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

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