Ingest mail

Read this if you want OMem to ingest your email. On macOS it reads Apple Mail’s local store (mail-app) — which already holds the mail your Exchange / IMAP accounts sync down — so there’s no browser automation and no Graph API.

Step 1 — Grant Full Disk Access

Mail lives in a protected location, so OMem needs Full Disk Access — and macOS never prompts for it automatically:

omem setup --grant-tcc

This opens System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access and reveals the omem binary so you can add it. Add omem itself, not Terminal — see the setup wizard’s permission note for why this matters for scheduled runs.

Step 2 — Configure scope

Accounts — which mail accounts to ingest (empty = all configured):
Terminal window
```
omem config set kinds.mail.source_config.accounts '["you@company.com"]'
```

Folders — defaults to inbox + sent; widen if you want:

omem config set kinds.mail.scope.folders '["inbox", "sent", "archive"]'

Time window — how far back to reach (default 3 months):
Terminal window
```
omem config set kinds.mail.scope.time_window.since 6m_ago
```

Enable and ingest:

omem config set kinds.mail.enabled true
omem ingest --kind mail

One thread, one page

OMem aggregates an entire email thread into a single wiki page — not one page per message. A 6-message back-and-forth becomes one coherent page with the full exchange, which is both cheaper (one curation call) and far more useful to query than six fragments. Attachments inside the thread are parsed too, each through its format’s parser.

Other scope knobs

Setting	Default	What it does
`kinds.mail.scope.max_messages_per_account`	`5000`	Cap per account.
`kinds.mail.scope.max_message_size_mb`	`50`	Skip messages larger than this (a metadata-only line is kept).
`kinds.mail.scope.include_attachments`	`true`	Ingest attachments.
`kinds.mail.scope.max_attachment_size_mb`	`50`	Skip larger attachments (metadata-only line kept).

Confirm it worked

omem query "something you remember discussing" --kind mail
omem wiki ls --kind mail

Getting zero results? See mail returns nothing — usually FDA, a too-narrow time window, or a folder name mismatch.

What’s next

Ingest calendar — same local-first approach for events.
Mail returns nothing — the common fixes.