Polite Mangadex Downloader

Small side project to manage reading your manga on Mangadex, a resource for scanslation groups. It works on Windows 10 or 11. The UI is ugly, but functional (like this site), and it doesn't burden Mangadex. Bug reports to sizer99 at sizer99 dot com.

Download v7.0.3

Download v7.0.3 Bulk Version (contains all dependencies, only if the version above doesn't work for you)

Download v6.6.5

Download Database Converter from 4.x to 5.0+

Readme and Change List

Getting Started

The very quiet Discord channel - seriously, I forget it exists

This politely downloads your new manga chapters from Mangadex. It's less of a burden on the server than if you were reading it on the site. It only looks at your follows pages to find new chapters, so even if you have 3000 follows it only has to look at one or two pages. Cheap! It only grabs one page at a time, so it takes a while to download, but you can just leave it running all the time and read at your leisure.

It's for people who like reading manga offline fullscreen on our tablets with a full-featured reader like Perfect Reader or Manga Storm.

Jun 23 2026

Mangadex updated to new certs which use YE and YR roots that older Windows boxes don't know anything about (and never will). It also needs newer crypt. Windows 10 and earlier are never going to support this. Windows 10's TLS 1.3 is also broken. Your browser works because your browser handles all of this itself!

I tried various things and the only way to make sure this works on Win10 is to completely switch away from Windows cert handling to libCurl, like your browser, which of course means rewriting everything that talks to MD.

I now have multiple reports that this is working for people who had the SSL error. Thanks all!

If 6.6.5 is working fine for you you don't need to upgrade.

If you do upgrade, uninstall the old one first or it will fail silently on startup because libCurl can't unpack its libraries to an admin directory.

Nov 17 2024

Mangadex has ended all support for normal userid/password login. You will HAVE to use an OpenId key/secret as detailed on the Options -> Login page. This works, I've tried it. You still need your username/password, then add your OpenId Key Name and Secret and you're good to go.

Version 7.0.3 - 2026 Jun 25 21:29 PST

Fix: Delegate race condition with libCurl could cause rare ExecutionEngineException (then crash).

Version 7.0.2 - 2026 Jun 25 20:45 PST

New: Catppuccin Color Theme from Rhombic-Drive!

Fix: Wine doesn't support Per-monitor DPI, crashes on menus. Detect Wine and turn it off.

Fix: Theme Import broke because of Sqlite changes. Fixed.

Fix: Download Update file was mildly broken with new Curl stuff.

Version 7.0.1 - 2026 Jun 23 21:12 PST

Fix:The output log was getting color themed, should always be black background.

Fix:Apparently the color pickers in themes haven't worked for years and nobody noticed or cared!

Version 7.0.0 - 2026 Jun 23 00:44 PST

MAJOR rewrite of the guts to handle MD's new cert stuff not being handled by older Windows.

YOU do NOT need to update if 6.6.5 is working fine for you.

You might want to make a copy of your mangadex.db file first just in case.

I am sure there will be some new errors, but this is working fine for me on an old Windows 10 box for now.

If you update, you MUST uninstall your current PMDL first. Otherwise it will just fail on start as libCurl tries to unpack its files and fails because it doesn't have admin rights. It's okay if you uninstall after, then install again.

Version 6.6.5 - 2024 Nov 17 20:09 PST

Plain username/pw login is DEAD. You also need an API key. See Options -> Mangadex Login.

Requirements:

Only Windows version, but will run under Wine for Linux or macOS!
You must have a Mangadex account, because it needs your favorites page and API key to work.
Requires .NET 10. If you run under Windows it should automatically prompt you to download and install it. Under Wine you may have to install that yourself.

Getting Started:

Install and run PMDL.
Choose 'Create New Database' and choose a new file. You should back this up occasionally!
On the 'Mangadex Login' tab, set your username and password. These are stored encrypted. Then on the same page:
On Mangadex, go to your settings (upper right, settings), 'API Clients', '+ Create', and give it a name of 'Personal PMDL Access', and add a description like 'Logging in with PMDL', 'Create'. It should be auto-approved after a while. Copy the personal key name from MD (should look like 'personal-client-xxxx-xxx') - paste that API Key Name in PMDL. Then (on the same MD page) Get Secret, Copy, and paste that into PMDL's API Secret.
On the 'Save Optons' tab, set your Save Directory and File Format.
You can try setting the save file names if you want, though it has a decent default of SERIES\SERIES vVOL cCHAP TITLE - PAGE [GROUP].zip
IMPORTANT: If you don't want to download all your old chapters for followed series at this point, go to Options and uncheck 'Download old chapters for new series' for now. This could take a looong time.
Now you should be able to 'Find New' and hopefully it'll log in!
Go to 'Known Series' tab, right click the upper grid, 'Recheck Favorite Series'
Say yes, and it'll fetch all your favorites from MangaDex
Probably go back to Options and check 'Download chapters for new series'. Now it will get all new chapters.
You're good to go!
If you want to download all of an old series, just go to it on Known Series, then in the bottom grid hit Ctrl-A (select all) then Ctrl-Shift-D (add to downloads and start).

Normal Use:

'Download Queue' tab, hit 'Find New', then 'Download'
You can also set 'Options -> General -> On Start' to 'Find and Download New Chapters'
There are lots of other options - try right clicking things or typing the start of a series name in the series box.
Set series priority so your favorites get downloaded first! You can use '=' and '-' keys.
Manage your favorites on the Mangadex site. If you add a new favorite on the site, it'll pick it up automatically.
Manage your language or other filter preferences on Mangadex, not in the app.
You can only find new series on the Mangadex site. This doesn't keep its own list of every single series on the site.

Running in Linux or macOS using Wine

Install Bottles
Install .NET 10 with Bottles
Run the normal (not-bulk) PMDL installer
That's it! Thanks to Rhombic-Drive for trying it in Linux and letting me know. It might just work under normal Wine too if you install .NET 10, let me know if it does for you!

FAQ: (probably)

Do you save my password? Yes, using .NET's ProtectedData class. Only the same user can decode it even if they know where to look.
Nothing is ever sent to me, and there are no ads - I don't care what you're reading, I've got too much to read already. It does do a new version check by loading this page, but nothing is sent except to Mangadex.
What's the database? SQLite. It's good enough for this small amount of data.
Open source? Maybe - it was a rush job, and while the design worked great 8 years ago (.NET 4) it's way out of date for .NET 10 - it needs some clean up and more internal doc.