owa-mail 0.1.1

Pipe-friendly mail CLI for Outlook / Microsoft 365

owa-mail

Mail CLI for Outlook / Microsoft 365. Read, send, schedule, reply, forward, move, mark and delete mail from the terminal. Pipe-friendly JSON by default, --pretty for humans.

brew install damsleth/tap/owa-mail
owa-mail messages --pretty

Or one-shot, no install, no on-disk state:

OWA_REFRESH_TOKEN=1.AQ... OWA_TENANT_ID=<tenant-id-or-domain> \
  uvx owa-mail messages --pretty

uvx pulls owa-mail (and owa-piggy as a transitive dep) into a throwaway venv. The two env vars feed straight through to owa-piggy's env-only mode - nothing is written to ~/.config/.

---

Happy-path setup (no app registration)

owa-piggy owns the token lifecycle; owa-mail just shells out to it on every call. The full first-run flow:

# 1. Install both
brew install damsleth/tap/owa-piggy damsleth/tap/owa-mail

# 2. Seed owa-piggy once from your browser (walks you through it)
owa-piggy setup

# 3. Go
owa-mail messages --pretty

owa-piggy and owa-mail version independently. owa-mail expects any owa-piggy >= 0.6.0 and sanity-checks the version on first call.

Multi-account: seed a named owa-piggy profile and pin it in owa-mail's config.

owa-piggy setup --profile work
owa-mail config --profile work

--profile also works as a one-shot override: owa-mail --profile home messages.

---

The output contract

JSON on stdout, logs on stderr. Every read command emits parseable JSON by default; --pretty is a human override that goes to stdout too. The entire CLI composes with jq:

owa-mail messages --limit 5

[
  {
    "id": "AAMkAG...",
    "conversation_id": "...",
    "received": "2026-04-30T08:42:11Z",
    "subject": "Hello",
    "from": "[e-mail]",
    "to": "[e-mail]",
    "cc": "",
    "preview": "Just checking in...",
    "is_read": false,
    "has_attachments": false,
    "importance": "Normal",
    "flag": "NotFlagged",
    "folder_id": "AAA...",
    "web_link": "https://outlook.office.com/..."
  }
]

Field names in the output are stable lowercase; the backend is Outlook REST v2 (PascalCase upstream) but owa-mail hides that detail.

owa-mail messages --unread | jq '.[] | "\(.from): \(.subject)"'
owa-mail messages --since 2026-04-01 | jq '[.[] | select(.has_attachments)] | length'
owa-mail folders | jq '.[] | select(.unread > 0)'

show returns a single message object (with body and body_type fields included). send/reply/forward return {"sent": true, "id": "...", "send_at": null|"<iso>"}. mark/move return the updated message resource. delete writes Deleted. to stderr.

---

Commands

# Read
owa-mail messages --pretty                           # Inbox, last 25
owa-mail messages --unread --limit 10 --pretty
owa-mail messages --folder SentItems --since 2026-04-01 --pretty
owa-mail messages --search 'subject:invoice'         # KQL search
owa-mail show --id AAMkAG... --pretty
owa-mail show --id AAMkAG... --html                  # raw HTML body

# Send
owa-mail send --to [e-mail] --subject "hi" --body "hello"
owa-mail send --to a@b.c,c@d.e --cc x@y.z --subject "review" --body "..." --html
owa-mail send --to a@b.c --subject "later" --body "..." --send-at 2026-05-01T09:00:00Z
owa-mail send --to a@b.c --subject "draft" --body "..." --save-draft
echo "body from pipe" | owa-mail send --to a@b.c --subject "piped" --body -

# Threads
owa-mail reply --id AAMkAG... --body "thanks"
owa-mail reply-all --id AAMkAG... --body "thanks all"
owa-mail forward --id AAMkAG... --to [e-mail] --body "fyi"

# Mailbox
owa-mail folders --pretty
owa-mail mark --id AAMkAG... --read
owa-mail mark --id AAMkAG... --flag
owa-mail move --id AAMkAG... --to Archive
owa-mail delete --id AAMkAG... --confirm

Folder names

The --folder and --to (move) flags accept these well-known names (case-insensitive, with common aliases):

Canonical	Aliases
Inbox
Drafts	draft
SentItems	sent
DeletedItems	deleted, trash
JunkEmail	junk, spam
Outbox
Archive	archived

Anything else is treated as an opaque folder id (look one up via owa-mail folders | jq '.[] | {name, id}').

Scheduled send

--send-at accepts an ISO datetime. Naive values are interpreted as UTC; offsets are converted to UTC before being attached to the draft.

owa-mail send --to a@b.c --subject "later" --body "..." --send-at 2026-05-01T09:00:00Z
owa-mail send --to a@b.c --subject "later" --body "..." --send-at 2026-05-01T09:00:00+02:00

Behind the scenes owa-mail creates a draft, attaches the PR_DEFERRED_SEND_TIME extended property, and dispatches it to /send. Exchange Transport then holds the message in your Outbox until the scheduled time - the same mechanism OWA's "Schedule send" button uses.

---

Auth

Two paths:

• owa-piggy bridge (default) - owa-mail shells out to owa-piggy, which piggybacks on OWA's public SPA client. No app registration needed; owa-mail stores no refresh token. Optional owa_piggy_profile pins a named owa-piggy profile.
• With an app registration - set OUTLOOK_APP_CLIENT_ID, OUTLOOK_REFRESH_TOKEN, and OUTLOOK_TENANT_ID in the config file and owa-mail talks to the AAD token endpoint directly. The app registration must have Mail.ReadWrite and Mail.Send (delegated) consented for your user.

Config lives at ~/.config/owa-mail/config:

# Default (owa-piggy) path - optional, pins a profile alias
owa_piggy_profile="work"

# App-registration path (optional, mutually exclusive)
OUTLOOK_APP_CLIENT_ID=""
OUTLOOK_REFRESH_TOKEN=""
OUTLOOK_TENANT_ID=""

---

Dependencies

• Python 3.8+ (stdlib only - no pip install required at runtime)
• owa-piggy unless you bring your own app registration

Development

git clone https://github.com/damsleth/owa-mail
cd owa-mail
python -m pip install -e '.[test]'
python -m pytest -q

Live mailbox tests are opt-in and hit a real Outlook account through owa-piggy. Set the live profile alias and recipient explicitly, and optionally override the Python interpreter used for -m owa_mail:

OWA_MAIL_LIVE=1 OWA_MAIL_LIVE_PROFILE=work OWA_MAIL_LIVE_TO=[e-mail] \
  python -m pytest -q tests/test_live.py
OWA_MAIL_LIVE=1 OWA_MAIL_LIVE_PROFILE=work OWA_MAIL_LIVE_TO=[e-mail] \
  OWA_MAIL_LIVE_PYTHON=python3 python -m pytest -q tests/test_live.py

See AGENTS.md for repo layout and ground rules.

What's not in this version

• Attachments - read or send. Planned for v0.2.
• @odata.nextLink pagination - --limit caps a single page; use date bounds (--since / --until) to walk further back.
• HTML-to-text rendering - --pretty shows the API's BodyPreview field; --html on show prints raw HTML. owa-mail does not parse HTML for terminal display (stdlib-only).
• Real-time receive (webhooks, IMAP IDLE) - poll messages --unread from cron or your agent loop.

Disclaimer

Personal tooling. The default (owa-piggy bridge) path holds no
refresh token of its own - tokens are owa-piggy's responsibility,
scoped to its profile store. The optional app-registration path
does persist a delegated refresh token in owa-mail's config file.
If you don't know why either of those might be a bad idea, don't
use it.