TL;DR — Quick Summary

himalaya is a CLI email client. Read, write, reply, and manage email from your terminal with IMAP/SMTP. Pipe, script, search — email as a Unix tool.

himalaya brings email to your terminal. IMAP/SMTP, scriptable, pipeable — email as a Unix tool.

Installation

# macOS
brew install himalaya

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S himalaya

# Cargo
cargo install himalaya

Configuration

# ~/.config/himalaya/config.toml
[accounts.personal]
default = true
email = "user@example.com"
display-name = "User"

backend.type = "imap"
backend.host = "imap.example.com"
backend.port = 993
backend.login = "user@example.com"
backend.auth.type = "password"
backend.auth.command = "pass email/personal"

message.send.backend.type = "smtp"
message.send.backend.host = "smtp.example.com"
message.send.backend.port = 465
message.send.backend.login = "user@example.com"

Usage

# List inbox
himalaya list
himalaya list --folder INBOX --page 2

# Read message
himalaya read 42
himalaya read 42 --html       # HTML rendering

# Compose
himalaya write
himalaya reply 42
himalaya forward 42

# Send from pipe
echo "Hello" | himalaya send --from user@example.com --to dest@example.com

# Search
himalaya search "subject:invoice"

# Attachments
himalaya attachment download 42

# Folders
himalaya folder list
himalaya folder create "Projects"

# Move/copy/delete
himalaya move 42 Archive
himalaya delete 42

# Flags
himalaya flag add 42 seen
himalaya flag remove 42 flagged

Summary

  • himalaya is a CLI email client for IMAP/SMTP
  • Non-interactive: list, read, write, reply, forward, search from CLI
  • Scriptable and pipeable — integrate email in shell workflows
  • Supports IMAP, SMTP, Notmuch, and Maildir backends
  • Written in Rust — fast, secure, cross-platform