REmailFS

About

REmailFS is a FUSE application allows emails to be fetched from an IMAP server and viewed as files. As on now the funcitonality that has been implemented is fairly rudimentary but includes:

1. Connecting to the IMAP server.
2. Listing all mailboxes on the server.
3. Downloading an email and viewing it as a file.

As it stands REmailFS only supports reading data from an IMAP server, modifying the contents of the server will be supported in the future. Only Gmail has been tested so far.

REmailFS lists each mailbox as a directory in the filesystem tree. The contents of a directory will be the child mailboxes of the current mailbox and the emails that are stored in the mailbox. When an email is opened locally it is fetched from the server if it is not stored locally already and displays the subject, date, sender, and content of the email. Currently, due to variations in the format of reveived emails, the content of an email is fetched if and only if the email containts a MIME text/plain section. Any other content will be ignored.

IMAP does not support fetching the most recent X emails so at the moment REmailFS will list the session UIDs of the emails in the inbox and then fetch the important information about those emails when they are read. After fetching an email, that email will appear in the filesytem tree with its subject line as the key instead of its session UID.

FUSE

The following FUSE methods have been implemented so far, any of the methods not listed here are default implementations.

• init
• destroy
• getattr
• lookup
• readdir
• read

Initial Setup

IMAP must be enabled on any account that you wish to use REmailFS with.

Gmail Setup

• Enable IMAP for Gmail
  1. Open your Gmail inbox
  2. Go to the Settings page by clicking the gear icon in the upper right hand corner and selecting Settings from the drop down menu.
  3. In the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab click the enable IMAP button.
  4. Click save changes.
• Enable REmailFS access to your Google account with an app password Full instructions at to generate an App password

Running REmailFS

After following the setup steps above REmailFS can be built and run using cargo run <mountpoint>

For more information on how to run REmailFS run the command cargo run -- -h