Aerc (mail client)

Page created: 2023-08-11

Updated: 2026-07-22

Main website: aerc: a pretty good email client (aerc-mail.org)

UPDATE 2026: I’m using this as my main email client now. I wrote a bit about it in How I got through my inbox in only two months.

I’ve just started learning Aerc, but my initial impressions are extremely favorable. So far, this is one of the most polished and well-designed TUI programs I’ve seen. I was reading mail in just minutes after installing!

Three weeks later: I’m still doing anything complicated in Claws-Mail or Thunderbird (especially related to attachments). But I’ve started reading and responding to most email messages with Aerc.

If anything, I’m even more impressed with it as I use it.

Here’s the stuff I’ve learned so far. Like vi/Vim, the keyboard shortcuts are case-sensitive:

Type ? (Shift+/) to view a cheatsheet of keyboard options.
Move up and down the message list box with j and k.
Move up and down the IMAP folder list with J and K.
Hit Enter to view a selected message.
Hit q to exit out of a message or Aerc itself.
Delete a message with D (or d and Enter at the prompt).
Reply (with quoted text) with R q (R then q, not at the same time).
Switch "tabs" Ctrl+n (works even while in Vim, which took me by surprise one day).

I love that keybinding is so each to change. I pretty much always want to do reply-all, quoted for 99% of the emailing I do. So I re-bound that to just r in both the message list and view modes in .config/aerc/binds.conf. So this line shows up in two places and I commented out the other reply types:

r = :reply -aq<Enter>

(I also changed the 'A' binding to :archive year, keep reading.)

Setting up IMAP message archiving

Now I want to get Aerc to archive email in the Archives/<year> format that Thunderbird used.

The first part is to change the default folder name from Archive to Archives. That’s done in accounts.conf:

$ cat ~/.config/aerc/accounts.conf
[Ratf]
source   = <redacted>
outgoing = <redacted>
default  = INBOX
from     = <redacted>
copy-to  = Sent
archive  = Archives

The second is to make the year style the default for key binding:

$ cat archive ~/.config/aerc/binds.conf
...
[messages]
A = :archive year<Enter>
...
[view]
A = :archive year<Enter>

The other thing I needed was to recompile Aerc from the current master instead of from the latest release. The CHANGELOG.md shows:

* IMAP now uses the delimiter advertised by the server

...

* :archive now works on servers using a different delimiter

That work was done just three months ago. I love to see the active support from multiple committers as Aerc closes in on sweet perfection!

(I believe my mail provider (runbox.com) uses a '.' delimiter rather than '/'.)

Conclusion

I’m still just an Aerc noob and sometimes I switch over to claws-mail or Thunderbird to do more complicated things (like deal with file attachments).

I’ll come back here and update this page once I’ve got some more usage under by belt.

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