Install and build

This page covers installing a release, building from source, and producing the release binaries and Debian packages yourself.

Install a release

From the apt repository

On Debian and Ubuntu, use the apt repository on Codeberg: it installs tmail, and the system updates it with the other packages. It has the packages for amd64 and arm64, and it works on Debian 12 and 13 and on Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 (these are the versions it was tested on). No account is needed to read it.

sudo curl https://codeberg.org/api/packages/squidd/debian/repository.key -o /etc/apt/keyrings/forgejo-squidd.asc
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/forgejo-squidd.asc] https://codeberg.org/api/packages/squidd/debian stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tmail.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install tmail

The repository has two distributions, stable and nightly. stable holds the packages of the releases; nightly holds the builds of every night (see Nightly builds). The distribution is a word in the line above, not the name of your system, so the same line works on every version. The key of the registry signs the repository and apt checks every package with it.

Download a release

Each release on Codeberg has one archive per platform, a .deb file per architecture and a SHA256SUMS file.

On Debian and Ubuntu, a downloaded package installs with:

sudo apt install ./tmail_<version>-1_amd64.deb

On other systems, unpack tmail-<version>-<rid>.tar.gz (.zip on Windows) and copy tmail to a folder on your PATH.

Check a download

Each release carries SHA256SUMS and SHA256SUMS.asc, a signature of that file made with a key that only signs the releases of tmail. If you download an archive or a package by hand, check where it comes from:

Get the key from the keyserver:

gpg --keyserver hkps://keys.openpgp.org --recv-keys 4C26F8B053103FD18BD144847C1034F0B3541CAA

or from the repository, if you do not want to ask a server:

curl -fsSLO https://codeberg.org/squidd/TildeMail/raw/branch/develop/RELEASE-KEY.asc
gpg --import RELEASE-KEY.asc

Then check the signature and the files:

gpg --verify SHA256SUMS.asc SHA256SUMS
sha256sum --check --ignore-missing SHA256SUMS

The key is TildeMail release signing <tom@orivega.io>, and its fingerprint is 4C26 F8B0 5310 3FD1 8BD1 4484 7C10 34F0 B354 1CAA. It is published on keys.openpgp.org for tom@orivega.io. gpg says that the key is not certified, because you have not signed it: what matters is that Good signature shows that fingerprint, so compare it with this page. The packages of the apt repository do not need this check: apt verifies them with the key of the registry.

Nightly builds

The packages of develop are built every night and put in the nightly distribution of the same registry. Their version carries a pre-release marker, for example 0.3.0-nightly.202610310300.g1a2b3c4 (tmail --version prints it), and Debian sorts it before the release it leads to. The last seven are kept; a night without a new commit builds nothing.

Use one distribution at a time: nightly and stable hold a package of the same name, and apt installs the newest version it can see.

sudo curl https://codeberg.org/api/packages/squidd/debian/repository.key -o /etc/apt/keyrings/forgejo-squidd.asc
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/forgejo-squidd.asc] https://codeberg.org/api/packages/squidd/debian nightly main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tmail.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install tmail

Shell completion

tmail completion <shell> prints a completion script for bash, zsh or fish. It completes the commands, the second word of cache, gpg, rules and themes, the option names, and file names for --config and --body-file.

Save the script to a file once. Sourcing it with source <(tmail completion ...) is the alternative: it works, but it starts tmail at every shell start. That is quick, and it reads no config.toml, creates no file and needs no configuration, but a saved file starts nothing.

bash

Save the script where bash-completion looks for it:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions
tmail completion bash > ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/tmail

Or add this line to ~/.bashrc:

source <(tmail completion bash)

zsh

Save the script as _tmail in a folder of $fpath:

mkdir -p ~/.zfunc
tmail completion zsh > ~/.zfunc/_tmail

and add fpath=(~/.zfunc $fpath) to ~/.zshrc, above autoload -Uz compinit && compinit.

Or add this line to ~/.zshrc, after the compinit line:

source <(tmail completion zsh)

Sourced before compinit, the script fails with command not found: compdef.

fish

tmail completion fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/tmail.fish

fish loads the file the next time it starts.

The script lists the commands of the version that printed it, so print it again after an upgrade. The Debian package does not install it.

Requirements

The .NET 10 SDK, to build. global.json rolls forward to the latest patch.
gpg on PATH, for signing, verifying, encrypting and decrypting. Without it, the GPG tests are skipped.
Optional: notify-send, which sys.notify calls.
Optional: Docker, for the live IMAP and SMTP tests (see Development).

Build from source

dotnet build TildeMail.slnx
dotnet test TildeMail.slnx

dotnet build produces a framework-dependent tmail under src/TildeMail.App/bin/. To run it from the source tree:

dotnet run --project src/TildeMail.App -- check

Single-file executable

scripts/build-binaries.sh

The script publishes a self-contained, single-file tmail that needs no .NET runtime. By default it builds these targets: linux-x64, linux-arm64, osx-x64, osx-arm64 and win-x64. win-arm64 is accepted with --rid.

It leaves in dist/:

one archive per target, tmail-<version>-<rid>.tar.gz (.zip for Windows), holding a tmail-<version>-<rid>/ folder with tmail (tmail.exe on Windows), LICENSE, THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md and the themes/ and langs/ folders (copy what you want into ~/.config/tildemail/: tmail does not read the folders of the archive);
a SHA256SUMS file.

The version is the project’s version, so it is the number tmail --version prints.

Run the script on Linux. It needs GNU realpath, sha256sum and tar, plus zip for the Windows targets. Every target is built on that machine: the first time, the .NET SDK downloads the runtime pack of each target.

Option	Effect
`-r`, `--rid RID`	Build only this runtime identifier; repeat for several.
`-o`, `--output DIR`	Output folder (default `dist`).
`-n`, `--dry-run`	Print the steps and do nothing.
`--no-archive`	Leave the plain binaries in `DIR/<rid>/`; no archives, no checksums.

To publish by hand, use the project, not TildeMail.slnx:

dotnet publish src/TildeMail.App -c Release -r linux-x64 -o out

On its first run the binary unpacks one native library (libonigwrap.so on Linux) under ~/.net. Set DOTNET_BUNDLE_EXTRACT_BASE_DIR to change that location.

Debian packages

scripts/build-deb.sh

The script builds tmail_<version>-1_amd64.deb and tmail_<version>-1_arm64.deb in dist/; each also carries the manual pages (man tmail, man tmail-config), the ready-made themes (see Themes), the translations (see Languages) and the third-party licenses in /usr/share/doc/tmail/THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md. It needs dpkg-deb (apt install dpkg-dev).

Option	Effect
`-a`, `--arch ARCH`	Build only this Debian architecture, `amd64` or `arm64`; repeat for several.
`-o`, `--output DIR`	Folder with the binaries and the `.deb` files (default `dist`).
`-n`, `--dry-run`	Print the steps and do nothing.

The script always rebuilds the binary first with scripts/build-binaries.sh --no-archive, so a package never carries an older build.

The package:

installs /usr/bin/tmail, the manual pages tmail(1) and tmail-config(5), made by tmail man, the themes of the themes/ folder in /usr/share/tildemail/themes/ and the languages of the langs/ folder in /usr/share/tildemail/langs/;
depends on ca-certificates and on the C and C++ runtime, zlib, OpenSSL and ICU libraries;
recommends gnupg and suggests libnotify-bin.

A pre-release version such as 0.2.0-rc1 is written 0.2.0~rc1, so that it sorts before 0.2.0.