msgvault-moonframe

A native reader for msgvault archives (email, chats, labels and attachments), built on Moonframe: the whole window is laid out by Luau, while Rust reads the archive.

It is msgvault-gpui rebuilt as a real app on the Moonframe library, to show what one looks like: the same msgvault-core crate, but no hand-written GPUI views.

How it is put together

Location	What it does
crates/msgvault-core	msgvault-gpui's core, unchanged but for its SQLite version: archive location, model, and the Backend trait with a read-only SQLite reader and a msgvault serve client.
crates/msgvault-moonframe/src/main.rs	The app: Moonframe::new("msgvault-moonframe"), its app folder, and one native provider, vault.
crates/msgvault-moonframe/src/vault.rs	The vault provider: reads the archive through msgvault-core and publishes what the views show as app.vault; mods send it messages ({ mailbox = "inbox" }, { open = id }, { query = "from:ada" }, ...).
crates/msgvault-moonframe/src/page.rs	HTML mail as a page for the reader's web view: no script, nothing from the network until asked.
crates/msgvault-moonframe/app/	The window, in Luau: mods/titlebar, mods/sidebar, mods/list and mods/reader, two components and style.luau. Edits show live while the app runs.

The app gets Moonframe's shell for free: the menus, light and dark themes, --check, and the Send feedback ?, which asks a coding agent to change the app's own Luau.

What it shows

• Title bar: search with msgvault's Gmail-like syntax (free text, from:, to:, subject:, label:, has:attachment, is:unread, is:starred, before:, after:), where the archive is read from, refresh (⌘R) and the light/dark switch.

• Sidebar: the account in view, the standard mailboxes with counts, coloured labels, Gmail's categories, the other sources (WhatsApp, Slack, the calendar, messages removed upstream), every account, and the archive's size.

• List: one row per conversation, its newest message.

• Reader: an email thread with earlier messages folded, or a chat as bubbles. HTML mail renders in a web view (toggle with ⌘⇧H) with remote pictures blocked until you load them. Attachments can be opened or saved, only on a click. All Attachments lists every file, by kind and search.

• Live: what msgvault syncs shows by itself within two seconds (the database's files are watched, no query; a daemon is asked every 30 s), and new rows come in tinted, then settle.

• Scramble (View › Scramble Names and Text, ⌘⇧X), to share a screenshot of a real archive: every name, address, subject, body, label and filename is swapped for a made-up one (a person keeps one name everywhere), HTML mail shows as its scrambled text, pictures are hidden, and the title bar says "Scrambled". It is kept across launches; ⌘⇧X or the pill turns it off.

  A screenshot can't be descrambled: each made-up word or name comes from a short list, chosen by a hash keyed with a random secret made on your machine (~/.cache/msgvault-moonframe/scramble.key, never shown), so many real words share each made-up one and nobody without the secret can check a guess. Even word lengths vary. A test opens every conversation of the demo archive and fails if any of its words shows while scrambled. What stays, so it still looks like mail: dates and times, counts and sizes, emoji, punctuation, a file's extension, the kinds of sources, and roughly how long each text is. Don't share scramble.key.

Run it

just run          # a `msgvault serve` daemon, else $MSGVAULT_HOME or ~/.msgvault
just demo         # msgvault-core's generated demo archive
just check        # load every mod and provider headlessly

Without an archive it opens the demo archive by itself, and the title bar says "Sample". It only ever reads: SQLite is opened read-only.

Developer Mode, in the app menu, turns on Moonframe's tools for changing the app as it runs (the Components menu, Inspect Element, Reload Modules), live and without a rebuild; the choice is kept. Until you pick, it is on in cargo run and off in just run (a release build).

Moonframe comes from GitHub, pinned in Cargo.toml, with only the features this app uses. To work on both at once, patch it to a checkout:

[patch."https://github.com/penso/moonframe"]
moonframe = { path = "../moonframe/crates/moonframe" }

Speed

Each part of what the window shows is read once and kept until what it depends on changes: opening a message reads only its thread, switching mailboxes only the list, and the counts and labels (the costly queries on a large archive) only when the account changes or msgvault syncs. The list reads 100 conversations at a time ("Show more" for the next). Every click logs where its time went, without any of the archive's content:

vault: open in 6 ms (thread 4 ms, rows 1 ms, reader 1 ms; publish 0 ms, 100 rows)
moonframe::perf: provider vault: published, 4 views ran in 9.8ms

RUST_LOG=msgvault_moonframe=info,moonframe=info shows them (on by default).

Install

Each release has a macOS disk image (signed and notarized), Linux tarballs and a Windows zip, with checksums, Sigstore signatures, SLSA build provenance and an SBOM; see docs/releasing.md for how it is made and how to verify a download.

Develop

just format (nightly rustfmt and taplo), then just ci: formatting, lockfile, clippy with -D warnings, tests, and the headless check. just deny checks licences and advisories.

MIT licensed. msgvault's schema in crates/msgvault-core/schema keeps its own licence.