WHAT IS IT?
msgvault pulls your entire email history (Gmail, IMAP, MBOX, Apple Mail) and messages (WhatsApp, iMessage, Google Voice) into a local archive, then lets you explore everything offline via a TUI, DuckDB SQL or an MCP server. The premise: your communications belong to you, so they live on your disk, not on a provider's cluster.
WHY IS IT INTERESTING?
- Fully offline after sync: once the database is populated, no network needed. Search, analytics and AI queries all run locally.
- Stack built for volume: SQLite with FTS5 for Gmail-style full-text search, Parquet + DuckDB for analytics over hundreds of thousands of messages.
- Snappy TUI: interactive terminal UI to browse the archive with zero latency, even on massive corpora.
- Smart incremental sync: leverages the Gmail History API, so no full re-download on every run.
- Native AI integration: an MCP server exposes the archive to Claude Desktop or any MCP client for semantic queries across your whole correspondence.
- Multi-account and dedup: multiple mailboxes in a single database, attachments deduplicated via SHA-256 content addressing.
USE CASES
- Full backup of a Gmail mailbox before migrating or closing an account.
- Historical search across 10+ years of mail without relying on the provider's UI.
- Personal analytics: top senders, volume over time, attachment extraction.
- Feeding an AI assistant with your message history via MCP to recover context.
- Consolidating scattered exports (MBOX, emlx, WhatsApp, iMessage) into a single store.