Organize your e-mails without sacrificing your privacy

Plauna is a privacy focused service that helps you categorize your e-mails. All of its data is stored only on your computer.

You can parse your e-mails from mbox files or directly by connecting to your IMAP servers. Plauna helps you categorize your e-mails and automates the process so that incoming e-mails are moved to their respective folders on your IMAP server.

IMPORTANT: Plauna is still under heavy development at the moment. The features are subject to change.

• You own 100% of your data. Everything is on your machine.
• You define your categories: Use as many or few as you like
• Multi-language support.
• Support for multiple IMAP connections.
• Statistics about your emails and metadata (very basic, still under development).
• Upload data from mbox archives.
• Read emails directly from IMAP folders.

The easiest way to get Plauna is using the Docker image.

Plauna requires some configuration to work as mention under “How to use” -> “How to run” below. If you’re going to use docker, it makes sense to mount the configuration file in a separate volume.

The second way to get Plauna is fetching it from the git repository and compiling using Clojure CLI with the command:

clj -T:build uber

This will produce a Plauna uberjar in the ./target directory which you can run using a Java Runtime Environment.

Plauna comes without security features like different users. It is made to be used by self-hosters who own and use the service themselves in an internal network that is isolated.

Please do not use Plauna in an open network or open ports to outside!

You must provide a configuration file to start Plauna. By default, the configuration is expected to be at ~/.config/plauna.edn. You can modify the location of the configuration file by passing the parameter –config-file. This method is useful when running Plauna from the command line, e.g., java -jar plauna.jar –config-file=/opt/plauna/plauna.edn.

If you are using Docker, you can put the parameters in the environment variable PLAUNA_ARGS. A docker-compose example would look like this:

services:
  plauna:
    container_name: plauna
    image: ozangulle/plauna:dev
    environment:
      - 'PLAUNA_ARGS=--config-file=/opt/plauna/plauna.edn'
    restart: unless-stopped

The configuration file is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

If this is your first time using Plauna, do not use a configuration file.

The “:email” part of the configuration was moved over to the database.

If you had an old configuration, the first time you run Plauna after updating it will save the email client configuration to the database. You don’t have to do anything manually.

Plauna can be configured using a separate configuration file. Currently the only values that can be configured using the configuration file are :data-folder (defaults to /var/lib/plauna) and :server {:port *} (defaults to 8080).

{:data-folder "/home/myhome/example-directory" ; The location for the db, training files and models. Refers to the path in the container
 :server {:port 80} ; The port Plauna's web server listens to in the container. Defaults to 8080.
}

You can use the environment variables $DATA_FOLDER and $SERVER_PORT instead of using a configuration file. You can also use the environment variable $CONFIG_FILE to specify the location of your config file.

Everything that can be done using the environment variables can also be done using the cli parameters –config-file, –data-folder, and –server-port.

The order which configuration is used is determined by the following order:

1. Config file specified as cli parameter (will be deprecated soon)
2. CLI parameters
3. Environment variables
4. Default configuration

Plauna supports basic (username - password) and oauth2 (XOAUTH2) authentication methods.

Basic authentication is very straightforward. Leave “Authentication” at “Basic” (it is the default value), enter your username and password. You will need to click at “Connect” on the “Connections” page in order to connect to the server. This is only needed during the initial set up. Plauna automatically tries to connect to every configured e-mail server on startup.

Currently only tested for Gmail!

Prerequisites: You need your own application on Google Cloud, or Azure, or whatever e-mail provider you are using.

When you select “Oauth2” on the connection screen, a new section called “Auth Providers” will appear underneath the connection details. You need to fill in a name (only for displaying on Plauna, you can choose whatever you like), the authentication and the token urls of your oauth provider, the client id and secret of your application, the scopes (separated with an empty space), and a redirect url. The redirect url path is “/oauth2/callback”. If you’re testing on localhost, you need to enter http:///localhost:{port}/oauth2/callback. If you are using a custom domain for Plauna, please adjust accordingly.

After saving the auth provider, you need to select it under connection config and click “update connection”. You can leave the “Secret” field in the “Connection Config” form empty. It will not be used for oauth2.

After you set up your configuration, go to the “Connections” page and click on “Connect”. On your first login, you will be redirected to your oauth provider in order to authorize the application you created to access your data. If everything is set up correctly, you will then be redirected automatically back to Plauna.

When you start Plauna, it starts a web server on the port which you specified (defaults to 8080) and connects to the IMAP servers that you configured. You can use Plauna without configuring any IMAP servers but you would be missing out on the “move e-mail” functionality. On your very first start, the database is empty. You need to fill it with e-mails. There are three non-exclusive ways of doing this:

1. Go to “Admin”. Under the header “Parse E-mails” select an mbox file and click on the button “Parse Mbox”. You can see your e-mails under the “E-mails” tab shortly thereafter.
2. Go to “Watchers”, click on any IMAP account name, select a folder you want to parse the e-mails in, make sure “Move e-mails after categorization” is unchecked and click on the button “Parse E-mails”. This will read all the e-mails in the selected folder.
3. Just leave Plauna running and watch it save your e-mails. Beware: Depending on how many e-mails you receive on any given day, this method may be very slow.

Plauna automatically detects the language of an e-mail upon parsing it. Here, you must also select the languages that you want to use in training - therefore the languages you want to use in categorization.

Go to “Admin” -> “Manage Categories” in order to create and delete categories. If you set up connections to your IMAP servers in your settings file, anytime you create a category Plauna will try to create a folder on the servers. If you however delete a category, Plauna will not delete it on the server. As a general rule, Plauna reads and moves e-mails as well as it creates folders but it never deletes anything.

Under the tab “E-mails” you can edit the language and category of every e-mail; either as a batch operation or by clicking on an e-mail and changing it at the details page.

Under the tab “E-mails” there is an expandable section called “Data Training”. Click on the button “Train with Existing Data” to train the model(s) using the existing categorized data. Important: You must have more than one category saved for each language you want to train in.

You must have selected at least one language in “Admin” -> “Manage Languages” in order to start training on your e-mails.

After training your models on the categories you created, Plauna will categorize each e-mail you receive and moved it automatically to its corresponding folder.