Terminal email client

Email in the terminal — the lane between webmail bloat and full GUI clients. Why it’s having a moment: email is the last daily workflow many people still can’t do from a terminal, and 2026’s TUI renaissance (Bubble Tea maturity, vim-motion expectations) finally made competitive clients buildable. Also the CLIs for agents adjacency: an email CLI is the agent-accessible surface for inbox automation (triage, drafting, receipts processing) that IMAP plumbing alone never gave.

The field (captured)

• neomd (OSS) (ssp-data / Simon Späti — same author as the Listmonk tweet; 274★, MIT, Go): “a minimal terminal email client for people who read & write in Markdown.” The differentiators: HEY-style screener (unknown senders wait in ToScreen until you approve/block/categorize — “you choose who reaches your inbox”), GTD workflow (process once: Waiting/Someday/Scheduled/Archive on single keystrokes; Feed + PaperTrail lanes for newsletters/receipts), compose in $EDITOR (nvim) and send as Markdown → HTML multipart with pre-send review, direct IMAP/SMTP — no local sync daemon (RFC 6851 MOVE for instant operations, cache for instant folder switches), vim motions throughout (j/k, gg/G, /, numbered links, multi-select m, undo U). Spy-pixel indicator in the feed view.
• matcha (OSS) (floatpane; 1.1k★, MIT, Go/Bubble Tea): “a beautiful and functional email client for your terminal” — the feature-rich pole: rich content rendering, multiple accounts, 35+ community plugins with a built-in marketplace (TUI + online), nightly releases. Where neomd optimizes the workflow (screener/GTD/minimalism), matcha optimizes breadth and polish.

The comparison, honestly

Same substrate (Go, IMAP/SMTP direct), opposite centers of gravity: neomd = opinionated workflow (the HEY/GTD doctrine as a TUI; Markdown-native; from the digital-brain community — its docs live on ssp.sh/brain), matcha = extensible platform (plugin marketplace, accounts, rendering). Pick by whether your inbox problem is process (neomd) or tooling (matcha). Watch-flag for both: neither names agent/MCP surface yet — the first to expose a clean CLI/MCP API owns the CLIs for agents email lane.

Open

• Hands-on candidate: run one against the household mailbox (IMAP) — the screener/GTD loop is exactly the email-triage lane mvanhorn’s fo-agent automates; if it goes well, that’s the agents-and-email bridge.