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⬅️ Previous capture (2022-01-08)

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An awesome email client for terminals

I first used thunderbrid to manage my emails, then I switched for a very short time to mutt before discovering aerc, which is a very good email client. This is how to install it:

Step 1: Installing dependencies

First we have to install golang. First, download the golang tarball:

Downloads page of Go

Then run the following commands to install it on your system.

$ sudo mv Downloads/go*.tar.gz /usr/local
$ cd /usr/local
$ sudo tar xvf go*.tar.gz
$ sudo rm go*.tar.gz
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/go/bin/* /usr/bin

Then we can install scdoc.

$ git clone https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc
$ cd scdoc
$ make
$ sudo make install

Step 2: Installing aerc

Now we can install aerc the same way we installed scdoc:

$ git clone https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc
$ cd aerc
$ make
$ sudo make install

Step 3.1: Configuring gmail to work with aerc

Gmail doesn't trust a lot of clients. So we need to tell gmail aerc is trustworthy. To do that we need to go in the security settings of gmail:

Google's security settings

Over there, click to enable "2-step verification", then go back to the security page and click on "app passwords".

In this new panel, select a new app of type "Other", and name it "aerc". Then you have to copy and save the given password, you won't be able to access it later on.

Step 3.2: Configuring aerc

Now you simply have to run the setup of aerc:

$ aerc

Over there, simply answer all the questions, if you don't know the specific configurations, it's not a problem. You just have to tell your email and app password.

Once you did all of that, you can now use aerc. If you want to know the keyboard shortcuts and how to use aerc you can checkout its man page:

$ man aerc-tutorial

aerc also have other man pages, and you can also use :help inside of aerc to view the different aerc's commands available.

Conclusion

The reason why I decided to use aerc instead of mutt and thunderbird: