portable-email-manager

What This Skill Does

The portable-email-manager is a robust, lightweight command-line tool designed for the OpenClaw AI agent. It provides comprehensive IMAP and SMTP capabilities, allowing your agent to interact directly with your email infrastructure without external heavy-lifting services. The tool handles everything from simple email retrieval to complex folder management and attachment detection. It is designed to be cross-provider compatible, meaning you can plug it into Gmail, Outlook, Zoho, or any private mail server. It exposes advanced search functionalities that allow the agent to filter messages by sender, date range, read status, or keywords, making it an essential bridge between your inbox and your AI-driven workflows.

Installation

Installation is straightforward. First, navigate to the skill directory within your OpenClaw environment (cd skills/portable-email-manager) and run npm install. The skill relies on nodemailer for outgoing traffic, imap-simple for incoming retrieval, and mailparser to unpack and interpret email content correctly. Ensure you have your environment variables set before execution: export EMAIL_USER and EMAIL_PASS (preferably an App Password). If you are using non-standard providers like Gmail or Outlook, you will need to modify the configuration inside scripts/email.js to point toward the correct host headers and ports as defined in the documentation.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for automating routine communication tasks. Use it to scan incoming emails for specific report keywords, organize your inbox by moving high-priority items to specific folders, or quickly search through thousands of historical messages to find a specific document. It is particularly effective for developers or power users who want to "chat" with their inbox, asking their agent to summarize unread messages or draft responses based on existing threads.

Example Prompts

1. "OpenClaw, find all unread emails from my manager sent this week and summarize the attachments."
2. "Search for the latest invoice from the billing department and move it to the 'Financials' folder."
3. "Send a quick email to the team letting them know the weekly report is ready and attached."

Tips & Limitations

Be mindful that searching the email body (--body) can be computationally expensive and slow for very large mailboxes, so use sender or subject filters whenever possible. Always use App Passwords rather than your primary account credentials to ensure maximum security. If you are experiencing connection issues, verify your provider's specific port requirements (like TLS/587 for Outlook).