Overview

Mailhack is an email management tool that takes a "white list" approach to email management. Only emails from senders who have been explicitly allowed will stay in your inbox. Emails from non-whitelisted senders are put in a "Trash" folder which is purged after 90 days. You can drag an email from the "Trash" folder to the "Permit" folder to add its sender to the white list and you can drag an email from your inbox to the "Block" folder to remove its sender from the white list.

This approach has proven surprisingly useful for me. I hope it will help you spend less time managing email and more time doing anything else!

Set Up

Mailhack is written in Python 2 and requires the "imapclient" package.

pip install imapclient

Next, provide the connection information for all of the accounts you want to manage. An example is shown below:

{
   "accounts" : [
      {
         "description" : "Home",
         "server" : "imap.secureserver.net",
         "port": 993,
         "username" : "[email protected]",
         "password" : "ABC112233"
      },
      {
         "description" : "Work",
         "server" : "imap.gmail.com",
         "port": 993,
         "username" : "[email protected]",
         "password" : "DEF332211"
      }
   ]
}

You can optionally pre-populate the whitelist. To do so, create a file called "whitelist.json" with content similar to that shown below.

[
   "[email protected]",
   "[email protected]",
   "[email protected]"
]

Creating whitelist.json is optional. If you do not create it, mailhack.py will create it and manage its contents automatically based on the contents of t he Mailhack/Permit and Mailhack/Block IMAP folders.

That is the only setup required. It is recommended that you schedule mailhack.py to run every 20-30 minutes and purge.py to run once per week.

Usage

Mailhack is a pair of python scripts that you can run from anywhere that has connectivity to the internet.

mailhack.py

Connects to your IMAP server or servers using the information in mailhack.json. The first time it connects it will create the following folders: Mailhack/Block, Mailhack/Permit and Mailhack/Trash.

First the white list (whitelist.json) is updated as follows. For emails in Mailhack/Permit, the senders are added to the white list and the emails themselves are moved to the in box. For emails in Mailhack/Block, their senders are removed from the whitelist if present and the emails themselves are moved to Mailhack/Trash.

Next the in box is processed. All emails in the inbox from senders not on the white list are moved to the Mailhack/Trash folder. All emails in Mailhack/Trash with senders that are on the white list are moved to the inbox.

purge.py

Connects to your IMAP server and processes the Mailhack/Trash folder. Emails sent more than 90 days ago are deleted.

Known Issues

• Do not run under python3. Under python3, mailhack.py will move all emails to the `Mailhack/Trash' folder.