Reading Emails

Emails are rendered as styled Markdown in the terminal using glamour. The reader supports vim-style navigation.

Navigation

Opening Emails Externally

Images

Remote images appear as [Image: alt] placeholders, keeping the reading experience clean and fast. To see images, press O to open in your browser.

Inline / attached images (e.g. screenshots pasted into an email) are listed in the reader header: Attach: [1] screenshot.png [2] report.pdf. Press 1–9 to download to ~/Downloads/ and open with xdg-open. Inline images also show [Image: filename.png] placeholders at their position in the body text. On mail ≥ 1 MB, an inline image over 256 KB stays on the server until downloaded this way — see Attachments below.

When you press O to open in the browser, inline images are extracted from the email and saved to temp files. The HTML cid: references are rewritten to file:// paths so the browser renders them — including images sent by other people (not just your own).

Spy Pixel Blocking

neomd automatically detects and blocks tracking pixels, similar to HEY’s spy pixel blocker. Since the TUI renders emails as styled Markdown via glamour, remote images are never fetched — senders cannot tell if you read their email.

Two-layer detection (same approach as HEY):

1. Curated denylist — 150+ tracking services with URL pattern matching, sourced from Simplify (BSD-3-Clause), LeaveMeAlone (CC-BY 3.0), and DHH’s original HEY list (MIT). Covers Mailchimp, HubSpot, SendGrid, ConvertKit, Substack, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, and many more. When matched, the service name is shown (e.g. “Mailchimp”).
2. Generic 1×1 pixel heuristic — catches custom/branded tracking domains not on the list by detecting <img> tags with empty alt AND tiny dimensions (both width/height 0–1) or CSS hiding (display:none). Layout spacers (e.g. 1×50) are not flagged.

When tracking pixels are detected, neomd shows:

• ° indicator in the inbox list (orange, next to the attachment @ column)
• ° N spy pixel(s) blocked (ServiceName) in the reader header with tracker attribution

Scanning: Spy pixels are detected when you read an email. To scan all emails in the current folder at once, press <space>S or run :scan-spy-pixels (alias :ssp). The scan runs in the background, skips already-scanned emails, and uses IMAP PEEK (won’t mark emails as read). Results are cached in ~/.cache/neomd/spy_pixels and persist across restarts.

When you press O to open in the browser, remote images load normally — you’re explicitly choosing to see the full email. Tracking pixel blocking is a TUI-level protection.

This is how it looks:

In overview:

And within an email open:

Links

Links in emails are automatically numbered inline where they appear in the body. A link like Check out our blog renders as Check out our blog [1] in the terminal.

Press space then a digit (1–9, 0 for 10th) to open the link in $BROWSER.

• Up to 99 links per email, deduplicated by URL — 1–9/0 open the first ten; space then l then two digits (l11–l99) opens the rest
• Numbers appear inline so you can see them while reading without scrolling
• space is always the reader’s leader key (see Navigation) — it never pages the body; use d/u for that

Attachments

Attachments are listed in the reader header:

Attach:  [1] report.pdf  [2] photo.png

Press 1–9 to download attachment N to ~/Downloads/ and open it with xdg-open. Filenames are deduplicated automatically if a file already exists.

On mail ≥ 1 MB total, attachments over 256 KB stay on the server until you ask for them — the header still lists them with their size, and pressing 1–9 (or the <space> v calendar chord for a large invite) shows Downloading <name> (<size>)… while it fetches, then opens as usual. The size shown is the encoded transfer size (roughly 1.37× the actual file for base64-encoded attachments). Smaller mail, and parts that were fetched with the body, behave exactly as before. E (continue draft) on a large draft or queued send-later message downloads any missing parts first, before opening the editor.

Download Raw Email Source

Press space then d in the reader to download the full raw email source (.eml file) to ~/Downloads/. The file is named neomd-YYYYMMDD-<subject>.eml using the email’s date and sanitized subject line.

This is useful for archiving emails, debugging headers, or importing into other email clients. The status bar shows a green confirmation when the download completes.

Calendar Invites (iCalendar / RSVP)

When an email has a text/calendar part or .ics attachment, the reader shows a card and exposes a chord:

📅 Q2 Planning  ·  Mon, 21 Apr 2026 14:00–15:00  ·  Conference Room A

When opening the email:

Sending an RSVP ≠ adding the event to your calendar. neomd sends one iMIP email (RFC 5546/6047 REPLY) to the organizer; that’s the entire effect. To put the meeting on your own calendar, press <space> v o to hand the .ics to your local calendar app.

After sending: the REPLY lands in your Sent folder, the original invite gets \Answered (· indicator), and the status bar shows RSVP sent: accepted. Responder = active account’s user; recipient = the event’s ORGANIZER; [[senders]] aliases are not used.

Will the organizer’s calendar auto-update?

The organizer’s mail server processes the iMIP REPLY before they see it — no manual click needed on their end. Reliability depends on whose server they’re on:

Practical workflow: for a Gmail-organized invite, just click Yes/No in Gmail’s web UI (no email is sent — Google updates internally). Use neomd’s <space> v {a|d|t} for invites from Outlook, Apple, CalDAV, or anywhere iMIP is honored. The organizer always gets a clear Accepted: <event> email regardless, so it’s never silent — just the calendar-side automation that varies.

Local handoff (<space> v o). xdg-mime query default text/calendar shows what will run on Arch. Override with [calendar].open_command = "morgen" (or khal import, thunderbird, …).

Only the first VEVENT is processed; recurring (RRULE), counter-proposals (METHOD=COUNTER), and cancellations (METHOD=CANCEL) are out of scope — those still arrive as new emails you can re-process or import via <space> v o.

Threaded Inbox

Related emails are automatically grouped together in the inbox list. Threads are detected using a hybrid approach:

1. Message-ID / In-Reply-To headers — proper RFC 2822 threading chain
2. Subject + participant fallback — emails with the same normalized subject (stripped of Re:, Fwd:, etc.) and overlapping participants (From/To) are grouped together

Threads display with a Twitter-style vertical connector line:

  1  ·17:43  │ rafaelxxxxxxxxxxx@g…  Re: Re: AUR Neomd              (12K)
  2  ·16:30 ·╰  rafaelxxxxxxxxxxx@g…  Re: AUR Neomd                  (10K)
  3 N 19:50  │ Bla blabla   via Li…  Jenna just messaged you        (38K)
  4 N 18:53  │ Bla blabla   via Li…  Jenna just messaged you        (38K)
  5 N 17:59  ╰ Bla blabla   via Li…  Jenna just messaged you        (38K)
  6   18:46    LinkedIn              tom Weller replied to ...      (45K)
  7  ·14:22  · Simon Späti           Data pipeline question          (5K)

• · reply indicator — you’ve replied to this email (IMAP \Answered flag, works across clients)
• ·╰ reply indicator within a thread
• │ connects thread members (newest on top)
• ╰ marks the root/oldest email at the bottom of each thread
• ° spy pixel indicator — tracking pixels were detected and blocked (shown after first read)
• Non-threaded emails show no connector (clean, no visual noise)
• Threads are sorted by their most recent email, so active conversations float to the top

Or as image:

Merge Threads

Automatic threading only groups real replies. Some mail never threads yet arrives in floods — mailer-daemon bounces, CI notifications, “your invoice is ready” — and each one takes an inbox row. Like HEY’s merge threads, neomd lets you merge any emails you choose into one titled group.

Merge: mark emails with m (or just sit on one), then

:merge Bounces

The members collapse into a single row wherever they live:

  4 N  ≡ 09:12    Mailer-Daemon         Bounces (12)                   (3.1K)

• ≡ marks a merged row; the subject shows the title and how many members sit in this folder
• N shows if any member is unread, · if you replied to any of them
• The row sorts by its newest member, like a normal thread
• Replies to a merged email are absorbed automatically — the whole reply thread joins the row

Open: press Enter, l, or T on the row to see every member across Inbox, Sent, Archive, Waiting, Someday, Scheduled, and Work in a temporary Merged: <title> tab (with [Folder] prefixes). Enter reads one email as usual; esc returns. Opening a merge searches the 100 most recently added members; very large groups show a partial view.

Act on all members at once: archive (A), delete (x), move (M…), toggle read (n), and the screener keys applied to a merged row apply to every member in the current folder. m marks or unmarks all of them. Undo (U) works as for any bulk move.

Auto-merge future mail from a sender:

:merge-sender Bounces

Same as :merge, plus the cursor email’s sender address is stored as a rule. Every folder load then adds new mail from that sender to the group.

Unmerge:

• :unmerge on a ≡ row asks y/n and dissolves the whole merge (rule included).
• :unmerge inside an opened merge removes only the cursor email.

Where it lives: merges.toml next to your config.toml (demo configs get their own). Members are stored by Message-ID, never by UID, so a merge survives moving its emails between folders. The file is plain TOML and safe to keep in dotfiles:

[[merges]]
title = "Bounces"
sender = "mailer-daemon@"       # optional, case-insensitive substring of the From address
message_ids = ["<a@x>", "<b@y>"]

T on a normal (non-merged) email still opens the conversation view described below.

Sender View

Press ctrl+v on any email in the inbox list to see every email from that sender, across every folder — not just the current one. neomd extracts the sender’s address and runs an IMAP from: search across Inbox, Sent, Archive, ToScreen, Feed, PaperTrail, ScreenedOut, Waiting, Scheduled, Someday, Spam, Drafts, Trash, and Work (if configured).

Results display in a temporary “Sender” tab, same as Search/Everything/Thread:

• Each email shows a [Folder] prefix so you can see where it lives
• Press Enter to read any email, esc to return to the previous view

This is handy for pulling up a person’s full history at a glance — e.g. checking every email a recruiter or client has ever sent you, regardless of which folder each one ended up in.

Replying, Forwarding, and Drafts

Conversation View

Press T from the inbox list or while reading an email to see the full conversation across folders. neomd searches Inbox, Sent, Archive, Waiting, and other configured folders for related emails — matching by normalized subject and participant overlap.

Results display in a temporary “Thread” tab:

• Each email shows [Folder] prefix (e.g. [Sent], [Inbox], [Archive])
• Threading connectors (│/╰) show the conversation structure
• Press Enter to read any email, Esc to return to previous view

Also available as :thread (alias :t) from the command line.

Mark as Read Behavior

Neomd marks emails as read after you’ve spent time viewing them, not immediately when opened. This prevents accidental marking when quickly peeking at emails.

How it works:

• When you open an email (press enter or l), neomd fetches the body from IMAP — for mail under 1 MB that’s the full message; for larger multipart/mixed mail it fetches only the text parts and small (≤ 256 KB) siblings, leaving big attachments on the server until you download them (see Attachments)
• Once the body loads, a timer starts (default: 7 seconds)
• If you stay in the reader for the full duration, the email is marked as \Seen on the server
• If you exit early (press h, q, esc, or T), the email stays unread

Configuration:

[ui]
mark_as_read_after_secs = 7   # wait 7 seconds (default)
# mark_as_read_after_secs = 0   # immediate marking (no timer)
# mark_as_read_after_secs = 10  # 10 seconds

Set to 0 for immediate marking (as soon as the body finishes loading). Set to any value in seconds to customize the delay.

UI behavior:

• The local inbox list updates immediately when an email is marked as read — no need to manually refresh
• The unread indicator (N) disappears as soon as marking completes
• Manual toggle with n still works to mark/unmark emails at any time

Reply Indicator

Emails you’ve replied to show a · dot in the inbox list. This uses the standard IMAP \Answered flag, so it works across clients — if you reply from webmail, neomd shows it too.