TideMail

Mail for people who live in a terminal.

TideMail keeps your accounts, message list, and reading pane on one screen. It speaks IMAP and SMTP, stores its cache on your machine, and gives the keyboard the good seat.

Need the full settings and shortcut reference? Open the setup and usage guide.

The Android app and its Go bridge live in the separate TideMail Android repository. Desktop releases are built from this repository.

One inbox, several built-in themes.

• NO config file editing, all in the GUI.
• One view for every account. Read a unified inbox or open any account, folder, or label from the same three-pane screen.
• Send from the right address. Pick an account from the compose From row. TideMail switches its SMTP settings, Drafts folder, From address, and signature with it.
• Mail state stays in sync. Read state, stars, archive, move, and delete use IMAP. Changes made in Gmail or another client return to TideMail on sync.
• A few seconds to change your mind. Press Ctrl+Z to stop a queued send or undo a pending delete, archive, or move.
• An outbox you can trust. Press O to inspect queued, sending, failed, and sent mail. Failed deliveries survive restarts and can be retried or edited.
• Unsubscribe without hunting for a footer. Press Ctrl+U while reading to use the message's unsubscribe header or labeled unsubscribe link.
• Compose your way. The standard editor supports text selection, the system clipboard, undo and redo, and word movement. You can switch on Vim motions and commands instead. Optional AI tools can summarize mail, proofread a draft, and build local filters from plain English.
• See the pictures, not just the alt text. On Ghostty, Kitty, and Rio, images in HTML mail render inline in the reading pane, sized to fit and loaded in the background so browsing stays quick. Remote images wait until you press i. Receipts keep their columns and newsletter cards stay together.
• Readable by design, in every theme. Text, selection highlights, and the focused-pane border are all checked against WCAG-style contrast minimums (4.5:1 for text, 3:1+ for large text and UI elements like borders) across every built-in theme, enforced by automated tests.
• Match your desktop. On Omarchy, the match-omarchy theme follows your current desktop theme — contrast-corrected to the same bar as the built-ins — and repaints live when you switch it.
• Experimental plugins. Install trusted plugins such as TideMail Smart (JEV) to classify mail with local annotations, Needs You signals, and optional TypeSafe/Jev analysis.
• Optional support, kept out of your way. Open Settings → Support to visit or copy Tidemail's Ko-fi link. No donation prompts appear during normal email use.

Linux and macOS builds are available for Intel and ARM machines.

TideMail is on the AUR as tidemail-bin, which packages the official release binary along with the TideMail icon and a desktop entry, so TideMail shows up in your app launcher (it opens in your default terminal):

yay -S tidemail-bin
# or
paru -S tidemail-bin

Updates come from your AUR helper — yay -Syu or paru -Syu alongside everything else, or yay -S tidemail-bin for just this one. Plain pacman -Syu will not do it: pacman skips packages it did not install from a sync repo, so it reports success and leaves TideMail where it was. TideMail notices it was installed this way and points you at the right command instead of trying to replace a root-owned binary itself.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/allisonhere/tidemail/main/install.sh | sh

The installer writes to ~/.local/bin by default, so it should not ask for a system password. Set INSTALL_DIR=/path/to/bin on the sh command if you want a different writable destination. If an older tidemail earlier on PATH would still run first, the installer removes it when possible or prints the exact cleanup command.

You can also grab an archive from the latest release.

The left pane holds accounts and folders. The upper-right pane shows the current message list. The reading pane stays below it, so opening a message never hides the rest of your inbox.

Use j and k to move. Press Tab to cross panes. Hit ? whenever you forget a key. TideMail keeps the help screen inside the app and lets you search it.

• Rest on a folder to refresh a stale cache silently, press Enter or s to fetch it immediately, or press F to sync every folder.
• Mark messages with Space, then archive, move, delete, or change read state as a group.
• Press / to search the local message cache across accounts.
• Use * for a server-backed star. The next sync picks up star changes from Gmail and other clients.
• Open a message and press r to reply, f to forward, or Ctrl+U to use its unsubscribe header.

Delete, archive, and move wait six seconds before TideMail sends them to the server. Ctrl+Z restores the last queued action.

The From row becomes an account picker when you have more than one sender. TideMail uses the chosen account for SMTP, drafts, the From address, and its signature. Replies, forwards, and reopened drafts use the same picker.

To, CC, and BCC suggest saved contacts first. TideMail follows with addresses found in mail you have synced. You can manage contacts in the app and move them through vCard files.

TideMail saves the draft while you type. A sent message waits five seconds by default, which gives Ctrl+Z time to reopen it. Set the delay to 0 if you want mail to leave at once. Failed sends retry up to three total attempts by default; change the limit under Settings → Editor. Set it to 1 to disable retries.

The standard compose editor supports Shift-selection, clipboard shortcuts, undo and redo, word movement, and Home/End. Turn Vim mode on in Settings if you prefer commands such as dw, dd, :w, and :q.

Read state, stars, archive, move, and delete sync through IMAP. TideMail keeps a local SQLite cache for speed and search, then reconciles it with the server on sync. By default an account uses IMAP IDLE, so mail lands as the server announces it (sync_minutes = 0); interval polling stays available for servers that need it, and -1 keeps an account manual-only.

Drafts live under the selected sender account. Sent messages use that account's SMTP settings and are filed in its server-side Sent folder; Gmail's own SMTP filing is detected so it does not receive a duplicate. TideMail detects common Sent, Archive, and Trash folder names, including Gmail labels.

Global search stays active while you move through results. The content pane can find text inside the open message, walk links, copy a visual selection, and save attachments to a folder you choose.

Receipts keep item descriptions, quantities, and amounts in aligned columns, including totals with merged cells. Narrow reading panes show labelled records instead, so prices stay associated with their items.

Newsletter cards stay together — each image next to its heading, description, and button — with a thin rule between neighbouring cards.

TideMail renders HTML mail as terminal text. On terminals with Kitty graphics support (Ghostty, Kitty, Rio), images embedded in the message — CID parts, inline data URIs, and content-location references — are drawn as real raster images inline in the reading pane, scrolling with the document. They fit the pane and the sender's width and height without being stretched or enlarged, and are laid out again when you change the terminal font size. Images load in the background once you stop on a message, so moving through the list stays quick. Remote images stay blocked for privacy until you press i, which loads them for the message you are reading; [display] images = "off" forces text placeholders everywhere. On terminals without graphics support every image becomes a labelled text placeholder.

Choose Settings → Display → Reading → Images (Auto or Off) and press Ctrl+S to save. The change takes effect immediately; remote images still require i to load. The setting also shows whether inline images are supported.

foot and WezTerm: inline images are currently unsupported. TideMail uses text placeholders there. foot supports Sixel images, but TideMail's renderer requires Kitty Unicode placeholders; WezTerm does not support those placeholders. Email text and attachment saving still work.

Full headers are one Ctrl+E away, with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC results called out in color.

Connect OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, or a local Ollama server if you want message summaries and a compose proofread. TideMail can also turn a plain-language mail rule into a local filter that runs without an AI call for each message.

AI stays off until you configure a provider.

TideMail can run external plugins from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/tidemail/plugins/ (or ~/.config/tidemail/plugins/ when XDG_CONFIG_HOME is unset). Plugins receive message metadata, never message bodies, and can add annotations such as needs_reply=true or category=shipping. TideMail uses those annotations for tags and views such as Needs You, while keeping the original plugin output inspectable. Press e on a message to correct its tags locally; plugin reruns do not erase your correction. Result cards can offer u when TideMail itself finds an unsubscribe option; the plugin never receives the link, and TideMail still shows its normal confirmation before acting. Report plugins (press enter on one in Plugins (experimental)) can ask TideMail read-only questions, such as message volume or category totals, and show the answer; they never see message bodies or get database access.

Administer installed plugins directly in Settings → Plugins. Select a plugin and press s to edit its settings in the right-hand pane.

To install TideMail Smart (JEV), build it from the TideMail plugin collection repository and copy its binary and plugin.toml into the plugins directory. The full user guide is in docs/guide.md.

If you are writing a plugin, start with the Plugin API getting-started guide, then see the developer tools guide for the scaffold → build → validate → test workflow, and see the protocol, manifest, and permissions references. Reports and read-only queries are covered in queries and analytics. Complete local examples are in examples/plugins/example and examples/plugins/analytics.

Press M, add your incoming and outgoing mail settings, then save with Ctrl+S. Gmail, Yahoo, and iCloud require an app password. Outlook can sign in with OAuth; Gmail OAuth is temporarily unavailable while Google approval is pending (see below). Any other IMAP/SMTP server — including an on-premises Microsoft Exchange server — uses the Custom provider with a username and password.

TideMail stores passwords, AI keys, and OAuth refresh tokens in libsecret on Linux or Keychain on macOS. If secret-tool is missing on Linux, TideMail falls back to ~/.config/tidemail/config.toml, so protect that file.

Google OAuth is temporarily unavailable while TideMail's Google app awaits approval. The account form and installer both call this out. Use a Google App Password instead; existing saved Gmail OAuth accounts are left unchanged.

Maintainers and source-build developers: see Google OAuth registration and release setup for the approval and release checklist.

Provider Outlook covers Outlook.com, Hotmail, and Microsoft 365 / Exchange Online. Microsoft dropped basic auth for these, so the account signs in with OAuth — but it needs no setup: TideMail uses Thunderbird's shared public client. Add the account, keep the Auth row on OAuth, press Ctrl+O, open the copied URL, approve, and paste the https://localhost/?code=… URL the browser lands on into the Code field. Set TIDEMAIL_MS_CLIENT_ID to your own Azure app to get the device-code flow instead. M365 work/school mailboxes need IMAP enabled by an admin (Set-CASMailbox -ImapEnabled $true).

A self-hosted Exchange server (2016/2019/SE) is not the Outlook provider — it does not use Microsoft's cloud sign-in. Use the Custom provider with your server's IMAP/SMTP hostname and your normal username and password; on-prem Exchange still accepts basic auth over TLS. TideMail cannot connect to an on-prem server that has disabled basic auth and requires NTLM or Kerberos (GSSAPI).

theme = "lavender-fields-forever"
# The account new messages are sent from, and the one focused at startup.
# Holds an account id, so renaming or reordering never moves it. Omit it and
# TideMail uses the first account below. Set it with Space in Accounts.
default_account = "8f43c9e644384bd5a25a27ff0d9c2701"

[display]
send_delay_seconds = 5
send_max_attempts = 3  # total attempts; 1 disables automatic retries
compose_vim = true
images = "auto"  # "auto" (inline + blocked remote), or "off" (text placeholders)

[[account]]
id = "8f43c9e644384bd5a25a27ff0d9c2701" # generated by TideMail; do not copy or edit
name = "Personal"
imap_host = "imap.example.com"
imap_port = 993
imap_tls = true
smtp_host = "smtp.example.com"
smtp_port = 587
smtp_tls = true
user = "mira@example.com"
from = "Mira Chen <mira@example.com>"  # optional, but a name alone is not an address
signature = """
Mira
Sent with TideMail"""
sync_minutes = 0  # push via IMAP IDLE; N polls every N min, -1 is manual only

The signature is a multi-line box in the account form, so Enter gives you a new line and there is no escape to remember; editing the file by hand works too, and a TOML multi-line string is easier to read than \n escapes.

The order of the [[account]] blocks is the order accounts appear everywhere: the sidebar, the account list, and the Ctrl+U sender picker in compose. Reorder them here, or with Shift+J and Shift+K in Accounts.

Config lives at ~/.config/tidemail/config.toml. TideMail puts its SQLite cache at ~/.local/share/tidemail/mail.db unless XDG_DATA_HOME points elsewhere. Each account's generated id is its permanent internal identity, so display names may be changed or shared safely. TideMail adds missing IDs automatically and writes a one-time .pre-account-ids.bak copy beside the config first. TideMail refuses to start on a malformed config and prints the exact path to repair, rather than loading defaults that could overwrite the real settings.

TideMail requires Go. Clone the repository, build, and run the binary:

git clone https://github.com/allisonhere/tidemail
cd tidemail
go build -o tidemail .
./tidemail

Run the test suite with:

go test ./...

Bubble Tea runs the application loop. Lipgloss handles terminal layout and color.

You can reuse two parts as standalone Go libraries:

• ripple, the compose editor
• tideui, the multi-pane TUI toolkit