mailrake

A self-hosted tool that turns a cluttered personal Gmail account into a small set of reviewed, explainable rules — and then keeps it that way.

What it does

mailrake reads the metadata of messages in a single Gmail account — who sent them, when, whether they were read, and a few headers — and builds a picture of which senders matter. It proposes rules to archive or label the ones that do not, and asks a human to approve every rule before anything is applied.

• Message bodies are never read, stored, or transmitted.
• Nothing is applied to the mailbox without explicit approval.
• Mail is archived and labelled, never deleted.
• Every action is logged and reversible.

Who it is for

One person: the operator running it on their own machine, against their own mailbox. It is not a hosted service and there is nothing to sign up for.

How it runs

It is a command-line program backed by a local PostgreSQL database. The approval interface is a web page bound to 127.0.0.1 — reachable only from the machine it runs on. Where possible, approved rules are compiled into native Gmail filters so they keep working with no software running at all.

mailrake requests Google account access solely to read message metadata and to apply labels and archive actions the operator has approved. It never requests the scope required to permanently delete mail.