mxr

August 20, 2026 · View on GitHub

Your email, on your computer, usable from the terminal or your agent.

mxr syncs Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft 365, and IMAP accounts into one local mailbox. It keeps your message history in SQLite, builds a local search index, and exposes the same mail controls through a TUI, a pipeable CLI, a web app, MCP, and an agent skill. Attachment names, types, and sizes are local; mxr downloads attachment contents when you open them. Send through Gmail, Outlook, or any SMTP server.

Write mxr, say “Mixer”.

The mxr terminal interface showing mailbox rules

Try it

Install the macOS or Linux binary with Homebrew:

brew install planetaryescape/mxr/mxr

Open a realistic 50,000-message demo inbox. It is isolated from your real config, credentials, and mail:

mxr demo

Try local search and a safe batch mutation:

# cal@signal.example is one of the demo's senders. `from:` matches a whole
# address, so use the full one here and in your own mail.
mxr search "from:cal@signal.example is:unread" --format json | jq .
mxr archive --search "label:newsletters older_than:30d" --dry-run

Stop the demo when you are done:

mxr demo stop

Install another way · Read the quick start

Connect your mail

Mail system	Sync	Send	Setup
Gmail	✓	✓	`mxr accounts add gmail`
Outlook.com, Hotmail, Live	✓	✓	`mxr accounts add outlook`
Microsoft 365 work or school	✓	✓	`mxr accounts add outlook-work`
Any IMAP server	✓		`mxr accounts add imap`
Any SMTP server		✓	`mxr accounts add smtp`

You can add several accounts and search them together or scope any command to one account. Provider-specific behavior stays behind a common mail model.

mxr also has a documented Rust adapter interface, a fake provider, and a conformance suite for adding another provider. Adapters are compiled into mxr; they are not loaded as runtime plugins.

Account setup · Provider adapter guide

First sync

Open mxr after adding an account:

mxr

The daemon starts automatically and syncs in the background. A large mailbox can take a while on the first run. You can use mail as it arrives, wait for the full sync, or watch its progress:

mxr sync --wait --wait-timeout-secs 900
mxr sync --status
mxr status --watch

mxr sync returns as soon as the sync has started. --wait holds until the account reports idle and prints a live 3,000/50,000 progress line; --wait-timeout-secs (default 60) bounds the wait, not the sync.

Later syncs are incremental. Search reads the local Tantivy index, opening mail reads SQLite, and queued changes sync when the provider is available again.

Talk to your inbox

The CLI covers the same mailbox that the TUI uses. It returns structured data, supports account scoping, and gives mutating commands a preview path.

# Find mail
mxr search "is:unread from:notifications@buildkite.com" --format json | jq '.results'

# Read the newest match
mxr cat --search "from:alice@example.com" --first

# Draft with local relationship context
mxr draft-assist --search "from:alice@example.com" --first "Propose Tuesday afternoon"

# Preview, then apply a batch action
mxr read-archive --search "from:noreply@example.com older_than:7d" --dry-run
mxr read-archive --search "from:noreply@example.com older_than:7d" --yes

Gmail drafts can stay available on every device without splitting into two copies. Push once to link the local and Gmail drafts; later edits update the same Gmail draft, and normal sync pulls Gmail edits or deletions back locally:

mxr drafts push DRAFT_ID --dry-run
mxr drafts push DRAFT_ID
mxr drafts edit DRAFT_ID
mxr sync

The CLI, TUI, web app, MCP server, and agent skill all use this same linked draft lifecycle. Read the linked Gmail draft guide for MCP calls, deletion behavior, and failure handling.

An agent that can run shell commands can discover mxr with mxr --help and consume JSON from the CLI. MCP clients can use the first-party stdio server:

mxr mcp serve

Example prompts:

Look through unread mail from the last 24 hours. Tell me what needs a reply, draft answers for the urgent threads, and leave the rest alone.

Find my past conversations with Ada. Learn how I usually write to her, then draft a short reply to the latest thread in the same tone. Do not send it.

Email content is untrusted data, never instructions for the agent. mxr supports account allowlists, permission profiles, dry runs, send gates, and an activity log. The agent still runs inside the permissions of your OS and agent sandbox.

Install the agent skill · Read the agent safety guide · Browse recipes

More demos

Click a preview to watch the recording.

The recordings use the seeded demo inbox and real mxr commands.

What is local

Email bodies, headers, threads, labels, and contacts
Attachment names, MIME types, sizes, plus files cached after you open them
SQLite as the canonical local store
Tantivy BM25 search across full mailbox history
Optional local embeddings for hybrid and semantic search
Relationship profiles, communication history, and analytics
Pending offline mutations and the activity log

LLM-assisted commands read local context and call the model provider you configure for generation. They do not send drafts automatically.

How it works

The long-running daemon owns sync, storage, search, rules, and provider connections. The TUI, CLI, web app, MCP server, scripts, and agents are clients of the same Unix socket protocol. Closing a client does not stop mail sync.

Read the architecture guide

Other installation methods

Prebuilt release archives are available for macOS Apple Silicon and Linux x86_64:

Download the latest release

Install from a release tag with Cargo:

cargo install --git https://github.com/planetaryescape/mxr \
  --tag vX.Y.Z --locked mxr

Linux source builds need the ALSA, D-Bus, and pkg-config development packages:

sudo apt-get install -y libasound2-dev libdbus-1-dev pkg-config

See the installation guide for Gatekeeper notes, release checksums, and other platforms.

Development

git clone https://github.com/planetaryescape/mxr
cd mxr
cargo build -p mxr

Focused checks:

scripts/cargo-test -p mxr --test cli_help
scripts/cargo-test -p mxr --test cli_journey
scripts/cargo-test -p mxr --test daemon_lifecycle
cargo test --workspace provider_offline_smoke_

The public mail building blocks used by mxr are documented in Public Rust crates.

mxr