Summary

Wes McKinney announces msgvault, a local-first email archive and search system built in Go that uses SQLite and DuckDB to enable millisecond queries over a lifetime of email data. The project was motivated by Gmail's increasing enshittification — poor search, slow attachment retrieval, and unwanted AI features — and the desire to own and privately query personal data. msgvault syncs emails via Gmail's OAuth API, stores them in SQLite with Parquet indexes for DuckDB-powered search, and ships with a terminal UI, CLI, and MCP server for LLM integration. McKinney has indexed nearly 2 million emails and 150,000 attachments from his 20-year Gmail history, and plans to eventually delete all data from Gmail after confirming local backups. Future plans include mbox import, WhatsApp/iMessage support, and a web UI.

Key Insight

In the age of local LLMs and enshittified cloud services, users should own their data locally and query it on their own terms — and the tools to make this fast and practical finally exist.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 5

  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.

• 7

  Rather than improving the core product (which they have no incentive to do: see enshittification), Google has been focused on shoving AI features I don't want in my face.

• 7

  Something about giving all of my Gmail to Sam Altman and co makes me squirm.

• 8

  I've always been uncomfortable with my email corpus being fodder for Google's advertising machine, but 'Would you like to use Gemini AI on your email?' feels like a special kind of hell.

• 7

  Gmail's 'semantic search' buries me with unrelated results matching one or more terms in my query. This 'can't find shit' problem is endlessly frustrating.

• 5

  I don't think having millions of emails and over 100,000 attachments on Google's platform is a good long-term plan.

• 3

  An initial hybrid Python / Rust became a bit too tedious to develop with coding agents and the single-language Go project has been fast to develop and is easy to distribute to end users.

Tone

opinionated, enthusiastic, practical