joplin-mail-gateway

Simple (bash-based) mail gateway for the open source note taking and to-do application Joplin.

Rationale

This tool provides a solution for emailing content directly into your Joplin notes.

You may send or forward an email to a dedicated email address. This email is then automatically delivered to your personal Joplin notes. Attachments (PDFs, Images, ...) will automatically be included in the note. In addition text is automatically scanned from images via OCR. This extracted text is added at the bottom of the note so that it is easily searchable in Joplin.

Features

• automatically fetch mails from a certain mail account and add all new mails as Joplin notes
• automatically add mail attachments
• provide tags via mail subject (with #-syntax)
• choose notebook via mail subject (with @-syntax)
• automatically run OCR on images and add text to bottom of note
• automatically add png thumbnails for PDF attachments
• automatically add PDF text part to bottom of note

Prerequisites

1. Joplin terminal application installed and configured

   see https://joplin.cozic.net/

   Tested with joplin 1.0.119 (prod)

2. pdftoppm and pdftotext must be installed

    sudo apt update
    sudo apt install poppler-utils
   

   Tested with pdftoppm 3.03 and pdftotext 3.03

3. tesseract must be installed

    sudo apt update
    sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr
   

   And for German training files:

    sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr-deu 
   

   Tested with tesseract 3.04.01

4. getmail must be installed

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install getmail4
   

   Tested with getmail_fetch 4.48.0

5. ripmime must be installed

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt install ripmime
   

   Tested with ripmime v1.4.0.9

6. python 3 must be installed

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt install python3
   

   Tested with python3 3.5.2.

   Note: If you are running Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS, make sure to set Python3 as the default interpreter:

    sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/python python /usr/bin/python3 10                    
   

Install

1. Clone from github

    git clone https://github.com/manolitto/joplin-mail-gateway.git
   

2. Create a mail directory for incoming mails with following structure:

    mkdir -p ~/joplin-mailbox/new
    mkdir -p ~/joplin-mailbox/cur
    mkdir -p ~/joplin-mailbox/tmp
   

3. Create a log directory

    sudo mkdir /var/log/fetch-joplin-mails
    sudo chown $USER /var/log/fetch-joplin-mails
   

4. Create a new mail account at your preferred email provider that supports POP3

5. Create the configuration file

    cp config-sample.sh config.sh
    chmod 700 config.sh 
   

6. Change default configuration by editing config.sh

    readonly POP3_USER="your-email-user@your-provider"
    readonly POP3_PW="your-super-secret-pop3-pw"
    readonly POP3_HOST="pop.gmail.com"
    readonly POP3_PORT=995
    readonly DEFAULT_TITLE_PREFIX="Neue Notiz"
    readonly DEFAULT_NOTEBOOK="Import"
   

7. Test your configuration

    ./fetch-joplin-mails.sh  
   

8. Add cron job

    crontab -e
   

   Add the following line:

    */5 * * * * ~/joplin-mail-gateway/fetch-joplin-mails.sh >>/var/log/fetch-joplin-mails/fetch.log 2>&1           
   

Running from a docker container

The gateway can be run from a docker container. The included Dockerfile does everything from installing joplin to fetching emails

To setup the docker container :

1. prepare the mail-gateway by editing the config.sh file as described above

2. edit the joplin-config.json file with your Joplin sync settings. Template files are availables. Simple remove the .template extension

3. build the container by running

    docker build . -t joplin_gateway
   

4. run the container

    docker run -d joplin_gateway