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msgvault: local-first email archive

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Came across this post from Wes McKinney talking about the new tool he's building as the local-first email archive with a terminal UI and MCP server. It's called msgvault and it's powered by DuckDB and comes as a single Go binary. Wes has written more about the new tool in this announcement post on his blog, explaining how it works and what's the future goal for the tool. He writes:

Fundamentally, this is my data, and I should be able to search it in milliseconds, pull up old emails and attachments in a few keystrokes, and query my history with natural language privately and securely. Finally, in 2026, there is no reason that I should not be able to solve this problem. So I did.

And it does make sense.

Basically, you will be able to chat with all your emails via the inbuilt MCP server and search through your entire archive within milliseconds. The tool currently works for Gmail using the OAuth API archiving everything in a local SQLite database. There's a command msgvault delete-staged that also deletes the syncs emails from Gmail.

In future, the tool will also have .mbox import feature and support for other email services. And can even support import for WhatsApp, iMessage, and SMS archives.

There is much more info about this on the official website that you can check.

I think, this is a great use-case and I'm all for it.

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