Similarity based email sorting for any IMAP mail server¶
mailsort reduces the interruption caused by the increase of daily emails by automatically sorting your emails into folders (IMAP labels) based on the similarity of new messages to the ones you have already sorted. It uses machine learning to learn from your existing folder assignments and suggests or applies folders.
This folder based approach allows you to focus on the most important emails first, while still being able to access less important emails later. You are in contorl. When you change the folder assignments, you can retrain the mailsort machine learning model so mailsort can adapt to your changing preferences. Think of it as a personal assistant that helps you manage your emails.
mailsort is deliberately a plain Python library and command line tool rather than a hosted service: you run it yourself, on your own schedule (for example from cron), against your own local database. Your emails belong to you.
mailsort connects to any IMAP mail server, stores your emails locally in an SQLite database, and trains a machine learning model on the folders (IMAP labels) you have already assigned to your emails, and uses that model to suggest or apply folders to new messages.
Motivation¶
In 2020 there were 306.4 billion e-mails sent and received daily. This number is estimated to increase by 4% yearly, resulting in over 376.4 billion e-mails by 2025. While email as medium for internal communication in large enterprises is slowly replaced by instant messaging solutions and business communication platforms, these solutions fail to address the primary challenge, namely the communication between employees from different companies. So addressing the stress and productivity lost resulting from interruptions caused by the increase of daily emails is the motivation for the development of mailsort.