Brief

Wes McKinney presents msgvault as a self-hosted alternative to leaving decades of Gmail data inside Google’s systems. He frames the project around personal email sovereignty at scale, citing a 20-year archive of almost 2 million emails and 150,000 attachments, and highlights a technical stack centered on DuckDB, a terminal interface, MCP integration, and a single-binary Go release.

title: @wesmckinn: I've used Gmail for 20 years. Almost 2M emails, 150K attachments. Rather than le...
author: wesmckinn
contenttype: twitterpost
published: 2026-02-02T12:40:56+00:00
source_url: https://x.com/wesmckinn/status/2018303622145065455

word_count: 40

Tweet by @wesmckinn

I've used Gmail for 20 years. Almost 2M emails, 150K attachments. Rather than let Google hold my data hostage, I built msgvault: local-first email archive with a terminal UI and MCP server, powered by DuckDB. Open source, single Go binary.

Posted: 2026-02-02T12:40:56.000Z
Engagement: 4414 likes, 439 retweets, 185 replies