~bitfehler/vomit

The Very Opinionated Mail Interaction Toolkit
27 days ago
27 days ago

#Vomit - the Very Opinionated Mail Interaction Toolkit

The Vomit project strives to provide a suite of tools for efficiently working with email. Currently, this means tools for the command line, but graphical tools are not out of scope. Vomit aims at use cases beyond reading and writing. In fact, Vomit currently doesn't provide anything to read or write mail, though that may change at some point.

#Opinions

  • Email is great, people just need better tools
  • Often, a MUA is not the right tool for working with email
  • There are many good tools - they just don't have access to your email

Based on these opinions, the Vomit project explores the following approach:

#Maildir ++

Vomit wants mail stored in Maildir++ format. An email is a file. Enough said.

And yes, that means you can use some of the tools right on your mailserver, if that's your type of thing.

#Composability

Vomit likes composability. It aims to supply various small tools (some merged in one executable) to work with your mail. But another goal is to make your mail accessible to other tools - e.g. by printing emails or an attachment to stdout. See the vmt README for some other examples.

#Interoperability

Vomit intends to supply all the tools you need to get started. But if you prefer to use other tools, that's cool. Want to use mbsync instead of vsync? Cool. Your MUA already stores mail in Maildir++? Excellent. Vomit hopes to provide options without forcing anything onto you.

#Tools

Some tools may feel familiar, others not so much. Currently, there are:

#vmt

Currently "the" Vomit tool, a sort of swiss army knife for email. It allows for various interactions with your email, some interactive, others suitable for scripting. See its README for lots of details. Includes the functionality of vsync as subcommand.

#vsync

A library (vomit-sync) and tool for IMAP-to-maildir synchronization. This stand-alone version is intended to be an alternative to isync/mbsync, offline-imap, and friends.

#Contribute

Please send patches to the vomit mailing list.

#Feedback

The mailing list is open for all kinds of feedback, questions, and discussions.