Himalaya: CLI to Manage Emails

[djha-skin]

Himalaya makes it pretty easy to write cli tools and automate email workflows. It pairs well with August, another rust project that can render html to text on the terminal. I wrote a git email patch automation tool around Himalaya so that people can receive email patches easily[1].

1: https://github.com/djha-skin/git-receive-mail

[cfiggers]

This is cool. I like the ongoing trend of TUIs getting more attention and use.

A little while ago I wrote my own little TUI tool using Textual that interfaces with Outlook using pywin32. I really only needed (need) one specific feature above and beyond what Outlook already does. And that is, I wanted a Vim-like UX for assigning categories to emails and archiving/deleting them. What I have now works surprisingly well and it's very satisfying to have made my own thing that suits my own needs precisely the way I want it to.

[rubicks]

I have been looking for something like this. Got a link to your project?

[xyst]

I feel like this has been here before, glad it's kept up with updates. Will have to give this a shot soon.

From strictly reading the docs, I love these features:

* oauth2 * json output

But do I need to run the "himalaya ..." command every so often to get fresh e-mails? Or can I leave TUI open and it will refresh in the background?

When composing messages, does anybody know if the "From" header can be re-written like in Thunderbird? I am able to send from ad-hoc aliases with my mail server, but need to re-write the "From" header first. For example, I can receive mail sent to "[e-mail]" and delivered to mailbox at "[e-mail]". In order to reply with same e-mail address, I must re-write the "From" header to match.

[faitswulff]

It's designed to be a CLI tool as opposed to a TUI so that it's more composable with other CLI tools. So you can use it as a building block to create a TUI, but it's not one by default.

[jedisct1]

I still use mutt on a daily basis.

Being able to select emails using regular expressions is super useful.

IMAPFilter is also simple and powerful to quickly sort email.

[drwu]

Yes! I use mutt for searching, tagging, thread operations (splitting,appending etc.), bouncing, attaching other mails, deleting attachments, openpgp (personal), smime (at work), and it works with IMAP out of the box.

I am also able to integrate (a locally hosted) LanguageTool to check the grammar in the editor.

The only issue is to write emails with embedded images. But personally I don't like such emails for occupying the space of the mailbox.

[msravi]

What do you use to fetch email? mbsync keeps messing up the UID of emails with gmail.

[aynawn]

Does it support email filters? I'd love to manage my gmail filters programmatically or use a configuration file to manage them so I can reuse the filters across multiple emails.

Edit: there is a separate tool for this for gmail https://github.com/mbrt/gmailctl

[jonstewart]

Neat. I used and loved “mh” in college, but that was before html email became prevalent. It was beautiful to have different commands and treat emails as individual files. Unfortunately mh was grotty old C code and just couldn’t keep up (IMHO) with how we use email today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System

[bandie91]

shameless plug: i wrote emlv[1] (EMaiL Viewer) in the same mindset. it displays raw email files on the terminal.

[1] https://codeberg.org/hband/gemlv#emlv

[zimpenfish]

> I used and loved “mh” in college

Same and also `nmh`. Loved how you could combine the various parts to make your own tools.

[alberth]

I'm confused, it is called 'Pimalaya' or 'Himalaya'

[jarbus]

Pimalaya is the org, Himalaya is the mail client, AFAIK

[vigonotion]

I think the README is missing some examples of what this can do. I used it for a script that marks every mail as seen:

    #!/bin/bash

    while true; do
    # Run the command and capture its exit code
    result=$(himalaya envelope list --folder INBOX --page 1 --page-size 100 --output json not flag Seen | \
        jq -r '.[] | "\(.id) Seen"')
    exit_code=$?

    # Check the exit code of `himalaya`
    if [[ $exit_code -ne 0 ]]; then
        echo "No more unseen emails to process or an error occurred."
        break
    fi

    # Check if result is empty
    if [[ -z "$result" ]]; then
        echo "No more unseen emails to process."
        break
    fi

    # Process unseen emails
    echo "$result" | xargs himalaya flag add

    echo "Processed unseen emails. Checking for more..."
    done

I'm not a shell coder and while writing the script I wasn't sure if the better way would have been to use the underlying Rust library, but that probably would have taken longer to build for such a small task.

Another idea I had was to use it to sort mails into folders by the receipient address suffix ([e-mail] would sort into the amazon folder), which should be possible if I have read the man pages correctly.

Anyway, thanks for this, not sure if this is the "best" way for me to work with mails but it absolutely is the first tool that made me start automating my inbox.

[brink]

I love that logo.

[oblio]

Brilliant logo, thanks for pointing it out, I was just reading the comment before deciding if it was worth it to check out the project page.

[MikeTheGreat]

Genuine question - the HN title says "CLI to..." but looking at the GitHub repo I don't see any CLI-centric documentation.

I do see

    $ himalaya envelope list --account posteo --folder Archives.FOSS --page 2

and a screenshot that looks like PINE. Is that screenshot interactive (like PINE) or does himalaya print that out and then the process exits?

I guess my question is: is this different than PINE (or any other terminal-based, interactive email client)?

[fabrixxm]

Himalaya is not interactive: while Pine is a TUI, this is a CLI. Very useful to integrate emails in scripts easily.

[zokier]

The built release packages have full set of man-pages for you to familiarize with.

[tempfile]

Looks like mblaze but with extra steps

https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze

[38]

last release 2017, good game. also only works on Windows with Linux emulator.

[JeremyHerrman]

Is anyone using local LLMs to manage their email? This seems like it could be helpful to hook that up.

[jarbus]

Been eyeing this project for a while, hesitant to pull the trigger before a 1.0, just because email is a pain to configure, and having to keep up with changes before a 1.0 would have been a pain.

I'd love to see a blog or some post on the roadmap for this project (and the org in general).

[throwthrow4567]

you are in luck then, they just cut 1.0 4 hours ago =)

[delusional]

This looks like it's a "real" CLI instead of a curses thing (TUI?). That's really exciting for me. I strongly prefer tools that can be composed as a standard shell pipeline.

Edit: That is indeed exactly what this is. It's wonderful :)

[gorgoiler]

Amazing! Love the idea, and I really love the “sponsorship” part. It’s very cool that a project like this can get funding.

The “MML” MIME markup language is new to me. It is strange that it’s neither markdown based nor does it automatically build the plain text part for you.

On the few occasions these days where I compose an email in mutt (via vim) I find I end up writing markdown _anyway_* so supporting it as an authoring format would be fantastic.

Alas, a lot of professional interactions require HTML emails. I don’t want to come across as awkward nerd to everyone all the time.

*!:)

[pydry]

Looks nice. No JMAP though :/

[taylorbuley]

I use alpine over at sdf.org. I'd love to use this instead.

[kedarkhand]

Well Himalayas are definitely better than Alps! :)

[jxf]

Q: Can I use this if I work at a Microsoft Teams enterprise org? Probably not, I'm guessing, but hoping there's a way to make that work somehow.

[stackskipton]

Depends, likely not as Microsoft strongly recommends disabling IMAPv4 and POP3 access to mailboxes in 365 and I think it's now the default. Most company policies do not allow it to be enabled outside service mailboxes.

[teruakohatu]

Do you mean Microsoft 365 for Enterprise? Teams is the chat app.

Thunderbird can sync with Microsoft 365 for Enterprise mail servers and can be configured to store email in a maildir format. So you could use Himalaya to read emails that Thunderbird synced, but you can't manipulate Thunderbirds maildir.

[michaelmior]

I haven't tried, but the README mentions Office 365 and OAuth, so perhaps?

[nixosbestos]

Sorry this is pretty low-value but I love that organization name. Pimalaya. Cute and very fun to say.

[stabbles]

In Dutch it's very fun to say, but not cute ;) sounds like slang for the male genitalia.

[hk1337]

This seems really nice. I wonder how it handles accounts with two-factor authentication, sms and yubikey.

[varunneal]

API Dev keys, e.g. https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/oauth2#1.-o....

[szajbus]

After testing many clients I learnt to stop worrying and just use Mail app.

[kriops]

Mail causes me to procrastinate so much, and I have no idea why. I use icloud everything, so I wanted my mail there as well, but after 12-13 months I switched back to FastMail because their UX is subtly better suited to quickly sorting through mail for me. And fwiw I'm afaik not using any FastMail features that Mail doesn't have.

I don't mean this in the way that Client A > Client B, but I have spent a fair amount of thought on this, and I have not been aple to pinpoint exactly what characteristics makes the difference for me, which I find to be interesting in itself.

[tambourine_man]

Last week I searched for an email in Mail.app. It was right there on the screen and it couldn’t find it. It also fails to display or even list some attachments.

This is unacceptable to me. Yet I keep using it because I dislike Gmail’s web interface and my Vim imap setup is not really usable yet and probably never will be.

[bovermyer]

I'm here too.

I've used many, many different clients over the last few decades (yes, including Linux `mail`). I have to use Outlook at work, and I have to use my providers' web clients on my Windows gaming PC, but on all my other devices I use Mail.app.

I just... don't ever use all the features of the other clients, or don't like some of the behavior they have, or any of that. For a long time I would get excited about new email clients and try them out right away, but no more.

I dunno if it's just that I'm getting old, or if I just don't care as much, or both, or something else.

[dewey]

Indeed, I'm additionally using https://mimestream.com for company Gmail as the Gmail support in Mail.app is sometimes a bit lacking (Labels etc.), but it's also a good way to keep private and work emails separated.

[markatkinson]

I feel you. I now just use email in my web browser via the respective providers recommended website, aka mail.google.com, microsoft.office365.exchange.email or whatever it is they are calling it these days.

[marcomourao]

MailMate did that for me.

https://freron.com/

[siva7]

I just wish that Mail.app would have a seamless ingegration with Calendar.app like Microsoft already provides with Outlook. Also the label system feels very outdated compared to Outlook.

[krembo]

Kanmail turns your Gmail labels to a columnar kanboard, pretty useful in wide screens https://kanmail.io/

[alchemist1e9]

How does this compare to old school mblaze tools?

[szundi]

I liked mutt, but this seems promising as well.

[oldpersonintx]

I can go a week now without receiving a single useful email...gmail or fastmail are fine

[skydhash]

They are, but I have a cron job that fetches my email every 5 minutes. No need to keep a tab open, or do the auth routine again and again. And I used to put an indicator in my status bar displaying the unread count. There’s a whole world of integration when you just dig a bit deeper.

[zerop]

Honest question - Why use interfaces like this, but not regular HTML client?

[smartmic]

There are many choices for email client interfaces. HTML for email does not have a good reputation among hackers. After all, email can be considered an ancient technology and is historically based on plain text - HTML breaks not only the philosophy but also many of the tools developed around email.

I have found a sweet spot for an email client between a pure CLI and a full-featured (HTML) GUI client - I use Emacs Gnus, which takes full advantage of Emacs' text-based interface. As always with Emacs, the learning curve is a bit steep at first, but the rewards can be reaped afterwards.

[mbreese]

This question shows how far we’ve travelled from the original concepts of sending/receiving/viewing email. I just found it funny that you said “regular HTML client”, as if that was the default interface for email. Originally, it was all text, so this post is in many ways closer to how many thought of a “regular” client. But ever since Hotmail, it’s been a gradual shift away from command line email towards web applications. Desktop GUIs are still (kind of) holding on, but even they are more likely than not to be an Electron app.

To answer your question, these days, I’m not sure. There are so many extra features that email providers (Gmail/Office365) include in their web interfaces, it’s hard to not make the argument that the web interfaces are the better way to use email.

[dredmorbius]

There are times it's really useful to access email from a terminal, and terminals are widely available (shell on your primary system, Termux on Android, SSH to your email host, whatevs).

It's also often convenient to either script interactions, or to have full access to shell tools when interacting with email. I practice this more often with mutt, but I can filter either messages or metadata (headers) and send those to an awk or sed pipeline to extract specific information of interest (this is especially useful with notifications / alert emails). This might be tens, hundreds, thousands, or more messages that are of interest.

Full-blown GUI or Web client email tools are pretty, but lack this flexibility.

[tacomagick]

I don't have much knowledge regarding mail but I can think of two reasons.

First is the use of mailboxes if your mail provider does not provide you with an IMAP server to connect to in which case you'll use a client like mutt to manage your mails.

Second one is the accesibility through the terminal could be reduced with HTML sites. If I want to access my email through a headless server using lynx or similar having to refresh the website to check new mails, or even composing them might be difficult.