MailWise

Search and analyze email issue threads from a local knowledge base. Use when the user asks about past bugs, incidents, or wants to find how experienced engineers solved similar issues. Triggers on questions like "have we seen this before", "similar issues", "how did we fix", "root cause analysis", "past incidents".

MailWise — Your Team's Email Memory

Stop re-investigating issues your team already solved. MailWise turns your email threads into a searchable knowledge base — index thousands of EML files locally, tag expert engineers, and use RAG to instantly surface how similar issues were debugged and resolved in the past.

"Have we seen this before?" → MailWise searches 25,000+ emails in under a second and shows you exactly what your best engineers said about it.

What you get

Semantic search — not keyword matching, but meaning-based retrieval across your entire email archive:

$ mailwise search "calendar sync fails after folder migration" --show-body

  #1 [0.89] ★Expert  RE: Outlook calendar not syncing after mailbox move
     From: [e-mail] (2024-11-15)
     "The root cause is a stale folder-id cache. Clear HxCalendarSync
      and restart the sync service..."

  #2 [0.84]          RE: Sync failure post-migration — Mac clients
     From: [e-mail] (2024-10-22)
     "We've seen this pattern before. Check if the migration tool
      preserved the folder GUIDs..."

  #3 [0.81] ★Expert  RE: Calendar items disappearing after move
     From: [e-mail] (2024-09-08)
     "This is the same class of bug as CASE-4521. The fix is..."

RAG-powered analysis — Claude reads the most relevant past threads and synthesizes debugging guidance:

$ mailwise analyze "User reports calendar events vanish after moving to a new folder"

  Based on 5 similar past issues, here's what your team has found:
  ● Root cause pattern: stale folder-id cache after migration (3 of 5 cases)
  ● Recommended first step: check HxCalendarSync logs for GUID mismatch
  ● Expert consensus: clearing the sync cache resolves ~80% of these cases
  ● Edge case: if GUIDs were not preserved during migration, a full re-sync is needed

Get started in 3 steps

pip install mailwise        # 1. Install from PyPI
mailwise init               # 2. Interactive setup wizard — creates config, sets directories
mailwise index              # 3. Index your EML files (incremental, safe to re-run)

That's it. Now search with mailwise search "..." or get AI analysis with mailwise analyze "...".

Commands

Search for similar issues

mailwise search "describe the issue here" --show-body

• --show-body — show a preview of each matching message
• --expert-only — only show replies from expert engineers
• -k N — number of results (default: 10)

Deep analysis with RAG

mailwise analyze "paste full bug report or issue description here"

• -k N — number of similar issues to feed to Claude (default: 5)

Tip: Paste the FULL bug report — error codes, logs, environment details produce much better matches.

mailwise analyze "$(cat bug_report.txt)" -k 10

View a full email thread

mailwise show <EMAIL_ID>

Check index status

mailwise stats

Manage expert engineers

mailwise experts list
mailwise experts add [e-mail] --name "Jane Doe"
mailwise experts remove [e-mail]

Expert engineers' replies get ★Expert tags and boosted scores in search results.

Typical workflow

1. User describes an issue or pastes a bug report
2. Run mailwise search "..." --show-body to find similar past issues
3. If promising results found, run mailwise analyze "..." for deep RAG analysis
4. Use mailwise show <ID> to read full threads of interest
5. Summarize findings: root cause patterns, debugging steps, and next actions

Privacy & data handling

• Local-only commands (index, search, show, stats, experts): Everything runs on your machine. Embeddings generated locally via sentence-transformers. No data sent anywhere.
• External LLM command (analyze): Sends email excerpts to the Anthropic API via Claude Code CLI. Do not use on sensitive emails unless your org's data policy permits it.

Authentication

• The analyze command requires Claude Code CLI — run claude once to authenticate, or set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
• No auth needed for local commands (index, search, show, stats, experts)