Overview

Run this CLI application to easily handle the emails in your IMAP inbox (e.g. outlook365, gmail, etc.)

I created the app because my email client, while great and smart, is not good at filtering emails.

This application does not even have command-line arguments yet, and the only way to change its behavior is through its configuration files. Obviously this needs to change down the road.

To be fair: editing the configuration files is very easy.

WARNING!

Again, at this point, the application works fairly well but it's only a MVP. It will not devour your emails, but it is brittle.

Getting started

• Copy secret.toml.template to secret.toml
• Store your login credentials in secret.toml (you may need to create application-specific passwords... oauth not yet supported)
• Copy config.toml.template to config.toml
• Create all the rules you need
• Run mailbiter

Concepts

So, what do we find in config.toml?

Profiles

A profile represents an email account. It has simple settings, such as number of emails to retrieve, and the name of the secret containing your credentials in secret.toml

Rules

A rule can either be a row rule ('rowrule') or a set rule ('setrule')

You are likely going to use row rules as they apply, individually, to each email retrieved from your inbox.

Set rules are not implemented!

When/if they are, here is what they will do: they will be run against filters applied to multiple emails. This will allow you, for instance, to say "I do not want to keep more than 3 emails from that sender."

A rule consists of a complex condition and one or more actions.

Conditions

Conditions are expressed using a syntax close to natural language. For instance:

subject contains 'you won' and sender contains 'lottery'

This basic syntax can be very powerful. Here are a few more examples:

• subject contains 'reminder' and not (subject contains 'tomorrow')
• subject contains 'blue' or subject contains 'green'
• sender endswith '@example.com'
• subject in ['cat', 'dog', 'rabbit']
• now - date > duration('24h') and sender != 'chris@example.com'
• date < calendar('2020-02-03') and date > calendar('2020-02-01')
• 'Seen' in flags

Actions

• move to '<folder name>'
• copy to '<folder name>'
• delete
• info
• inspect
• run <path> # TODO

TODO

Urgent

• Filter more than just inbox

Open points

Should we also provide email size as a criterion?

Sanity checks could be quickly performed before a run:

• ensure that all actionnames reference actual action entries (done)
• ensure that all accounts names reference actual account entries

Misc

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