Email KB Assistant

A desktop email drafting and knowledge management tool built with Electron, React, and Claude AI. Designed for academics, professionals, and anyone who manages high-volume professional communication.

Features

• AI-Powered Drafting — Generate or polish emails using Claude (Anthropic), OpenAI-compatible models, Ollama, or local GGUF models
• Contact Management — Maintain profiles with relationship types, language preferences, and communication history
• Knowledge Base — Upload PDFs, DOCX, Markdown, or fetch URLs as reference context for AI generation
• Thread Archive — Save and search communication records with full-text and semantic search
• Writing Style Training — Teach the AI your personal writing style with rules and examples
• IMAP Integration — Import emails directly from Gmail or Outlook
• Templates & Skills — Reusable email templates and customizable AI behavior files
• Multi-Language UI — English, Simplified Chinese (简体中文), and Spanish (Español)
• Obsidian Compatible — Store all data as Markdown files in an Obsidian vault (or any folder)
• Offline Capable — Works with local models (Ollama, GGUF) for fully offline operation

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Windows 10+ (64-bit)
• Node.js 18+ and npm
• An Anthropic API key (get one here)

Development Setup

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/email-kb-assistant.git
cd email-kb-assistant

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Copy and configure environment variables
cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env with your API keys

# Start development server
npm run dev

Build for Production

# Type check
npx tsc --noEmit

# Build installer + portable
npm run dist

Output in release/:

• Email KB Assistant Setup 1.0.0.exe — Windows installer
• win-unpacked/ — Portable version (no installation needed)

Architecture

Electron desktop app with a React/Vite/Tailwind renderer and Node.js main process.

src/
├── main/           # Electron main process
│   ├── ipc/        # IPC handlers (one file per feature)
│   ├── services/   # Business logic, LLM providers, file I/O
│   └── defaults/   # Default skills, templates, user guide
├── renderer/       # React frontend
│   ├── components/ # UI components
│   ├── hooks/      # Custom React hooks
│   ├── i18n/       # Language files (en, zh, es)
│   └── types/      # TypeScript interfaces
└── preload/        # Electron contextBridge

All user data is stored as plain Markdown and YAML files in a user-chosen folder, making it fully portable and compatible with Obsidian, VS Code, or any text editor.

Development Background

This project was built by a university professor to solve a real workflow problem: managing hundreds of professional emails across multiple languages (English and Chinese) while maintaining consistent quality and institutional knowledge.

Every feature exists because it was needed in daily use — from IMAP email import to writing style training to the Obsidian-compatible file format.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

This is a personal tool shared for educational purposes. Issues and pull requests are welcome, but response times may vary.