Last Updated on: 19th November 2023, 12:53 pm
Web site: github.com/wangp/bower
Category: Network
Subcategory: Email Clients
Platform: Linux, UNIX-like
License: GPL
Interface: Ncurses
First release: December 18, 2011
Bower – a written in Mercury, a curses frontend for the Notmuch email system. Bower makes use of standard Linux utilities, so will likely require some work to work on other systems.
Bower is designed such that it can be run on the local machine but call out to notmuch on a remote machine (that holds your mail) via ssh. The advantage is that you can start helper programs on the local machine (e.g. a web browser or image viewer), and add or save attachments on the local filesystem, even if your mail archive is stored on a different machine.
Bower also keeps some centralized information in the notmuch configuration file ~/.notmuch-config. You may wish to tell bower about your Maildir hierarchy, namely where to place draft and sent messages.
Bower can look up addresses using the notmuch address command. Only addresses that appear in the From header of messages from the last year will be found. This restriction is for better performance, and also avoids finding stale email addresses.
You can send mail through one or more accounts defined in bower.conf. An account is selected by matching the From address on the message to the address on the account.
Bower can produce encrypted and/or signed PGP/MIME messages through GnuPG. Message decryption and signature verification are performed by notmuch. It is up to the user to configure GnuPG on the machines running bower or notmuch.
The project author is Peter Wang.