ma

Mail Archivist. Downloads all mail from multiple accounts into a SQLite database, for backup and analysis.

Usage

Environment

1. install rust: https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install
2. ensure $HOME/.cargo/bin is in your $PATH
3. cargo install ma

Initial

1. cd $mail_archive_directory (any directory in which you want ma to maintain the mail archive)
2. ma fetch (will generate initial config file and then exit with a failure to connect)
3. Create an App Password with your provider, for example:
   • Google/Gmail: https://myaccount.google.com/apppasswords
   • Fastmail: https://app.fastmail.com/settings/security/integrations
   • Runbox: https://runbox.com/mail/account_security
4. $EDITOR ma.toml (fill in the correct values in the generated config file)
5. ma fetch (should now work)

Routine

Like with git, you can either cd into $mail_archive_directory or provide it to ma as an argument, like so:

• ma --dir $mail_archive_directory fetch to update
• sqlite3 $mail_archive_directory/ma.db to enjoy exploring your mail archive with SQL!

TODO

• fetch all messages from all mailboxes from all accounts
• store raw messages in content-addressed file tree (dump/[hash..2]/[hash].eml.gz)
• insert headers and text body into SQLite
• store state, the highest seen msg per account per mailbox, and avoid re-downloads
• fetch directly to database and rebrand file-tree storing as export
• snapshot (log?) mailboxes and message locations
• poll/idle for new messages (maybe not necessary, since once can just periodically re-fetch)
• post-update hooks (Can be used for custom notifications, aggregate query reruns, etc.)
• timeouts
• parallelize fetch
• parallelize import/export
• example analytics
  • Received based route trace graph
  • From -> To directed graph with edges weighted by
    • frequency
    • msg size
• export into InfluxDB or something similar that Grafana can read from

Questions

Automatic Address Book

How to measure confidence in sender/receiver identity, given that:

• any name can have any address
• any address can have any name