Getting started

Six steps from an empty Mimeo to a working email operation. The first three are setup, in order; the rest is building, in whatever order your situation calls for.

1. Log in to your Mimeo

Mimeo is single-tenant: your install lives at your own domain and nobody else's data is in it. Log in with the credentials from your provisioning email. Everything below happens inside your Mimeo, and every URL in these docs is relative to it.

If your install arrived empty — a self-hosted Mimeo you stood up yourself — the login page offers a Sign up link instead. Use it once to create your account. A Mimeo holds one account, so signup closes as soon as that account exists: the link disappears and /signup takes you back to the login page.

2. Set up your sending provider and domain

Your Mimeo holds your people, your content, and your history, but it doesn't put mail on the wire — a sending provider does that, and your mail needs a verified domain of its own to send from. A fresh Mimeo opens with a setup wizard that handles all of it: pick Postmark or Resend, connect its keys and webhook, name your senders, and add one CNAME per sending domain. The wizard verifies each piece as you go, so when it says you're done, you can send.

The step-by-step walkthrough: Set up sending.

3. Set up your manager repo

When the wizard finishes, it offers one more step: connect your manager repo — your whole email operation as files in a git repo you own, synced with your Mimeo and ready for your coding agent. Take it. The screen mints your API token and hands you three commands to paste (or a prompt to hand your agent, which does the whole thing). Missed it? The same screen lives at Settings → Agents & API → Manager repo.

One paste gets you: every definition pulled into files, the mimeo CLI ready to diff and push changes back, and your agent's MCP connection to your Mimeo already wired. The token it minted is the same one the API uses in step 5 — one credential for everything.

The full story: Your manager repo, and How it fits together for the five-minute map of all the pieces. Strictly optional — everything in Mimeo can be done from the web UI alone — but this is where working with an agent gets good.

4. Start creating and building

Nothing here is required, and nothing has to happen in order. Each of these can be done in the web UI by hand, or by your agent working in the manager repo — same result either way. (Bringing an existing list from another tool? Jump to step 6 first.)

• Author an email — markdown with Liquid personalization, rendered in your layout. Preview it against a real person, then use Send test to me: the end-to-end proof that your provider, domain and layout all work, delivered to your actual inbox.
• Define your custom fields — under Settings → Fields, declare the attributes your business uses (plan, company, source). Declared fields mean the API ignores junk keys, and your agent can read the schema back with GET /api/v1/field_definitions.
• Define a segment — "who should get what," as live rules rather than frozen lists.
• Build a sequence — a welcome series or course: ordered emails with delays.
• Build a flow — event-triggered automation: when someone signs up, do these steps.
• Add guards — send-time checkpoints that hold, skip or cancel mail when a condition says so.

5. Send events and subscribers into Mimeo

Ongoing data enters as events. Your app, your checkout, your signup form, and your agent all talk to the same endpoint, authenticated by the token from step 3:

curl -X POST https://your-mimeo.com/api/v1/events \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer mm_your_token" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "email": "ada@example.com",
    "name": "signed_up",
    "person": { "first_name": "Ada" }
  }'

That single call creates the person if they're new, matches them on lowercased email if they're not, records first-touch attribution, appends to their timeline — and triggers any flow listening for signed_up. Fire one for yourself, then open People and look at your timeline: the event, the send, the open, the click, in order. That timeline is the answer to "what actually happened to this person?" Details: the event contract.

6. Import your subscriber list

If you have an existing list, bring it in with CSV import — any CSV with a header row, columns mapped yourself, including a mapping for "already unsubscribed" so a migration never emails people who opted out.

Moving off another email tool wholesale? Read Migrating your list first — it covers bringing your unsubscribes, trimming the cold tail, warming up your sending, and cutting over without double-mailing anyone.

What's next. Once people are in and an email exists, the rest opens up: broadcasts for one-offs, reporting to see what happened, and the scheduled queue for what's about to. When a term is unfamiliar, the glossary has all of them.

Next: How it fits together → · Your manager repo