Digest

A local-first Electron desktop app for AI-powered email management and summarization.

Forked from EmailEssence — a capstone project by Emma Melkumian, Joseph Madigan, Shayan Shahla, and Ritesh Samal.

Overview

Digest takes EmailEssence's proven backend — FastAPI, the summarization pipeline, the repository pattern — and re-homes it as a local-first desktop application. No cloud deployment, no remote database. Your email stays on your machine, summarized by your choice of AI provider.

Features

• Secure OAuth 2.0 authentication with Google
• AI-powered email summarization with pluggable providers
• Clean, clutter-free reader view
• Local-first — all data stored on your machine
• Tokens secured via OS keychain (Electron safeStorage)

Architecture

Electron App (app/)
  ├─ Renderer: React 19 + Vite
  ├─ Preload: typed IPC bridge (contextBridge)
  └─ Main Process
       ├─ IPC handlers
       ├─ OAuth (Electron-native, loopback redirect)
       └─ Sidecar manager → FastAPI backend subprocess
                              ├─ Routers → Services → Repositories
                              └─ SQLite (aiosqlite)

All renderer-to-backend communication flows through Electron IPC — no direct fetch() calls.

Technical Stack

Electron App (app/)

• TypeScript — main process, preload, shared types
• React 19 — renderer UI
• Vite — renderer dev server and build
• tsup — main/preload bundling
• electron-builder — packaging and distribution

Backend (backend/)

• Python 3.12+
• FastAPI — API framework
• SQLite via aiosqlite — local database
• Pluggable AI summarization: local (Ollama, llama.cpp, LM Studio), OpenAI, Google Gemini, OpenRouter

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v18 or higher)
• Python (v3.12 or higher)
• UV package manager (for Python dependency management)

Installation

Backend Setup

Create a .env file in backend/ using .env.example as a template. Then:

Windows:

.\backend\setup.ps1

Linux/macOS:

chmod +x backend/setup.sh
./backend/setup.sh

The setup scripts install UV, create a virtual environment, and install all dependencies.

Electron App Setup

cd app
npm install

Development

# Start backend (from backend/)
uvicorn main:app --reload

# Start Electron app with hot reload (from app/)
npm run dev

Packaging

cd app
npm run package    # Outputs to app/release/build/

The packaged app bundles the Python backend so end users don't need a separate Python install.

Documentation

Project documentation lives in digest - docs/ (an Obsidian vault). Key references:

• FastAPI
• Electron
• React 19
• aiosqlite

License

TODO

Origin

Digest is a solo continuation of EmailEssence, carrying the full git history of the original capstone project. The fork inherits the backend engine and places it in a local-first, Electron-native context.