Pmail

Simple TUI mail client for Gmail.

Introduction

Pmail aims to be a usable, terminal based client for Googles Gmail service Pmail is built on top of the Gmail API, using python, hence the p. Pmail is supposed to integrate well with other terminal utilities, it uses W3m for parsing emails, Vim (Neovim) for editing and composing emails and integrates fzf for fuzzy finding email addresses and as a file picker for choosing attachments. As of now I haven't tested with other programs in place of these but in principle it should be possible to use other programs in their places.

The motivation to develop Pmail comes from a growing frustration with getting Mutt and the related msmpt/offlineimap configuration functional.

Pmail does not aim to implement all features available through the API, the current set of features is listed below. Of course Pmail is heavily inspired by Mutt but aims to be a much simpler more usable client for Gmail users.

Obligatory screenshot

Features

• Send, receive, reply, forward emails.
• Keyboard driven interface with vimish bindings.
• Lightweight.
• View emails using W3m.
• Compose emails with Vim.
• Fuzzy search through contacts using fzf, no need for an address book.
• Sort messages according with Gmails label system.
• Manipulate labels easily. (mark as read, move to trash, etc..)
• Separate client and server programs.

Pmail implements a client/server pair. The server is supposed to be run in the background (for example via a systemd service) and it serves two purposes. First it is supposed to keep a local database containing information about the users mailbox in sync with the remote version kept by Google. Second, it handles all database related functionality for the client. The advantage of this is it allows the use of a sqlite database since concurrency issues can be handled between different threads of the same program quite easily using Lock objects from pythons threading module. The local database is not a full copy of the remote inbox, it only stores information contained in the header fields of the emails (more or less). If you want to read an email then it must be downloaded and so a network connection is required.

Installation instructions

At the moment Pmail is still in development and still has a few issues but it needs testing. If you would like to test it out you should follow the following instructions.

Dependencies

You will also need to install W3m, vim and fzf if you wish to use all the features of Pmail. You will also require the following python packages:

google-api-python-client 
google-auth-httplib2 
google-auth-oauthlib
sqlalchemy

These can be installed with pip or however else you like to install python modules.

Setup Gmail API

(Instructions valid as of July 2020.) You will need to do this step for each account you wish to use.

1. Go to the Quickstart guide and click on the 'Enable the Gmail API button.
2. Agree to the terms and conditions, select 'Desktop App' if it asks you for the type of application and finally click the 'Download client configuration button at the end.
3. Save the credentials.json file somewhere safe.

Setup Gmail PubSub (optional)

This is an optional step which is only needed if you wish to enable push/pull update notifications via GClouds PubSub interface. See here for detailed instructions about how to set this up.

In summary what you need to do is this:

1. Install the pubsub client:

   pip install --upgrade google-cloud-pubsub

   You will need to create authentication credentials for the pubsub client, follow the instructions here. Save the resulting credentials.json file somewhere safe.

2. Create a pubsub topic called pmail for the project which is associated with API (if you followed the quickstart guide, this will be called something like quickstart-xxxxxxxxxxxxx)

3. Create a subscription alled pmail-update, set the delivey type to pull.

4. Grant publish privileges to gmail-api-push@system.gserviceaccount.com.

Install Pmail

Method 1: Using pip (recommended)

Run the following command:

pip install pmail-tui

Method 2: Clone this repo

Make sure you have all of the dependencies installed and then:

git clone https://github.com/lt20kmph/pmail

Method 3: From the AUR

Not supported yet

Configure

Pmail looks for config files in the following locations in order of preference:

$HOME/.config/pmail/config.yaml
../config.yaml

To copy the included example config file to $HOME/.config/pmail/config.yaml run the following:

python -m pmail --mk-config

You can safely ignore most of the configuration options but you will need to fill out your relevant details in the accounts section.

For the pubsub to work (optional) you will need to fill in the relevant settings with the authentication and project name.

Also you might need to change nvim to vim under editor depending on your preference.

Getting Started

First we need to start the server. Run Pmail in server mode:

python -m pmail -m server

If everything is working, a Google window will open up (or a link will appear in your terminal) asking you to confirm the relevant permissions. At this point you may have to find the advanced options to 'allow unsafe apps'. If everything went successfully after a few minutes (or longer, depending on how much history you are syncing, controlled by the 'sync_from' option in the config file) you should have synced a local copy of your mailbox and then you can start Pmail in client mode, in a separate terminal window:

python -m pmail -m client

The client should start up and you should see a list of your messages, and you can start deleting/sending/forwarding emails.

Usage Instructions

Use the arrow keys or j/k to scroll up and down through the message list. You can also use PAGEUP/PAGEDOWN keys to scroll faster. The selected email is highlighted as you scroll. The following key bindings are available.

RETURN - Read the selected email
r - Reply
f - Forward an email
a - Reply to group/Reply to all
m - Compose a new email
v - View attachments
dd - Move mail to trash and mark as read
dt - Move mail to trash but do not read
dr - Mark as read but leave in the inbox
ll - Toggle label visibility on and off
lu - Show messages with unread label
li - Only show messages with inbox label (default)
ls - Show messages with sent label
lt - Show messages in the trash
/ - Do a search
c - Clear search filter
SPACE - Select email (can be used to select multiple emails)
TAB - Switch between accounts if you have more than one configured
b[n] - Switch to nth mailbox, for n in [1,..,9]
bu - Start unified mailbox mode
gg - Go to top of message list
G - Go to bottom of message list
CTRL U - Scroll up one page
CTRL D - Scroll down one page
H - Move cursor to first visible messsage
M - Move cursor to central visible message
L - Move cursor to last visible message
q - Quit

Before finally sending an email a confirmation screen will be shown. On this screen various options are available, but they are presented on the interface. On the attachments screen, you can either press 'q' to quit or 's' to save the attachment to your downloads directory in the configuration file.

Notes

You can choose how much history you want to sync up by setting the associated value in the configuration file.

When a search is executed a list of matching messages is retrieved directly from Google - not by querying the local database - and the corresponding message information is added to the local database. This is probably not ideal - it means if you do a search with a large amount of matches it can be quite slow and it can cause your local database to grow quite allot. On the other hand if you want to increase the amount of historical messages with information stored locally you can just do a search for 'newer_than:4y', where '4y' is any time period you like. The search is compatible with any keyword search exactly the same as the usual Gmail searching capabilities and hence its quite powerful.

pmail can also be run with a flag '-n' and an account id. When run like this pmail will return an int corresponding to the number of unread mails in the mail box of the account corresponding to the id provided.

For example, if you had the following in your config.yaml:

accounts:
    yourname@gmail.com:
        id: 'ID'
        name: 'Wonderful Person'
        credentials: 'credentials.json'

then running:

python -m pmail -n ID 

would return the number of unread mails in the mailbox for yourname@gmail.com. This is potentially useful for scripts.

Attachments

In order to correctly (more or less) detect which messages have attachments, when pmail is first run, it will create a new hidden label called ATTACHMENT which it will add to all existing messages with attachments and also create a filter which will add this label to all new incoming messsages with attachements. This means that pmail will display the attachments icon on any messages which have the paperclip icon in the gmail web interface.

Security considerations

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOU OWN SECURITY. Keep your credentials.json file somewhere safe, possibly encrypted. After the first run, Pmail stores a token.pickle file this file confirms that you have agreed to give permission to Pmail to send and modify emails. Also keep this file safe. Communications between the server and client parts of the program is incredibly primitive and no form of encryption is currently implemented. Therefore, do no attempt to run the client/server over any network you do not completely trust

Limitations and TODO

• There are some strange bugs which need to be investigated.
• Handle searches with large number of results differently.
• Improve error handling and logging (partially done, but can still be improved).