mailprune

Email triage TUI. Stacks your inbox by sender so you can trash, archive, mark-read, or unsubscribe from hundreds of emails in a few keystrokes. Built for fast inbox-zero over Gmail IMAP, multi-account.

The kill-loop

The fastest way to inbox zero:

1. s — sort by read rate. Stacks you never open float to the top.
2. Space down the list to mark the dead newsletters (auto-advances).
3. u — bulk unsubscribe everything marked, one confirm.
4. y again at the "also trash?" prompt.
5. g to regroup by sender+subject and repeat for noisy notification types from senders you otherwise keep.
6. m when the pane runs dry — it sweeps the next 5,000 messages — and go again.

 mailprune   personal  work               12 trashed · 40 archived · 3 unsubbed
┌ 42 · sender · read rate · 2▌ ────┐┌ DoorDash <no-reply@doordash.com> · unsub:┐
│▌ 214   0% U DoorDash (214 new)   ││2026-06-09 ● Your order is on the way     │
│▌ 120   1% U Medium Dai… (118 new)││2026-06-08 ● Your driver is nearby        │
│   76  31% U LinkedIn (52 new)    ││2026-06-07 ● Weekend deals near you       │
│   31  93%   GitHub (2 new)       ││2026-06-05 ● 30% off your next order      │
└──────────────────────────────────┘└──────────────────────────────────────────┘
you@gmail.com: 5,000 of 137,482 messages in 42 stacks   m more  g group  s sort
 j/k move  Space mark  d trash  e archive  r read  u unsub  / filter  ? keys

The window, and what a stack acts on

mailprune sweeps the newest 5,000 messages in your inbox and stacks those. That is the window. Give the pane the width and its title says so — newest 5,000 of 137,482 msgs, or all 3,120 msgs once a sweep has reached the oldest message in the mailbox. (The 80-column screenshot above is too narrow for it: the title spends what it has on the group and sort state instead.) m sweeps the next 5,000 and folds them into the stacks already on screen; R reconnects and re-sweeps from scratch.

The number on a row is that sender's mail inside the window. Trashing and archiving are not limited to the window: d and e search your whole inbox for that sender and act on everything they find. So the confirm prompt asks about a bigger number than the row shows —

trash 1,204 messages from DoorDash (214 in view)?

— and 1,204 is the one that moves. Confirm on that. If the server refuses the search, the action still runs but reaches only the mail in view, and the status line says so.

Two exceptions. Under g (sender+subject) a row is one kind of mail from a sender rather than the sender, and IMAP cannot search on that subject, so d and e act on the window's mail only — the prompt's two numbers agree because they are the same number. And r (mark read) always stays on the window's mail: it moves nothing out of the mailbox, so it asks nothing.

u unsubscribes per sender; the "also trash?" prompt after it states a mailbox-wide count like any other trash.

The internals are in docs/adr/0001–0004.

Install

macOS and Linux (prebuilt binaries via Homebrew):

brew install niraj8/tap/mailprune

Or grab a tarball from releases (macOS arm64/x86_64, Linux x86_64), or build from source:

make install   # cargo build --release && cp to ~/bin

Passwords are stored in the platform keychain: macOS Keychain, Secret Service (GNOME Keyring/KWallet) on Linux, Credential Manager on Windows (compiles, untested). No keyring daemon? Use the MAILPRUNE_PASSWORD_<EMAIL_WITH_UNDERSCORES> env var instead.

Setup

1. Enable 2FA on each Google account, then generate an app password at https://myaccount.google.com/apppasswords (also requires IMAP enabled in Gmail Settings → Forwarding and POP/IMAP).

2. Config — create ~/.config/mailprune/config.toml:

   [[accounts]]
   name = "personal"
   email = "you@gmail.com"
   
   [[accounts]]
   name = "work"
   email = "you@other.com"

3. Store app passwords (saved in the macOS Keychain):

   mailprune auth you@gmail.com

4. Run: mailprune (TUI) or mailprune stacks (headless dump of all accounts).

Notes

• Nothing is ever deleted permanently. d moves mail to Gmail Trash, which Gmail keeps for 30 days. That's the undo story.
• The read-rate % is the share of a stack's messages you've opened, red when ≈0. A 0% stack with 100 messages is a newsletter you should unsubscribe from.
• u tries RFC 8058 one-click POST first, then mailto: (sends a real email via SMTP from your account), then opens the https link in your browser.
• mailprune writes a local log of your triage decisions — header metadata only, never message bodies — to ~/.local/state/mailprune/actions.jsonl, for future "suggest stacks to act on" features. Disable with action_log = false in config.toml. Network activity is logged to debug.log alongside it; disable with MAILPRUNE_NO_DEBUG_LOG=1.

Release

make release VERSION=X.Y.Z bumps, tests, tags and pushes; the tag builds the tarballs. Then make publish-tap hashes them into the Homebrew formula.