Paul LütznerandClaude Opus 5
376cf4ae72
Connect it with an address and an API token and it appears beside the other services; nothing else in the UI had to change, because the picker, the destination chooser and the connect dialog are all driven by the provider taxonomy and the driver interfaces. TAGS ARE THE CONTAINER LAYER. A document archive has no directory tree — Paperless replaced folders with tags and expects the rest to be found by searching — so the picker's "descend into a container, pick a file" has nothing to descend into. The root lists every tag as a folder with the newest documents beneath it, and opening a tag lists that tag's documents. Correspondents and document types would serve equally well and are deliberately not offered: three sideways slices of one archive is a navigation problem, and search already crosses all three. Search is Paperless's own full-text index, so it reads the OCR layer as well as the metadata and a scanned invoice is findable by a line item nobody typed. That is the feature: there is no longer a reason to open Paperless, find a document and download it before writing the mail. Upload is asynchronous — post_document answers with a task id, not a document id — so upload() returns it prefixed. Ids are opaque outside the driver, which is what makes the prefix safe, and download() refuses a task id with a sentence a person can act on rather than letting it 404 later. ShareLink is not declared. Minting a Paperless share link is a permissioned feature with its own expiry semantics, not something to do silently. The taxonomy test that assumed only photo services lack share links had a false premise; it now states the real rule rather than being relaxed. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
plMail
Self-hosted mail with a calendar beside it. Connect the mailboxes you already have — IMAP, Gmail, Outlook — and read them side by side in one inbox, on a server you own.
📖 Read the handbook →
Installing on Docker, Linux, WSL2, macOS or a NAS · every feature in detail · connecting Gmail and
Outlook, with the exact permissions to tick · how the internals work.
Also on the wiki and in docs/ — all three
are built from the same files.
What it is
A mail client you host yourself. It connects to the mailboxes you already have — IMAP, Gmail, Outlook — syncs them into your own PostgreSQL database, and gives them one inbox, one search box and one set of labels in the browser.
It is not a mail server: it doesn't receive mail from the internet or host your domain. Because everything is synced locally, search runs against your database, and your mail stays readable when a provider doesn't.
Highlights
- Every account in one place — IMAP, Gmail and Outlook side by side, sending aliases included. Credentials are encrypted before they touch the database.
- New mail arrives on its own — IMAP IDLE, Gmail and Outlook push, browser notifications.
- Search that means it — full text plus
from:,subject:,label:,has:,before:and friends, completed as you type. - Filters as a tree — any/all/none, nested, restated in plain English and counted against real mail before you save. Apply one to mail that arrived before it existed.
- Filed where you drop it — drag a conversation onto a folder, a label or one of the inbox tabs, several at once if they are ticked. A folder moves it and a label just adds itself, so dropping on "Receipts" does not take the mail out of your inbox. Only the targets that will accept it light up, and a tab you choose by hand stays chosen when the next message in the thread arrives.
- A calendar beside the mail — two-way sync with Google, Microsoft and CalDAV, drag-to-move week grid, invitations answered in place, share and booking links.
- Files where you keep them — attach from and save to Drive, Photos, OneDrive, Dropbox, Nextcloud, Immich and Paperless-ngx.
- A language model, if you want one — point plMail at an Ollama box on your own network and it can search by meaning, draft replies, summarise a thread and sort mail into tabs. A long thread is summarised from as much of it as fits, and says so; ask for the whole conversation and it runs as a job with a context window to match. What it has been told about how you write is editable in the composer, for one attempt at a time. Off by default, each of the four switched on separately, and nothing ever leaves your network.
- You decide what sorts your mail — header rules that answer the same way every time, or the model reading each message; and on Gmail, whether either of them is allowed to disagree with Google. Change your mind and the mailbox re-sorts itself in the background. Every message's Details panel shows what all three said and which one won, and a Report button tells your administrator when it got it wrong.
- It tells you when something breaks — a sign-in that has expired, a calendar that stopped syncing, push that lapsed, work the queue gave up on. Each with what it means for your mail and the smallest thing that fixes it. A Google sign-in dying every week gets named for what it is — Google expires tokens for an app still in Testing — and warned about before the next one.
- Yours — two-factor auth, per-app JMAP passwords, 41 themes, English, German and Pirate.
A look around
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| Threads — replies collapse into one conversation. | Compose — rich text, autocomplete, undo send. |
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| Themes — 41 of them, light and dark. | Calendar — docked beside the mail, or its own page. |
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| Filters — counted before you save. | Admin — workers, push health, logs, queue. |
Screenshots use demo data — none of the accounts, senders or messages shown are real.
Install
Images are published for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64. Nothing to fill in first: the secrets are
generated on first start, and the public address is asked for on the setup screen.
Docker
git clone https://github.com/karatektus/pl_mail.git
cd pl_mail
docker compose up -d
Open https://localhost and create your account.
TrueNAS SCALE
- Create a dataset for plMail — say
yourPool/yourDataSet/plmail. - Open
truenas.compose.yamland change one line to that path:path_data: &path_data /mnt/yourPool/yourDataSet/plmail - Apps → Discover → ⋮ → Install via YAML, paste the file, install.
Reach it on port 30080 and put a reverse proxy in front of it. Everything else in that file works
as it is; each setting explains itself in place.
Then
Add an IMAP mailbox in Settings → Mail accounts and you're done. Gmail and Outlook need OAuth credentials from Google or Microsoft first — the handbook walks through both, including the optional Pub/Sub topic for instant Gmail delivery.
Back up two things, separately: the PostgreSQL data and
var/secrets/generated.env. The database holds your mail; the key inside that file unlocks the credentials in it. Keeping them apart is the point — and losing the key means the stored mailbox passwords are gone.
Contributing
Bug reports and pull requests welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for the dev setup, the test suites and the console commands.
License
AGPL-3.0.