Local Eml

English · 한국어

A private, local viewer for .eml files. Drop a folder, a .zip, or pull from S3 / IMAP — search, browse, and read your mail offline. Everything stays on your machine.

Install

Linux / macOS

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hwhang0917/local-eml/main/scripts/install.sh | sh

Windows (PowerShell)

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hwhang0917/local-eml/main/scripts/install.ps1 | iex

The installer downloads the latest release, verifies it, and registers Local Eml as a background service so it starts automatically. Open http://localhost:7878 in your browser.

What you can do

• Import emails from .eml files, folders, .zip archives, an AWS S3 bucket, or an IMAP mailbox. Duplicates are detected by file hash and skipped. In-flight imports can be cancelled at any time.
• Search by sender, subject, or body. Korean and other CJK languages work out of the box, and typing only Hangul initial consonants (e.g. ㅎㄱ to find 한국) does 초성검색 across the whole library.
• Receive new mail automatically from any saved IMAP profile (opt-in per profile). Local Eml fetches only what's new since the last sync; default cadence is every 10 minutes.
• Read safely — HTML messages render in a sandboxed iframe with remote images blocked by default.
• Star messages you want to revisit and filter to just starred.
• Export your library as a single .zip or upload it to an S3 bucket. Existing keys in the destination are skipped, so re-running is safe.
• Save profiles for IMAP and S3 so you don't retype host names and bucket details.
• Korean / English interface and absolute / relative date display, switchable in Settings.

Your data lives in ~/.local-eml/ (or %USERPROFILE%\.local-eml\ on Windows). Local Eml only listens on 127.0.0.1 — nothing is exposed to your network. A red banner shows up at the top of the page if the background service stops responding.

Where credentials go

• AWS S3 secret key, session token — never persisted. You re-enter them per import / export.
• IMAP password — by default, never persisted; you re-enter it per import.
  • If you turn on "Receive new mail in the background" on a saved IMAP profile, Local Eml needs to log in unattended. The password is then encrypted with AES-256-GCM and stored in the database; the encryption key lives in a separate file at ~/.local-eml/keys/secret.key (mode 0600). A leaked or backed-up database alone does not expose the password — the attacker also needs the keyfile. Turning the toggle off removes the stored password on the next save.
• Other profile fields (host, bucket, region, username, access-key-id, etc.) — saved in plain SQLite, since they're not secrets.

Uninstall

# Linux / macOS
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hwhang0917/local-eml/main/scripts/uninstall.sh | sh

# Windows
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hwhang0917/local-eml/main/scripts/uninstall.ps1 | iex

Add --purge (or -Purge on Windows) to also delete the data folder. Without it, your mail library stays.

Building from source

See docs/DEVELOPMENT.md if you want to build, run, or contribute. Library attributions are listed in-app under Settings → Attributions.