Paul LütznerandClaude Opus 5.5
76bf97c82e
Three things about who a mail is from, grouped as v0.3.5. The sender name (#70). EmailAlias::$displayName was shown in the From selector and published as the JMAP identity name, and nothing sent it: MessageSendService built From with the account's name whatever the address. There was also no field to set it in the browser. Account::senderNameFor() the alias's name, else the account's; the selector, the draft row and the From header all read it Settings -> Aliases a sender name field under each address EmailSubmission/set writes fromName with the address it resolves The address a reply goes out from (#41, the reply half). Every window was pre-set from the account alone, so a reply to mail for an alias opened on the primary address, and a draft saved from an alias reopened on the primary and was stored that way by the next autosave. ReplyFromResolver the first of From (own mail), To, Cc, then Delivered-To / X-Original-To / Envelope-To that the account may send as SenderResolver::tokenFor() opens a draft on the address it carries catch-all domains an account setting, not an alias row: any address at one may be answered from, is left out of a reply-all, and signs with the account signature. ComposeType admits such a token on submit by the same rule. Not offered for Gmail and Microsoft accounts. Typing an arbitrary From into a new message is not in this. Signatures as HTML (#32). Pasting source into the contenteditable gave the source back, and a linked image never showed, the page's img-src being 'self' data: blob:. Rendered | HTML a textarea beside the editor. Rendered asks the server (signature/preview) and shows what a save would keep, with the elements and attributes the sanitiser dropped named underneath SignatureImporter sanitises, and fetches https images through ImageProxyFetcher into data: sources, 256 KB each and 768 KB a signature; the rest stay linked and are counted DataImageEmbedder on send, a data: image becomes an inline part and a cid: reference, since Gmail and Outlook draw no data URI. It reads the entity-encoded form the sanitiser stores (= for the padding). No migration: the catch-all domains live in Account::$settings and are carried by a config backup. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <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.
📱 Apps for your phone
- Android — karatektus/pl_mail_android
- iOS — karatektus/pl_mail_ios
Both connect to your own plMail server.
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. Every hit shows the words it matched on, marked, in a window of the message around them. What the words found comes first; what the model merely thought looked similar follows, labelled, and never pushes a real match off the page. - 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; Starred stars it and Unread — an optional list of every unread conversation, whatever folder it is in — marks it unread, both where it lies. 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, a drag-to-move week grid that pans rather than squeezes on a phone, invitations answered in place and landing in the calendar as you answer them, share and booking links. The time is always in view — on the Happening Soon button, under the name, or at the foot of the sidebar with the next thing coming up.
- 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, or at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, 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. Mail goes to the model host you name and nowhere else, so with a model on your own machine nothing 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.
- And when there is something newer — follow releases or the main branch, and the administrators hear about each new build once: on their devices and at the top of the admin area, with what changed since the one they run.
- Yours — two-factor auth, per-app JMAP passwords, 41 themes, ten icons for the tab and the phone's home screen, 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. |
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| Icons — ten of them, a blue horn among them. | Colourways — each icon in its own colours, or any of 32. |
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. From another machine, open
https:// and the server's address instead; the browser warns about the self-signed certificate
once and lets you continue.
TrueNAS
plMail is in the TrueNAS app catalogue. Apps → Discover Apps, search for plMail, and install it. The form asks for one thing, a database password; everything else has a default that works.
Reach it on port 30519, and put a reverse proxy in front of it if it should be reachable from
outside. Updates arrive through the catalogue like any other app's.
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.