Since I started to work in a company, I keep receiving more and more emails days after days… And I know I’m not the only one.
I tried Thunderbird, I kept it a long while, it does the job :
- Receiving mail
- Reading them
- Display them in thread
- Replay to them
Except one big flaws, It doesn’t suit my work environment. I have another window.
Under gnome, e17 and almost every desktop I’ve been using, I created another workspace to separate mail from my text editor or web browser : I had to adapt my working environment to my mail software.
This is unacceptable, mails are simple, software that manage email must adapt to me, not rule over me !
So I tried Mutt, much better, but still, if I want to let it go in a corner in order to continue downloading mail when I’m working, I have to let an entire window, in another workspace and adapt myself the way Mutt works.
But wait, there are a lot of mail management software, mail fetcher or mail indexer out there, let’s give a try to those.
I configured fecthmail, to download my entire mailbox, then, with notmuch, I indexed them all, wonderful, I finally got a command line tools for getting/retrieving and writing responses with the editor of my choice !
BUT, that’s not fully suitable in my case…
I tagged my mails, I sorted them… LOCALLY, and that is not possible. It’s important for me to have the exact same information on my phone too.
And then, I realized that all I wanted, all the great features I miss, was in fact already implemented in the IMAP protocol…
Why the hell Thunderbird does not display my mails tags properly ? Why is there no software to have a mailbox state
or search via IMAP SEARCH command ?
I look up for that on internet and find nothing. Is my request totally dump ? Am I crazy ?
In front of that huge problem of mine, I think I’m the only one complaining, but still, I have a problem with mail management software. So, I decided to make my own, a piece of software solving my problems… and perhaps solve someone else problems.
Imap-CLI aims to provide a command line interface, a python API and a REST API to consult and manage IMAP accounts:
- Get IMAP account status (New mails, mail counting… etc…)
- Get list of mails in INBOX (or any other directory)
- Search amongst mails by tag, header, or full text search
- Read mail
- Flag mail (Read, Unread, Delete… etc…)
- Reply, Forward, Bounce mails
Hope this proof of concept will help people as it already help me :)