Himalaya: CLI to Manage Emails

Himalaya makes it pretty easy to write cli tools and automate email workflows. It pairs well with August, another rust project that can render html to text on the terminal. I wrote a git email patch automation tool around Himalaya so that people can receive email patches easily[1].

1: https://github.com/djha-skin/git-receive-mail

This is cool. I like the ongoing trend of TUIs getting more attention and use.

A little while ago I wrote my own little TUI tool using Textual that interfaces with Outlook using pywin32. I really only needed (need) one specific feature above and beyond what Outlook already does. And that is, I wanted a Vim-like UX for assigning categories to emails and archiving/deleting them. What I have now works surprisingly well and it's very satisfying to have made my own thing that suits my own needs precisely the way I want it to.

I feel like this has been here before, glad it's kept up with updates. Will have to give this a shot soon.

From strictly reading the docs, I love these features:

* oauth2 * json output

But do I need to run the "himalaya ..." command every so often to get fresh e-mails? Or can I leave TUI open and it will refresh in the background?

When composing messages, does anybody know if the "From" header can be re-written like in Thunderbird? I am able to send from ad-hoc aliases with my mail server, but need to re-write the "From" header first. For example, I can receive mail sent to "[email protected]" and delivered to mailbox at "[email protected]". In order to reply with same e-mail address, I must re-write the "From" header to match.

Does it support email filters? I'd love to manage my gmail filters programmatically or use a configuration file to manage them so I can reuse the filters across multiple emails.

Edit: there is a separate tool for this for gmail https://github.com/mbrt/gmailctl

I'm confused, it is called 'Pimalaya' or 'Himalaya'

Genuine question - the HN title says "CLI to..." but looking at the GitHub repo I don't see any CLI-centric documentation.

I do see

    $ himalaya envelope list --account posteo --folder Archives.FOSS --page 2

I guess my question is: is this different than PINE (or any other terminal-based, interactive email client)?

I love that logo.

Amazing! Love the idea, and I really love the “sponsorship” part. It’s very cool that a project like this can get funding.

The “MML” MIME markup language is new to me. It is strange that it’s neither markdown based nor does it automatically build the plain text part for you.

On the few occasions these days where I compose an email in mutt (via vim) I find I end up writing markdown _anyway_* so supporting it as an authoring format would be fantastic.

Alas, a lot of professional interactions require HTML emails. I don’t want to come across as awkward nerd to everyone all the time.

*!:)

Is anyone using local LLMs to manage their email? This seems like it could be helpful to hook that up.

Been eyeing this project for a while, hesitant to pull the trigger before a 1.0, just because email is a pain to configure, and having to keep up with changes before a 1.0 would have been a pain.

I'd love to see a blog or some post on the roadmap for this project (and the org in general).

I still use mutt on a daily basis.

Being able to select emails using regular expressions is super useful.

IMAPFilter is also simple and powerful to quickly sort email.

Q: Can I use this if I work at a Microsoft Teams enterprise org? Probably not, I'm guessing, but hoping there's a way to make that work somehow.

Sorry this is pretty low-value but I love that organization name. Pimalaya. Cute and very fun to say.

This seems really nice. I wonder how it handles accounts with two-factor authentication, sms and yubikey.

I use alpine over at sdf.org. I'd love to use this instead.

Looks like mblaze but with extra steps

https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze

Looks nice. No JMAP though :/

After testing many clients I learnt to stop worrying and just use Mail app.

Neat. I used and loved “mh” in college, but that was before html email became prevalent. It was beautiful to have different commands and treat emails as individual files. Unfortunately mh was grotty old C code and just couldn’t keep up (IMHO) with how we use email today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System

I liked mutt, but this seems promising as well.

This looks like it's a "real" CLI instead of a curses thing (TUI?). That's really exciting for me. I strongly prefer tools that can be composed as a standard shell pipeline.

Edit: That is indeed exactly what this is. It's wonderful :)

How does this compare to old school mblaze tools?

[dead]

I can go a week now without receiving a single useful email...gmail or fastmail are fine

[flagged]

[flagged]

Honest question - Why use interfaces like this, but not regular HTML client?