msgvault: A personal email archive and search system to watch

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 08:00:00 -0500

Here’s a new project to watch if you are interested in taking control of your email: msgvault. The tool provides a local, searchable version of all of your Gmail messages and attachments, backed by SQLite and DuckDB.

The author, Wes McKinney, says he may add support for other email services in the future, as well as WhatsApp, iMessage, and SMS. I’ll probably look into it for myself once the project matures a little. Although given that it stores everything in a single giant database file, it won’t fit into my standard backup strategy of versioned, incremental backups. Still, it could be a nice step forward in regaining control over my email archives.

^{Hat tip to j4mie on HackerNews.}

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msgvault: A personal email archive and search system to watch