We present and analyze an interior penalty method for the numerical discretization of the indefinite time-harmonic Maxwell equations in mixed form. The method is based on the mixed discretization of the curl-curl operator developed in [Houston et al., J. Sci. Comp.22 (2005) 325–356] and can be understood as a non-stabilized variant of the approach proposed in [Perugia et al., Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg.191 (2002) 4675–4697]. We show the well-posedness of this approach and derive optimal a priori error estimates in the energy-norm as well as the L2-norm. The theoretical results are confirmed in a series of numerical experiments.