MailFathom documentation

A brain for your mail — self-hosted, AI-native, and yours alone.

MailFathom is a self-hosted service that synchronizes mail from your IMAP accounts into a local PostgreSQL copy, indexes it for search, and serves it to AI agents as read-only tools over the Model Context Protocol. Reading is local, and synchronization never marks anything read on the mail server.

A chat client asked to show the latest mail, answered with a table of the ten most recent messages, their receipt times, and the moment the local copy was last synchronized

One question, answered from the local copy in an ordinary chat client. The *** were blacked out by hand before the file entered a public repository — MailFathom redacts nothing on its way to a client.

This page is the front door of the published site. It exists only there: the file GitHub shows when you browse docs/ is README.md, which indexes the same pages for somebody reading them in the repository.

Where to start

If you want to	Read
Install, configure, and use MailFathom	The user guide
Deploy, operate, and troubleshoot a running instance	Operations
Understand what the tools return and what they bound	Features
Follow the boundaries the code is built on	Architecture
Look up a type or a member	API reference

Which version you are reading

The site opens on the current release. The selector in the header moves between the releases that are still documented and latest, which is built from the default branch and therefore describes work no release carries yet — a page there can document a setting you cannot configure in the version you are running. Every page states its version in that same selector, and a page outside the current release says so in a banner.

What this site leaves out

The repository holds what is deliberately not published here: the architectural decision records under docs/decisions/, which are a closed record of why a decision was taken rather than documentation of how MailFathom behaves; the specifications under specs/, which state intent rather than fact; and the instructions that govern the agents and contributors working on it. MailFathom is published under the Apache License 2.0.