apple-mail

Original：🇺🇸 English

Translated

1 scripts

Search, read, and extract attachments from Apple Mail's local storage. Query emails by sender, recipient, subject, body, date, mailbox, and flags. Read raw RFC822 messages and extract file attachments.

1installs

Sourcemitsuhiko/agent-stuff

Added on2026-02-18

NPX Install

npx skill4agent add mitsuhiko/agent-stuff apple-mail

SKILL.md Content

View Translation Comparison →

Apple Mail Skill

Search, read, and extract attachments from Apple Mail's local storage on macOS.

Tool

apple-mail.sh

— a bash script that queries the Apple Mail SQLite envelope index and reads

.emlx

files from disk. Read-only — it never modifies mail data.

Quick Reference

bash

TOOL=~/Development/agent-stuff/skills/apple-mail/apple-mail.sh

# Search emails
$TOOL search --from "peter@" --subject "dinner" --limit 5
$TOOL search --after 2026-02-01 --has-attachment
$TOOL search --body "invoice" --mailbox "INBOX" --unread
$TOOL search --to "armin@" --before 2025-12-31

# Show message metadata, recipients, attachments, and summary
$TOOL info 783660

# Read the raw RFC822 email (headers + body)
$TOOL read 783660

# Extract attachments to a temp directory (prints the path)
$TOOL attachment 783660                          # all attachments
$TOOL attachment 783660 "Rechnung.pdf"           # specific file

# List all mailboxes with counts
$TOOL mailboxes

Search Options

Flag	Description
`--from <addr>`	Sender address substring
`--to <addr>`	Recipient address substring
`--subject <text>`	Subject substring
`--body <text>`	Body/summary text substring
`--mailbox <name>`	Mailbox URL substring (e.g. `INBOX` , `Sent` , `Trash` )
`--after <YYYY-MM-DD>`	Received after date
`--before <YYYY-MM-DD>`	Received before date
`--unread`	Only unread messages
`--flagged`	Only flagged messages
`--has-attachment`	Only messages with attachments
`--limit <n>`	Max results (default: 20)

Output Format

search

returns pipe-delimited table with header row:

id|sender|sender_name|subject|received|status|flagged|mailbox|attachments

```
info
```
returns structured metadata sections
```
read
```
outputs raw RFC822 email to stdout
```
attachment
```
prints the temp directory path to stdout, file listing to stderr

Notes

Message IDs are Apple Mail internal ROWIDs (integers), shown in the
```
id
```
column
```
.partial.emlx
```
files contain headers only (body not downloaded);
```
read
```
warns about this
Attachments are copied to a temp directory under
```
/tmp/
```
; clean up when done
The
```
body
```
search queries the
```
summaries
```
table (Apple Mail's plaintext preview), not the full email body
Mailbox URLs are percent-encoded (e.g.,
```
%5BGmail%5D
```
=
```
[Gmail]
```
,
```
%20
```
= space)
Deleted messages are excluded from search by default