go-yo

Go-Yo is like a yo-yo for email. The goal is to be self-hosted, giving the user full control over the deployment, and avoiding potential privacy or security issues with third-party services.

Bouncing Workflow

You will need to create a dedicated email address for bouncing Go-Yo email. For the purposes of this workflow, we will assume that your Go-Yo email address is goyo@example.com

(Almost) any email address will do, as long as you can receive mail there, and as long as your email provider allows you to create variants of your email address, like goyo+foo@example.com. (Google/Gmail follows this convention - if you use another mail provider, please verify this).

In an email client such as mutt, simply bounce (or forward) an email to goyo+3.hours@example.com in order to have that thread bumped back to the top of your inbox in 3 hours. You can also do things like goyo+5.days@example.com, and goyo+on.june.1@example.com.

For the time being, Go-Yo will be very conservative with how it parses this email address. This is a good thing; you don't want Go-Yo to think you want a reminder in six months when you really meant six minutes. If there are any problems with parsing the bounce interval, Go-Yo will send an error message (via email) immediately, so you can deal with it right away. No surprises.

Scheduling Workflow

Go-Yo can also be used to schedule messages. The exact workflow for this is TBD.

Under the hood

Go-Yo uses the Maildir format for interoperability. Documentation about the Maildir format is available at http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html

Use a service such as offlineimap to fetch new messages and write them to the Maildir. Once new emails appear in the /new subdirectory, they are ready for processing by Go-Yo.

Go-Yo finds new messages in /new and, after processing them and scheduling the 'bounce' message, moves them to the /cur directory, adding the info string to the filename (see documentation) - and, specifically, setting the message flag to S (seen).

Go-Yo uses the unique portion of the filename to identify which messages to bounce.

After delivery, Go-Yo does not delete (ie, set flag T - trashed) for messages. This allows easy debugging and poor-man's logging.

Setup

(This setup procedure is subject to change until the first stable release of go-yo. Until then, go-yo must be compiled from source and run manually).

ec2-run-instances ami-d0f89fb9 -k KEYPAIR_NAME 

SSH into the instance once it's up and running.

First, we'll need to install Go

wget https://go.googlecode.com/files/go1.1.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz
sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.1.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin

Set your GOPATH

echo "export GOPATH=~/go" >> ~/.bashrc && source .bashrc

Install offlineimap and git if they are not already installed.

sudo apt-get install offlineimap git

Then, populate ~/.offlineimaprc with the following (create it if it does not exist).

[general]
ui = ttyui
accounts = GMail

[Account GMail]
localrepository = Gmail-Local
remoterepository = Gmail-Remote
#Controls how many accounts may be synchronized simultaneously
maxsyncaccounts = 3 
maxconnections = 3 

[Repository Gmail-Local]
type = Maildir
localfolders = ~/mail/GMail

[Repository Gmail-Remote]
type = Gmail
remoteuser = YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS@gmail.com
remotepass = YOUR_PASSWORD_HERE
sslcacertfile = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
realdelete = no
# Instead of closing the connection once a sync is complete, offlineimap will
# send empty data to the server to hold the connection open. A value of 60
# attempts to hold the connection for a minute between syncs (both quick and 
# autorefresh)
keepalive = 60

mkdir -p ~/mail/GMail

Test it out now

offlineimap -o

If you get no error messages, synchronization worked, and you should now have a complete folder mail within ~/mail/GMail

Now, time to install go-yo

go get github.com/ChimeraCoder/go-yo

Start running go-yo

$GOPATH/bin/go-yo -rootdir ~/mail/GMail/INBOX/ -email YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS -password EMAIL_PASSWORD -configuredemail CONFIGUREDEMAIL

Eventually you will want to run offlineimap in the background