scramble-mail-repo

This is the scramble.io module for locally storing and indexing email.

It's built on sqlite3 and organizes email by message id, thread id, labels, and full-text search. Boxes--like Inbox, Outbox, and Sent--are handled as a special case of labels. Does not search inside attachments.

Example

Create a new mail repo. Store everything in a given directory:

var ScrambleMailRepo = require('scramble-mail-repo');
 
var repo = new ScrambleMailRepo('/home/bob/my-mail');

Write an email into the repo. Raw RFC2822 format. See test/ for examples.

var sampleMail =
  "From: <[e-mail]>\n" +
  "To: <[e-mail]>\n" +
  "Subject: Yo\n\n"+
  "Sup?";
 
repo.save(sampleMail);

Search the repo, and print out the results.

// Full text search
repo.search("fifth of november", printResults);
// Full text search includes From and To
repo.search("[e-mail]", printResults);
// You can also search explicitly. "to:" queries include the CC header.
repo.search("to:[e-mail]", printResults);
repo.search("to:root", printResults);
// Search for an exact string
repo.search("\"remember, remember\"", printResults);
 
// Get the inbox
repo.search("label:\\scramble\\inbox", printResults);
// Get all sent mail
repo.search("label:\\scramble\\sent", printResults);
 
// Fetch a given thread
repo.getThread("herp", printResults);
 
// Fetch a given message
repo.getMessage("herp", printResults);

How it works

scramble-mail-repo stores raw email as flat files in simple directory layout, plus a single sqlite DB to index them. You specify a directory for everything to go into. Example contents:

index.sqlite
2014/
    01/
      <scramble mail id 1>.txt
      <scramble mail id 2>.txt
    02/
      ...
2015/
    ...

The sqlite DB uses the fts4 extension for full-text search. See schema.sql for the full schema.