paper-inbox 2025.12.12

Lift the signal from the noise by automatically printing out email paper copies from the senders you do care about.

Paper Inbox

Overwhelmed with emails and newsletters? Lift the signal from the noise by automatically printing out email paper copies from the senders you do care about.

What It Does

• Checks your inbox for messages from specific senders (e.g. school)
• Downloads and prints them with their attachments
• Keeps track of printed emails to avoid duplicates.
• Sends you a telegram msg whenever it prints a new email (optionally)

Limitations

At the moment paper-inbox only supports authentication of gmail inboxes.

Prerequisites

Please set up a google app in your google dashboard with a Gmail API, it will provide you with a secrets file that we will use during the configuration step of paper-inbox

The config will run all the checks on your system and will guide you through how to install some in case they are missing. The system dependencies the app currently relies on are:

• libreoffice: To turn emails into printable PDFs.
• CUPS: The printing system for Linux and macOS.

📦 Installation

pip install paper-inbox

Then run the interactive configuration with the --config flag

🚀 Usage

The interactive configuration should have helped you set up the app on a cron schedule, however you can also just run it manually to check everything is working:

paper-inbox

To see a print out of the current configuration

paper-inbox --show-config

To see a print out of the current cron schedule

paper-inbox --show-cron

To see a print out of used the directories and files

paper-inbox --show-dirs

To open the config dir:

paper-inbox --open-config

License

MIT License. This project is for personal use.