Count inbox emails using Gmail API or Gnome Online Accounts (limited support)

mongars will take an email account as configured in Gnome Online account (only oauth based email account is supported) or via the GMAIL API and will output how many unread emails you have in there.

You need to generate a OAUTH credentials.json via the google API console.

When it's done using pass you need to insert it in your pass store:

pass insert -m google/$EMAIL.mail.credential
INSERT YOUR CREDENTIALS HERE

Run mongars on your terminal for the first time with the flag --gauth and your $EMAIL as argument:

mongars --gauth $EMAIL

It will print a URL to open in your web browser and start the google Oauth flow to allow it to access to read your email on your $EMAIL account. It stores and refresh the temporary token in ~/.cache/mongars/token.$EMAIL.json.

You can define the pass key to other values by defining the flags --gauth-pass-cred-key. If you want to use the same credentials for multiple emails you would want to define this flag to the same value to both pass key path.

If you want you can as well redefine the --gauth-pass-token-file somewhere else.

You will have notification on new email if you have the notify-send command installed. The notifications include an Open and Archive option, the Open is limited to a search because the Gmail interface don't have direct links support.

You can customize the template and the command with the --notify-command-template flag the default is:

notify-send -i "{icon}" "{sender}" "{subject}"

The variables supported are icon, sender, subject and snippet are replaced with the values from the email.

You can output a markdown formatted (optionally) with gum if you pass the option -M/--show-markdown

You can output as json for waybar with -J/--show-json and it will show a tooltip of your last 5 message and subject snippet.

We are generally just quiet and don't output anything if there is an error, just use -v to see the error.

You just need to specify the email to check as an argument i.e:

mongars [email protected]

By default it will output the number of messages from your mailbox with an icon of different colours if there is unread message or not.

The INBOX folder is the default folder, if you would like to count another folder you can specify the -m option to it :

mongars -m Label1 [email protected]

You can further customize the colour output which uses lemonbar formatting with :

• --icon: the glyph icon default to 
• --icon-color-unreads: the color when unreads, default to a yellow #ffd700 set this to empty if you don't want any color formatting.
• --icon-color-normal: the normal colors. (no default)

By default if you have no mail it will output a 0 unless you specify the flag --no-mail-no-zero

If you don't want any icons you can simply use the --no-icon and it will just output the number.

This currently only support oauth2 based accounts, imap account with username, password are not currently supported (patch welcome but you probably want to use something more secure).

I only tested it with Google/Gmail accounts (enterprise and personal) so let me know if it works or not on other oauth2 based email accounts.

You can install this from aur with your aurhelper, like yay :

yay -S mongars

With pip from pypip - https://pypi.org/project/mongars/

pip install --user mongars

(make sure $HOME/.local/bin is in your PATH)

Checkout this repository, install poetry and run it with :

poetry install mongars
poetry run mongars

If you run this outside of gnome environement (ie: from a windows manager), you have to configure the accounts first in Gnone Online Account settings from gnome and then you can use it from your windows manager.

From your window manager start scripts or somewhere else you need to make sure to run the goa-daemon, for example on arch the path is /usr/lib/goa-daemon and from your startup script you will do :

/usr/lib/goa-daemon --replace &

different distros may have a different path, see also this bugzilla bug #1340203)

You can easily integrate this with Polybar :

[module/email]
type = custom/script
exec = mongars [email protected]
interval = 30
click-left = xdg-open https://mail.google.com/
exec-if = grep -q [email protected] ~/.config/goa-1.0/accounts.conf 2>/dev/null && ping -c1 mail.google.com

    "custom/email": {
        "format": " {} ",
        "interval": 15,
        "exec": "mongars [email protected] --no-mail-no-zero --no-icon",
        "on-click": "xdg-open https://mail.google.com"
    },

and you can style it in style.css file :

#custom-email {
  color: #b22222;
}

The gauth method support output to json, here is an example integrating it:

{
  "custom/email-work": {
    "format": "{} ",
    "return-type": "json",
    "tooltip": "true",
    "tooltip-format": "{tooltip}",
    "interval": 15,
    "exec": "poetry run mongars --gauth [email protected] -J",
    "on-click-middle": "kitty -T \"Email for [email protected]\" bash -c \"mongars --gauth [email protected] -M|less -R\"",
    "on-click": "xdg-open https://mail.google.com/"
  }
}

Apache 2.0

© 2021 Chmouel Boudjnah (@chmouel) - https://chmouel.com