Mail ingest via mail-intake

1. This recipe — mail-intake. A small Go daemon that polls IMAP, extracts attachments matching a MIME allowlist, and drops them into a consume directory with a per-attachment JSON sidecar. suchi’s fs-watch picks up both. Clean cred separation: the mail service never sees suchi; suchi never sees the mailbox.
2. Direct IMAP polling via INGEST_IMAP_URL — no external tools; see config.

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Prerequisites

• Proton Mail Bridge (or any IMAP endpoint) reachable from the mail-intake container.
• A shared volume both mail-intake and suchi can write / read. Recommended: a bind mount off /mnt/homelab/mail-intake/consume.

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docker-compose

services:
  mail-intake:
    image: ghcr.io/johnnybravo-xyz/mail-intake:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ./mail-intake/config.yaml:/app/config.yaml:ro
      - /mnt/homelab/mail-intake/consume:/consume
      - /mnt/homelab/mail-intake/state:/state    # dedup DB
    env_file: [.env]

  suchi:
    image: ghcr.io/suchi-dms/suchi:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    depends_on: [mail-intake]
    volumes:
      - /mnt/homelab/suchi/data:/data
      # Mount the SAME consume dir mail-intake writes to.
      - /mnt/homelab/mail-intake/consume:/ingest:ro
    environment:
      PUBLIC_URL: http://127.0.0.1:8000
      INGEST_FS_DIR: /ingest
      INGEST_FS_OWNER_EMAIL: [email protected]
    ports: ["8000:8000"]

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mail-intake config.yaml

imap:
  host: protonmail-bridge
  port: 143
folders:
  - Inbox
  - "Archive/Bills"
mime_allowlist:
  - application/pdf
  - image/jpeg
  - image/png
target:
  consume_dir: /consume
  emit_metadata_sidecar: true
  extra_tags: ["source:email"]

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Sidecar compatibility

{
  "title": "Electricity bill March 2026",
  "created": "2026-03-02T00:00:00Z",
  "correspondent": "BESCOM Billing <[email protected]>",
  "tags": ["utilities","source:email"]
}

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What you’ll see

1. Sees the file drop into /ingest/.
2. Reads the sidecar (filename.json).
3. Creates a document row owned by INGEST_FS_OWNER_EMAIL.
4. Enqueues post-ingest — qpdf → OCR → ZUGFeRD → rules → render.
5. Applies sidecar-derived title, created, correspondent (as sender), tags.

• Configure mail-intake to also drop the raw message alongside its attachments (upstream feature request, or write a small wrapper), OR
• Use suchi’s direct IMAP polling (INGEST_IMAP_URL). That path ingests the .eml first, then fans out its attachments as child docs via email_parent_id.

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Testing locally

# 1. Start Bridge (see Proton docs) — exposes IMAP on port 143.
# 2. In the mail-intake repo:
docker compose run --rm mail-intake --one-shot
# 3. Verify /consume/ now has attachments + .json sidecars.
# 4. Boot suchi:
docker compose up -d suchi
# 5. In another terminal, tail logs:
docker compose logs -f suchi | grep -E "fswatch|post-ingest"