meerail downloads every message you own into PostgreSQL, then puts a familiar email client on top of it. Real regex search that reads inside your attachments, full keyboard control, and a mailbox any LLM can actually read.
Most email clients hide your mail behind a search box someone else designed. meerail hands you the whole archive.
meerail syncs your accounts over IMAP and stores every message,
header, recipient and attachment in Postgres — the original
.eml bytes included. Nothing is summarised away, and
nothing needs the network to read again.
Search is a real regular-expression engine over subjects, bodies and
extracted attachment text. Match by prefix, alternation or whole
words (^Invoice, invoice|receipt,
\bcontract\b) and scope it by account, folder or a
last-N-years window.
Proton keeps your mail out of ordinary clients — meerail is built for it. A small agent runs on your machine and talks IMAP and SMTP to Bridge, so your Proton mailbox becomes a searchable archive without your Bridge credentials ever leaving the host. Aliases and additional addresses work too, and because the agent speaks plain IMAP, Gmail and any other provider work the same way.
A three-pane Apple-Mail-style layout: mailboxes, conversation list, message. Threading, a unified inbox across accounts, sandboxed HTML with remote images blocked, light and dark. No relearning where anything lives.
Move, read, flag, archive, reply and search without reaching for the mouse. Single-key shortcuts throughout, so triaging a morning's mail is a few keystrokes rather than a few hundred clicks.
Because the mailbox is a database, an LLM can query it with plain SQL: no scraping, no per-message API calls, no rate limits. Import the skill below and ask questions of ten years of email.
One docker compose up gets you the server, Postgres and
attachment text extraction. Your mail stays on your machine, and the
whole thing is open source as the
meerail
project.
Every attachment goes through Apache Tika on the way in and its text
is stored with the message. A search for termination clause
finds the PDF that contains it, not just mails that mention
it — same regex syntax on both. Run the OCR image and scanned
documents become searchable too.
Remote images are dropped by default, so the tracking pixels in marketing mail never phone home — meerail tells you how many it blocked and lets you load them for a message you trust. The HTML itself is stripped of anything executable and rendered in a sandboxed frame, and your mail credentials stay on your own machine with the agent.
Real screenshots of a running instance. Click any of them to see it full size.
meerail ships a skill file you can import into Claude Code (or any agent that reads Markdown instructions). It carries the schema and the connection details for the Docker container, so the model can query your mail directly.
Drop it into your skills directory and restart your agent:
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/meerail curl -o ~/.claude/skills/meerail/SKILL.md \ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ribalba/meerail/main/website/public/downloads/SKILL.mdView SKILL.md on GitHub
The skill connects to your container on
localhost. Nothing is sent anywhere you don't send it.
Already cloned the repo? It's at
website/public/downloads/SKILL.md.
Two pieces: the server in Docker, and a small agent that sits next to your mail bridge and speaks IMAP so your credentials never leave the host.
Everything below runs from the repository, so start by cloning it. You need git and Docker with the Compose plugin; the rest comes out of the containers.
git clone https://github.com/ribalba/meerail.git cd meerail
Server, Postgres and Apache Tika, in one command.
cp .env.example .env docker compose up -d
Copy the example config, then edit config.toml
and put in your own credentials — the host, ports,
username and password for your mail server. For Proton that's the
Bridge password shown in the Bridge app, not your Proton password.
The agent won't start until they're filled in.
cd agent cp config.example.toml config.toml $EDITOR config.toml # your credentials ./run.sh --once
Accounts the agent syncs show up on their own.
open http://localhost:8000
These four steps are the short version. Every config option, the agent setup for Proton Bridge and other providers, building the desktop app, the test suite and the architecture notes are all documented in the repository — and the code is right there next to them.
