plMail

📖 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, sign-in through Authentik, Keycloak or any other OpenID Connect provider, per-app JMAP passwords, 41 themes, ten icons for the tab and the phone's home screen, English, German, French and Pirate.

A look around#

Threads — replies collapse into one conversation.	Compose — rich text, autocomplete, undo send.
Themes — 41 of them, light and dark.	Calendar — docked beside the mail, or its own page.
Filters — counted before you save.	Admin — workers, push health, logs, queue.
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.