Introduction

I have been living in my e-mail inbox for more than 30 years since the beginning of the internet in the mid-1990s.

I became a Gmail user in 2006, 20 years ago. During that time, Gmail has become increasingly, to quote Cory Doctorow, enshittified. But my whole life is there, locked up inside Google’s walled garden. I built msgvault so that I could break free from this cage and have control of my life’s messaging data and build advanced tools and systems to do useful things with it.

This means:

• Search it instantaneously and categorize it the way I want. With a beautiful fast terminal UI rather than a slow, increasingly less useful web application.
• Chat with it securely via MCP in Claude Desktop and using my home local LLM inference servers.
• Extract and file away the over 100,000 e-mail attachments sent to me over the years.

I started with Gmail but I want all my life’s messages in this system, including WhatsApp, iMessage, and Google Voice.

I suspect I am not the only one who has felt this way. I hope you will join me in this revolution to liberate our life’s messages from their enshittified digital prisons.

— Wes McKinney, February 2026

Read more in the announcement blog post.