CLI-Inbox

Added/Fixed:

• Parses HTML email parts while preserving the raw HTML content + generates a plain text fallback using the ‘html2text’ library
• New ‘open’ command that opens an email (HTML or text) in the system browser (allowing proper viewing of complex HTML emails when the terminal view is baddd)
• Composer modified for reply editor: now prefills quoted content from the original message
• New ‘forward’ command to forward emails (automatically includes original message content)
• Minor internal fixes

Note: Initially I planned to use the w3m CLI browser to render HTML emails directly in the terminal, but nothing was really working properly. In the end I went with two separate approaches: terminal display uses ‘html2text’, and the new ‘open’ command allows viewing the full HTML version in the browser.

Next:

• Attachment download and send
• Threaded email view
• Account management
• Settings

Added/Fixed:

• Commands (‘next’/‘prev’/‘page’) to navigate between pages for now it’s still 20 emails per page (will do settings laterrr)
• Star and unstar emails
• Mark emails as unread
• Delete emails (moves to trash)
• Archive emails DOESN’T WORK FOR SOME REASONN I will fix in the next devlog if I can bruh
• Automatically detects default labels used (this is because of different languages problems)
• Shows “To” field when viewing sent emails
• Starred messages visually highlighted in the inbox + star collumn
• Prevents occasional decode errors when parsing messages
• Fixed some other problems and sidebar now displays as the same height as the email part of the layout

Note: this took some time because of the ‘archive’ problem and some “gmail language” problems, hm (that’s why I added the default labels func and dict)…

Next:

• Display HTML emails properly
• Attachment download and send
• Account management
• Settings

Added/Fixed:

• Email search functionality implemented (search results update the active message list)
• New ‘search’ command
• Labels now integrated directly into the main inbox view layout (responsive for wider terminals)
• Small layout and rendering fixes

Next:

• Star, delete, archive and mark unread actions
• Display HTML emails properly
• Attachment download and send
• Account management
• Settings

Added/Fixed:

• Label support implemented (lists available labels over the inbox, switching between labels using the ‘label’ command + fixed all the million IMAP problems -> that’s because I’m baka dev, the fix was easy, just separating the ‘name’ and ‘display’ in get_labels func…)
• Message flags now fetched from IMAP
• Unread emails are now bold in the UI inbox
• Emails automatically marked as “seen” when opened
• Threaded reply fixes (but still incomplete) (replying to emails preserves parent references)
• Minor rendering improvements in the inbox and other stuff

Next:

• Email search functionality
• Star, delete, archive and mark unread actions
• How can I display HTML emails…?

Added/Fixed:

• Email compose functionality implemented (interactive terminal editor to write new emails (used prompt_toolkit library))
• SMTP integration for sending emails
• Reply support added (automatically fills recipient and subject)
• Message IDs now displayed in inbox listing
• Screen clears before commands for a TUI-like flow

Next:

• Switch between Inbox, Sent, Spam, ecc.
• Read indicators and behaviour
• Email search functionality ye

Added/Fixed:

• Inbox and email UI rendering using the “rich” library (table layout and formatted email display) (ui.py)
• Inbox fetch limit increased (I’ll need to make a setting for this)
• New ‘view’ command to open a specific email by ID
• Email parsing improvements
• Date formatting func

Note: I discovered the “rich” library while working on the UI and… wow, it saves a lot of time for tables. Feels much more polished with very little effort… incredible, why I haven’t discovered it earlier bruhh :/

Next:

• Add compose and send email functionality (with SMTP)
• Switch between Inbox, Sent, Spam, ecc.

Note: This project started as a small experiment to see how practical a CLI email client could be lol, I don’t have much time left so I think I will need to grind it, ehe

Added/Fixed:

• Basic project structure split into modules (main, mail, auth and utils)
• Simple command loop with command parsing (basically the same as one of my previous projects)
• Gmail IMAP integration
• Account setup flow added for first run (Email and password are stored securely using the system keychain (via the ‘keyring’ Python library), and the credentials automatically load on subsequent runs.
• Login using Google App Passwords
• Inbox basic fetching implemented (retrieves the latest emails from the inbox (for testing noww))
• Colored status messages (info, success, error)
• Other minor additions

Next:

• Implement a proper UI to display the inbox
• Add compose and send email functionality (with SMTP)