A setup guide for a command-line email system on macOS. It installs tools that synchronize email locally, provide terminal-based reading and management, send notifications, and search indexed messages.

Use it when setting up a new machine, checking required software, installing missing tools, and configuring local email synchronization and notifications.

It removes the manual work of installing and configuring several separate email tools before a coding agent can use email from the terminal.

setup-email — Skill for Claude Code by ericboehs/claude-plugins

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add ericboehs/claude-plugins --skill setup-email

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ericboehs/claude-plugins

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cli-email-setup, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericboehs/claude-plugins/setup-email/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericboehs/claude-plugins/setup-email)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericboehs/claude-plugins/setup-email"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericboehs/claude-plugins/setup-email/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericboehs/claude-plugins/setup-email"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericboehs/claude-plugins/setup-email.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 51 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,325 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00051	$0.01325
Opus 5.5	$0.00020	$0.00530
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00010	$0.00265
Haiku 4.5	$0.00005	$0.00133

Measured 2mo ago against content hash dab84e88d85f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

setup-email scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2mo ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/cli-email-setup/skills/setup-email/SKILL.md · 162 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 162 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Setup CLI Email Stack

Guided installation and configuration of CLI email on macOS. Based on the reference guide at references/blog-post.md (read it for full config templates and details).

Overview

The stack:

mbsync (isync) — two-way IMAP sync to local Maildir
himalaya — fast CLI for listing, reading, flagging
neomutt — full TUI with sidebar, vim keys, colors
goimapnotify — IMAP IDLE for push notifications
qmd — full-text search across all indexed email

Step 1: Check Prerequisites

Check what's already installed:

# Check each tool
which himalaya && himalaya --version
which mbsync && mbsync --version
which neomutt && neomutt --version
which w3m
which goimapnotify || ls ~/go/bin/goimapnotify
which qmd
which mail-archive
which mail-sync
which maildir-to-text

Report what's installed and what's missing. If everything is installed, tell the user their email stack is already set up and suggest /check-email.

Step 2: Install Tools

brew install isync himalaya neomutt w3m
go install github.com/chmouel/goimapnotify@latest

Note: goimapnotify requires Go. If go is not installed: brew install go.

Step 3: Store App Passwords

Guide the user to create app-specific passwords and store them in the macOS Keychain.

Fastmail: Settings > Privacy & Security > App Passwords Google: https://myaccount.google.com/apppasswords

# Store in Keychain (user provides the actual password)
security add-generic-password -a '<email>' -s '<service-name>' \
  -w '<app-password>' ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain-db

The service names will be used in all config files for password retrieval:

security find-generic-password -a '<email>' -s '<service-name>' -w

Step 4: Configure mbsync

Create ~/.mbsyncrc — see references/blog-post.md for the full template.

Key settings per account:

AuthMechs LOGIN — required on macOS (avoids SASL errors)
SubFolders Verbatim — preserves folder names
Create Both + Expunge Both — full two-way sync
CopyArrivalDate yes — preserves email dates
Gmail: exclude Important and Starred (virtual labels)

Read the full file on GitHub · 162 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

references/blog-post.md 11 KB

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2mo ago First seen · 162 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A dab84e88d85f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

setup-email is a skill published in the GitHub repository ericboehs/claude-plugins (2 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 51 tokens to every session and 1,325 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

Productivity

setup-email next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
setup-emailericboehs/claude-plugins	Skill	2	2mo ago	MIT	A	51	Claude Code
orbit-notionnexu-io/open-design	Skill	106k	today	Apache-2.0	A	117	Claude Code, Codex
agentmailpaperclipai/paperclip	Skill	112k	today	MIT	A	30	Claude Code, Codex
Cortexdanielmiessler/LifeOS	Skill	20k	2d ago	MIT	A	184	Claude Code
rowboat-spacesrowboatlabs/rowboat	Skill	18k	today	Apache-2.0	A	60	Claude Code, Codex
feishuHmbown/CodeWhale	Skill	41k	6d ago	MIT	A	33	Claude Code, Codex
pinchtab-mcppinchtab/pinchtab	Skill	11k	11d ago	MIT	A	52	Claude Code, Codex