Features
Everything you need in a desktop email client. Nothing you don't.
All Inboxes
Every account, one list.
Turn on All Inboxes and every account's inbox merges into a single list, newest first. It's a real view, not a summary: read, reply, archive, flag and label without leaving it, and every action still lands in the message's own account.
- Your colors, your accounts. Each account gets a color you choose, so you can tell at a glance where a message came from. Click its dot to jump to it.
- Optional, and selective. Off until you ask for it, and any account can sit it out from its settings or a right-click. Excluded accounts dim so it stays obvious.
- Filters and keys work here too: unread, flagged and attachments, plus Del, Ctrl+A, and E to archive into the message's own account.
- All Spam, for the same reason. Spam folders empty themselves on a schedule. All Spam gathers every account's spam in one list, so a good email has somewhere to be caught. Press
!to send it home. - All Trash, if you want it: deleted mail from every account in one view, with Empty All Trash. Turn it on in Settings.
Email Management
A classic three-pane layout that puts you in control. Manage multiple accounts from a single window, organize your folders, and handle messages with the speed and precision you expect from a desktop client.
- Three-pane layout with resizable panels
- Multi-account support: Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Fastmail, self-hosted, and more
- Full folder management: create, rename, move, and delete
- Message operations: move, copy, archive, delete, mark read/unread, flag
- Multi-select messages with shift-click and ctrl-click
- Undo any delete, move, archive, or send. The reminder says what just happened (“3 messages deleted”), counts down, and pauses while your pointer is over it. Choose how long it waits, from 5 to 20 seconds, under Settings, Sync, and give undo a sound of its own if you like
- Hide folders you never look at: right-click to hide one, and bring it back from Account Settings, Visibility. A hidden folder still gets searched, and still works for moves and rules
- Optionally mark messages read as you delete them, so unread mail you threw away doesn't keep counting toward the Trash badge
- Drag-and-drop messages between folders and accounts
- Open messages deliberately: choose single click or double click under Settings, Reading. On double click, browsing only highlights a message, and nothing opens or is marked read until you double-click it or press Enter
- Open any message in its own window from the right-click menu or with Alt+Enter
- Narrow the list to a single conversation with one keystroke, without threading or rearranging anything
Account Setup
Add your email in seconds. Melia ships with presets for over 30 email providers that auto-fill your server settings, so setup is as simple as entering your email address and password. For providers that aren't in the list, full manual IMAP/SMTP configuration is available.
- Built-in presets for over 30 email providers: Gmail, Outlook, ProtonMail Bridge, Fastmail, Yahoo, iCloud, and more
- OAuth2 authentication for Microsoft accounts; app passwords for Google
- If your provider rejects your password because it wants an app password (iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and Fastmail all do), Melia says so and links straight to the page that creates one
- TLS, STARTTLS, or unencrypted connections with self-signed certificate support
- Enable or disable accounts without deleting them
- Drag-and-drop account reordering in the sidebar
- Account settings in eleven sections down one sidebar: General, Server, Folders, Visibility, History, Signatures, Aliases, Notifications, Rules, Certificates, and Encryption
- Download history, set per account: choose how much mail to pull down, from the most recent 1,000 messages, through Extended at 10,000, all the way to everything on the server
- Per-account new mail sounds and per-account colors for the All Inboxes view
Ready for work accounts
- Microsoft 365 sign-in works for everyone in the organization, not only tenant administrators. Once an administrator has approved Melia for the organization, regular users simply sign in
- Would your organization rather not use Melia's own Microsoft app registration? Sign in through yours instead: in Add Account, choose Microsoft and open “Use my organization's app registration”
- Adding a Microsoft account asks which account you want, instead of quietly using whichever one your browser is already signed in to
- Mail servers with a certificate from a private or company certificate authority: add the certificate under Account Settings, Certificates, or let Melia offer to add it when a connection fails because the certificate isn't trusted. You can also trust the certificates already installed on your computer, in Settings, System (not in the Flatpak version, which can't see them)
- Mail from Outlook arrives intact, with no more unopenable winmail.dat files: real attachments, pictures where the sender put them, and tables and links as they were written
Compose and Reply
Write it the way you mean it.
A real rich text editor in its own window or right in the reading pane, with drafts that follow you to your phone and sends that never quietly disappear.
- Every formatting tool: fonts, sizes, text color and highlight, alignment, lists, blockquotes, code and links, with undo and redo. The font picker offers fonts your recipients will actually have.
- Tables and images, sized by hand. Insert, resize, fill and border tables. Drag images in, drag a corner to resize, and they send at the size you see.
- Drafts that follow you. Drafts save to your server with a visible countdown, so a reply started in Melia can be finished on your phone, and drafts from Outlook, Thunderbird or webmail open here with formatting, attachments and Bcc intact.
- Sends that come back if they fail, reopened with the server's reason. Fix a mistyped address straight from the bounce notice and resend.
The details
Spell check in your language
Or several at once. Settings, Compose lists every language and downloads the one you want on the spot, with suggestions and add-to-dictionary.
Recipients from anywhere
Paste a spreadsheet column or any mix of spaces, tabs, commas and semicolons. Everyone on Bcc? Melia fills in the To header so it doesn't look like spam.
Signatures that survive
An HTML editor with color-coded markup and a live preview. Signatures from Thunderbird or a generator come through cleanly everywhere, and you can drop one from a single message.
Priority and receipts
Mark a message Normal, High or Low priority, and request read or delivery receipts. The result shows on the message and as a marker in your Sent folder.
No duplicate sent mail
Melia works out whether your provider already files your sent copy, with Keep a Copy in Sent to override it, and tells you why if a copy can't be saved.
Fast to open, fast to send
Compose windows open instantly. Contacts autocomplete as you type, each account has its own signature, and Ctrl+Enter sends.
Aliases
Send from any address you own.
An alias is a sending identity, not a second account. Mail addressed to it still arrives in the same inbox; the alias lets your replies go back out wearing the right name. Add as many as you like under Aliases in Account Settings.
One caveat worth knowing up front: sending as an address on a domain you do not control can fail the recipient's SPF or DMARC checks, because your outgoing server may not be authorized to send for that domain. Melia sets the headers faithfully, but it cannot make a third-party domain vouch for your provider. Aliases work best for addresses that already route through the same provider: one on your own domain, a plus-address, or a shared mailbox you are authorized to send for.
- Its own identity: display name, address, optional Reply-To, and its own plain text or HTML signature, falling back to the account's.
- No second password, ever. Melia signs in with the account's credentials and rewrites the From header.
- Replies sort themselves out. Mail to sales@ goes back out as sales@, and Reply All knows not to copy you back to yourself.
- A From picker only when you need one, grouped under each account, so it's never unclear who is sending.
- Switch mid-message and the signature swaps live. A draft saved as an alias reopens as that alias, and the Sent copy carries it too.
- Backed up with the account in your .meliaconfig file, carrying no credentials.
Email Rendering
HTML emails look the way they should. Melia uses Shadow DOM isolation, intelligent dark mode transformation, and post-render quality audits to display even the most complex newsletters beautifully, in any theme.
- Shadow DOM isolation: email styles never leak into the app UI
- Intelligent dark mode: near-white backgrounds converted to dark, decorative elements lightened, template grays stripped
- Post-render contrast audit: walks visible text, checks WCAG ratios, overrides unreadable content
- Post-render padding audit: measures text positions, injects spacing where content touches container edges
- Per-message zoom: 50% to 200% with keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+. / Ctrl+, / Ctrl+/), or scroll the mouse wheel over the zoom control and middle-click to snap back to 100%
- Quoted content auto-detected and collapsed with expand/collapse toggle
- Outlook's winmail.dat unpacked: the real attachments, pasted pictures in place, and formatted text with its tables and links, instead of a file nobody can open
- Smart padding detection: examines HTML structure and email framework markers before injecting spacing
Every alphabet your senders use
English
Japanese
Arabic
Russian
Hindi
Spanish
Korean
Hebrew
Greek
Tamil
French
Chinese
Thai
Ukrainian
Armenian
German
Persian
Bengali
Turkish
Georgian
Vietnamese
Punjabi
Italian
Telugu
Polish
Urdu
Portuguese
Gujarati
Czech
Hungarian
Swedish
Finnish
Dutch
Romanian
Emails displayed as written. Melia reads modern Unicode mail and decades of legacy encodings, so text arrives exactly the way it was sent, in over 100 languages, from Japanese to Arabic to Cyrillic.
Every writing system on Earth
100+ languages · 40+ scriptsWestern European
English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Irish, Welsh, Luxembourgish, Catalan, Galician, Basque, Afrikaans
Central & Eastern European
Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Romanian
Baltic
Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian
Cyrillic
Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Belarusian
Greek
Greek
Turkic
Turkish, Azerbaijani
Hebrew script · right to left
Hebrew, Yiddish
Arabic script · right to left
Arabic, Persian (Farsi), Urdu, Pashto
Southeast Asian
Thai, Lao, Khmer, Burmese, Vietnamese
East Asian
Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Korean
South Asian · Indic
Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Nepali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Sinhala
Other scripts
Armenian, Georgian, Amharic, Mongolian, Tibetan
Plus full emoji and mixed-script messages. A subject line that mixes English, Kanji, and an emoji renders as one clean line.
And now Melia speaks your language
Displaying mail in any script is one thing. Using an app in your own language is another. Melia's interface now speaks Français, Português do Brasil, and Deutsch: choose your language under Localization in Settings and the whole client follows, menus, settings, and all. Spanish, Italian, and Russian are next.
These translations are new, and Melia says so plainly rather than pretending otherwise. If a phrase reads wrong, the Localization section lets you suggest better wording from inside the app and export your suggestions as a file. Nothing is transmitted automatically, and nothing leaves your machine unless you decide to send it.
- French, Brazilian Portuguese, and German interfaces available today
- Standard folder names appear in your language. Sent, Drafts, Trash and the rest are translated, while folders you named yourself are left exactly as they are
- A Localization section in Settings that gathers language and time format in one place
- Time format: Automatic, 12-hour, or 24-hour. Automatic follows your system's regional setting, so a 24-hour region shows 24-hour times without you changing anything
- Suggest better translations from inside the app, then export them as a file to send in. Nothing is uploaded on your behalf
Email Headers, Decoded
Most email clients bury headers behind a wall of raw text. Melia parses them into a structured, interactive viewer that makes the invisible visible, from authentication results to the exact route your email traveled.
- Seven collapsible groups: addressing, content, identity, authentication, routing, metadata, and more
- Routing chain timeline: a visual map of every server hop with protocols and timestamps
- Transit time badge: see how long your email took from first hop to delivery
- Color-coded SPF, DKIM, and DMARC badges with detailed hover tooltips
- Clickable email address pills that open a compose window
- Toggle between structured pretty view and raw plaintext
- Read them without opening the message: right-click and choose View headers, or press
H. The message is not marked read, and it works inside spam folders, which is where it matters most
Gmail Labels, Done Right
Gmail labels are more than folders, and Melia treats them that way. For Gmail and Google Workspace accounts, every label shows up as a colored chip throughout the app, and you can create, apply, and manage them without ever leaving the keyboard. Melia even keeps whole threads labeled as they grow, and lets you attach labels before a message is ever sent.
Everywhere You Look
- Colored label chips on every message in the list, so you can scan your inbox at a glance
- Nested labels (Travel/Flights, Work/Clients) shown as a real hierarchy in the sidebar, each with its own colored badge
- A Labels row in the reading pane with one-click add and remove
- Adaptive layout: full label names when they fit, compact single-letter color beads when space runs short
- Automatic, consistent colors: a label is the same color everywhere in the app, or right-click any label to choose your own
- Your own labels front and center; Gmail system labels stay out of the way
Create, Apply, and Manage
- Label picker: filter as you type, or create a brand-new label on the spot, nested labels included
- Apply and remove labels instantly, with every change synced straight back to Gmail
- Multi-select to label many messages at once
- Keyboard-first: press
Gto open the picker, then arrow keys and Enter to toggle - Rename or delete labels right from the folder tree
- The picker is a real window: drag it where you want it, pull the edge to resize when you have a lot of labels, and Melia remembers the size
Sticky Labels
- Label a conversation once and it stays labeled: every reply, incoming and outgoing, inherits the thread's labels automatically
Send With Labels
- Assign labels while you compose a new message, straight from the composer
- Melia files the sent copy under those labels automatically once it reaches the server
- Your Sent mail arrives already organized, with no cleanup afterward
Search
A quick filter for the folder you're in, a full Advanced Search window for everything else, and Super Search for when a plain keyword is not precise enough. All of it private, offline, and instant.
Quick Search
- As-you-type filtering of the current folder; results update instantly
- Matches against subject, sender name, and sender address
- Highlighted matches so you can scan results at a glance
- Combine words with
||(either),&&(both), and!(leave out), group them with parentheses, and put exact text in quotes:invoice && (acme || globex) && !paid. A line under the search box reads your search back so you can see how it was understood, and the ? button explains it all - Press
@on a message to see only mail from that sender, again for everything from their domain, and once more to show all mail again. It works in any folder and across All Inboxes, or right-click the sender's address. Select All then selects every match, so a sender's whole backlog archives in one go - Keyboard-first: hit
/orCtrl+Fto start searching
Advanced Search
- Dedicated search window powered by SQLite FTS5 full-text indexing
- Search across all accounts and folders, or scope to a specific account or folder
- Searches the full message body, not just subjects and senders. Older mail is indexed quietly in the background, so a phrase you remember writing is findable
- Toggle which fields to search: subject, sender, recipient, snippet, or body, and show only unread, flagged, or messages with attachments
- Date range presets: today, last 7 days, last 30 days, last 3 months, and more
- Relevance-ranked results with match highlighting and percentage scores
- Search history with autocomplete: your recent searches, one keystroke away
- Results appear as you type, and the whole window is keyboard driven: Enter or the down arrow steps from the search box into the results, Escape clears the search without losing the account, folder and date settings you chose
Super Search
One keyword is a blunt instrument. Flip Advanced Search into Super and you can describe what you are actually looking for, a clause at a time, in words you would use out loud.
- Read your own query back in plain language: where Subject or Body contains any of JWT, auth service, or rate limiter, and Sender address is not ci@cloudpeak.io
- Each clause chooses its own fields: subject, sender name, sender address, sender domain, recipient, snippet, or body. Point one clause at several at once and a hit in any of them counts
- Test with contains, equals, starts with, or a wildcard pattern, and negate any of them. Contains none of is the clause a single keyword box has no way to express
- Clauses stack with and, each one narrowing further, while or does the widening inside a clause. List as many values as you like and any one of them matches
- Point it wherever you like, from every inbox at once down to two specific folders in different accounts, with the unread, flagged, and attachment filters still available on top
- When it is a search you will want again, Save as view turns it into a saved view without rebuilding it
A search you can keep
Build a search in Advanced Search until it shows exactly the mail you want, then save it as a view in your sidebar. Click it and that mail comes straight back, re-run fresh every time.
A view never moves or hides anything. Your mail stays exactly where it lives, and every message shows which account and folder it came from. Delete a view and you have deleted a saved search, never a message.
- Save any Advanced Search as a permanent view in the sidebar, updated every time you open it
- Build a view out of folders alone, with no search terms at all. Pick every Trash, or every Drafts across every account, and keep it one click away
- Views show the same results the search did, including anything sitting in Trash or Junk, so what you saved is what you get
- Drag views into whatever order suits you
- Right-click a view to edit its search, rename it, or delete it. Right-click the Views heading for New view and Delete all views
- Views keep loading as you scroll, so one spanning tens of thousands of messages does not stop short
Read the full Saved Views guide, which walks through building the search, scoping it, and editing a view later.
Conversations
One key. The whole thread.
Press i on any message and the list narrows to just that conversation. Nothing is threaded, collapsed or rearranged on your behalf: it's a filter you switch on when you want it, and off when you don't.
- First press: this thread and nothing else, in the folder you're already in.
- Second press: the rest of the thread joins from everywhere else in that account, your own sent replies included. Trash is never pulled in.
- Third press, or Escape: back in the folder you started from. A thread that lives in one folder simply toggles on and off.
- A bar that states the counts, so a short conversation reads as short rather than as a broken filter. Click 3 elsewhere to widen, and again to come back.
A filter, not a mode
Reach it however you work
The i key or Alt+I, the right-click menu, and a toolbar button all run the same cycle. None appear when there's no conversation to isolate.
The count, up front
The toolbar button carries the message count, so you can tell a long thread from a one-off before you open it.
Nothing moves
Nothing is moved, merged or hidden. Every message stays exactly where it lives, and each one shows you which folder that is.
You keep your place
Isolating never moves you off the message you started from, and leaving puts you back on it. Any deliberate move drops the filter on its own.
Work inside it
Move, delete, flag or mark messages exactly as anywhere else, undo included. Type in the search box and you filter the thread, not the folder.
Threaded by the headers
Melia follows Message-ID, In-Reply-To and References, so two unrelated messages that share a subject never merge. Gmail accounts honor Gmail's own thread id too.
Contacts
Melia builds your address book automatically from sent and received email, then gives it a proper home: its own window, sorted by name, with photos and birthdays. Keep it in step with your phone through iCloud, Nextcloud or any CardDAV server. Mark VIPs, track engagement, and address mail in a few keystrokes.
- Two-way sync with your phone's address book: iCloud, Nextcloud, Fastmail, mailbox.org, Posteo or any CardDAV server. Edit a contact in Melia and it changes on your phone, and the other way round. Deletes sync too
- Edits go in place: Melia changes only what you changed, so fields it doesn't show (extra addresses, custom labels, social profiles) stay on the server untouched
- The first sync shows exactly what it will do (new people, people it will match to ones you already have, cards it will update) before it writes anything
- Each contact shows which address books it lives in. Filter the list to one of them, or save a contact to another with one click. Self-hosted servers with their own certificate authority are supported. Each address book counts as an account
- Opens in its own window, sorted by name with alphabetical headers. Show names as “Last, First” or “First Last”
- Three browsing tabs: Contacted (people you've emailed), All, and VIP
- Contact photos: add one, crop it how you like, and it shows up wherever that person appears. Photos travel with vCard import and export, and in your backup file
- Sender avatars: a contact's photo, or their initials, beside messages in the list, in the reading pane, and in Contacts. One switch turns them all off. Turn on verified brand logos to see a company's certified logo instead, shown only when a certificate proves it and never on mail in Spam
- Birthdays: store one on a contact and Melia quietly lets you know when it's coming up
- Hover a contact to send, edit, or delete it without opening it first. Ctrl+click the trash to skip the confirmation, and Ctrl+S saves an open contact
- Per-contact details: edit name and email, add notes, view trust status
- Engagement tracking: times contacted, first and last contact dates
- Cleanup utility: remove stale or auto-generated contacts in bulk
- Feeds autocomplete in the compose window for fast addressing
Inbox Rules
Route your email automatically with per-account rules. Combine as many conditions as a message needs, negate any of them, and send what matches to a folder, to spam, to trash, or straight out of existence.
- Multi-clause rules: a rule can hold several conditions at once, combined with match all or match any
- Any condition can be negated: is not, does not contain, does not match
- Match on sender name, sender email, sender domain, subject, or body
- Match on who a message was addressed to, so an alias you gave to one company can be filtered on its own
- Operators: contains, equals, or wildcard matching
- Send matching mail to any folder, to spam, or to trash, or delete it permanently without it passing through Trash at all
- Drag-and-drop rule reordering (first match wins, top to bottom)
- Hit counter shows how many messages matched each rule
- Create any rule from a message: right-click it and Melia pre-fills the sender details, tells you how many messages in the folder already match, and offers to move those too
- Alt+R opens the selected account's rules, Alt+S its settings
Tidy & Trim
A clean mailbox, three clicks at a time.
Three tools for the housekeeping nobody enjoys. Each one shows you exactly what will happen, asks before anything is removed, and tells you what it did.
Tidy Merge duplicate folders
- Finds duplicate standard folders: Sent, Sent Items and Sent Messages, Trash and Deleted Items, and the rest.
- Recommends which to keep, based on which folder is actually receiving mail and which your provider marks as the system folder, and remembers your choice.
- Moves the messages into the folder you keep, then removes the empty duplicates.
-
1Choose
-
2Confirm
-
3Done
Trim Clear out old mail
- Right-click any folder or account to trim it.
- Pick any age, from minutes to years, and see exactly how many messages that means before you commit.
- A confirmation step stands between you and anything permanent.
-
1Choose
-
2Confirm
-
3Done
Empty Spam and trash, gone
- Right-click a spam or trash folder and choose Empty Spam or Empty Trash to clear it in one step, instead of moving thousands of junk messages into the trash and dealing with them twice.
- Right-click All Spam to empty every account at once. See exactly which accounts and how many messages, untick any you'd rather leave alone, and stop partway if you change your mind.
-
1One folder
-
2Every account
-
3Done
Security and Protection
Your inbox has a bodyguard.
Every incoming message runs through a layered protection system, on your machine, before you ever see it. Hover the cards to see each verdict up close.
- Tracking pixels neutralized before they fire, so opening a message tells the sender nothing.
- Suspicious senders flagged when a display name doesn't match, and look-alike addresses caught on sight: a fake “apple.com” written with a Cyrillic letter is flagged, and View headers shows the real address.
- Link safety: hover any link to see where it really goes. Deceptive, look-alike and redirect links are flagged on-device.
- Spam quarantine: a message opened from a spam folder cannot reach any server. Images and trackers are blocked, links won't open, attachments can't be handed to another app, and printing is off until you mark it Not Spam.
Underneath it all
Credentials in your keyring
OAuth2 for Microsoft accounts and App Passwords for Gmail and Google Workspace, all stored in your OS keyring, never in plaintext.
Encrypted connections
IMAP and SMTP connections are secured with TLS/SSL.
Proof of who sent it
A structured header viewer with SPF, DKIM and DMARC badges and a routing timeline.
Encrypted and signed mail
OpenPGP and S/MIME: read encrypted mail, check who really signed a message, and sign what you send.
Read receipts suppressed
No silent confirmations sent to senders. You decide when someone gets one.
Sandboxed messages
Messages open inside an extra layer of system-level sandboxing, limiting what a malicious email could reach if it ever tried to exploit the app.
Encrypted and signed mail
Melia reads OpenPGP and S/MIME encrypted mail sent to you, shows whether a signed message is genuine, and signs what you send. Your keys never leave your computer: Melia doesn't look them up on keyservers or anywhere else online, and it keeps them encrypted with a key held in your system keyring, the same way it protects your passwords.
Encrypting the mail you send is next. Until it ships, Melia signs your messages so recipients can confirm they came from you, but the message itself travels as ordinary email.
- Opens OpenPGP and S/MIME encrypted messages once you import your key in Account Settings, Encryption
- Signature checks on the message and in the message list, so you can see at a glance whether a signature holds
- Sign any message from the composer (Ctrl+Shift+K), or have an account start every new message signed. Works with OpenPGP keys and S/MIME certificates, and Melia picks the right one for the address you send from
- Create a new OpenPGP key right in Melia, ready to sign and read mail straight away, with help backing it up
- Import keys by dragging them onto Account Settings, Encryption, or straight from an email attachment, and share your public key in one click
- Remember a key's passphrase on this computer if you choose. It's off unless you turn it on
- A signed message waiting in the Outbox never goes out unsigned: if your key needs its passphrase again, Melia asks for it first
Desktop Integration
Native to your desktop, down to the dark mode.
Melia is a native desktop application, not a web wrapper. It wears your desktop's own window chrome, lives in your system tray, sends real notifications, and puts every keyboard shortcut under your control.
- More than two dozen themes: Light, Dark, Catppuccin, Nord, Gruvbox, Dracula, Rosé Pine, and WhiteSur, color-matched to the popular macOS-style GTK theme. Auto goes dark from 6 PM to 6 AM and Follow system tracks your desktop, each between the light and dark palettes you pick.
- Read any message light or dark, whatever the app theme. Set a default in Settings, Appearance, or flip one message with Ctrl+D. Compose follows the same setting.
- Real window chrome: your desktop's own shadow and rounded corners on most systems, flush tiling, and resizing from any edge.
- Notifications that know the account: 53 built-in sounds or your own, a different sound per account, and spam that arrives quietly. Click one to jump straight to the message.
Light
Dark
Drag the handle: the same email, light and dark.
And the rest of the desktop
Open from anywhere
A melia:// permalink opens a message in its own window on top of what you're doing, and Show in main window pulls it back.
Print and PDF
Ctrl+P uses your desktop's print dialog, falling back to a PDF when that isn't available. Save any message as a PDF from the toolbar or right-click, in the fonts you see on screen.
Files in and out
Open .eml files with Ctrl+O, a double-click, the command line or drag-and-drop, or straight from an attachment. Export your settings as a .meliaconfig file, passwords excluded.
Forward several at once
Select messages, right-click, and send them together as attachments in a single email.
Your fonts, your density
Any installed font at 8 to 48px, with System Default meaning your desktop's own. Compact, Comfortable or Spacious lists, set separately for the sidebar.
Plain text that lines up
Plain-text mail uses a fixed-width font by default, so tables and columns land where the sender put them, with a Monospace setting that offers only true fixed-width faces.
Keyboard control
Settings, Shortcuts lists every key Melia uses, in one scrollable pane. Not a printable cheat sheet you have to go and find, but the keys themselves, each one switchable where switching it makes sense.
- Most commands answer to two keys: a bare letter and a Ctrl or Alt chord.
RandCtrl+Rboth reply,MandAlt+Mboth toggle read. Each has its own switch, so you can free up a letter for typing and keep the chord - One master switch turns every single-key shortcut off at once, for anyone who catches keys by accident. The chords keep working, so the keyboard still drives the whole app
- The keys Melia cannot reassign are listed too, under Always on: Esc, Tab, Ctrl+Q, Ctrl+W, the arrow keys, F5. Some belong to the window, some are handled before Melia sees them, and some are conventions no application should redefine. They are shown so you can find them, not hidden because they are fixed
- Reach the right-click menu from the keyboard with the Menu key or Shift+F10, then move through it with the arrow keys
- Move through every account and folder without touching the mouse: hold Ctrl and use the arrow keys to walk the whole tree, step into folders, and collapse them, while the plain arrow keys stay with the message list
- Press 1 to 9 to jump straight to an account, or 0 for All Inboxes, pressing it again to switch to All Spam. The top-row number keys work on AZERTY and other layouts where digits need Shift
In your system tray
Melia can tuck itself into the tray and keep checking mail with the window closed. Whether it ever does that is entirely your choice, and it can never hide somewhere you cannot get it back from.
- Start Melia straight into the tray, with no window and no splash screen, and have it start automatically when you log in. Both are under Settings, Notifications
- The tray icon carries a green dot the moment you have unread mail, and right-clicking it gives you Open Melia, Check Now, Compose, and Quit Melia
- Minimize to tray and close to tray are separate settings, so you can use either, both, or neither. With close to tray on, the button, Alt+F4 and Ctrl+W hide the window instead of quitting. Ctrl+Q always quits, as does Quit in the tray menu
- If your desktop has no system tray, the setting says so and stays switched off. If a tray extension crashes mid-session, Melia keeps the window where you can see it and restores its icon on its own once the tray comes back
- Keep the dock badge showing unread mail only, for desktops that stack notification counts on top. The badge relies on a desktop API that Ubuntu Dock, KDE Plasma, and the Dash-to-Dock extension implement; stock GNOME Shell does not, so no badge appears there
Offline and Reliability
Melia works even when your network doesn't. An offline-first architecture backed by SQLite means your email is always accessible. Outgoing messages queue automatically and send when connectivity returns.
- Offline-first SQLite database: read, search, and browse without a connection
- Outbox: queued messages send as soon as you're back online. If your mail server refuses one, Melia tells you right away instead of quietly retrying
- Deferred sync queue: flag changes, deletions, and moves replayed automatically
- Per-account connectivity monitoring that notices a lost connection quickly, with automatic reconnection and OAuth token refresh
- One unreachable mail server no longer holds up startup: Melia stops waiting for it sooner
- Quit right after deleting, moving, or sending, and Melia finishes the job before it closes. A message can't go out twice because Melia was closed mid-send
- Priority connection pool: two IMAP connections per account so interactive actions never block sync
- Virtualized message lists for smooth scrolling through folders with thousands of messages
- Melia asks your mail server only for what it does not already know, so opening and switching folders is quicker and uses a small fraction of the data it once did
- Syncing large folders is significantly faster, and the interface stays smooth while mail downloads, including the first sync of a large mailbox and on hard drives and other slower storage where it could previously freeze for seconds at a time
- Unread counts in subfolders keep up on their own, instead of only updating when you click the folder
- Long lists keep loading as you scroll, instead of stopping after a couple of thousand messages
- Optimistic UI: delete, move, and read/unread changes appear instantly before server confirmation
You decide how much mail lives here
Melia downloads a folder the first time you open it, so your disk holds what you actually use. When you want more, or less, it's one setting away.
- Download All Folders: right-click an account to fetch every folder at once, so search finds mail in folders you've never opened. Melia tells you roughly how much it will fetch before it starts, and leaves Trash and Junk out by default, since they're usually larger than everything else combined
- Downloaded Mail, in the account menu, shows how much of each folder is on your computer next to what's on the server. Download the rest of any single folder from there, and a lock icon marks folders held back by your own limits, with a click through to the setting
- Keep mail for: cap how far back Melia keeps mail on this computer, anywhere from 3 months to 2 years, under Account Settings, History. Older messages are removed from this computer only, never from the server, and come back if you widen the setting or open the folder. Off by default
