Classic, Minimal, and Express, left to right
Gofer is a self-hosted webmail I'm building because I wanted one that's actually nice to use. Mail, contacts, and calendar in one place, running on your own machine or server, open in any browser.
It's pre-1.0, so things still change, but I use it every day with six accounts and around 100k emails, and it holds up fine.
- All your accounts in one place: Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, and any IMAP/SMTP server.
- Mail the way you'd expect: threads, labels, drag and drop, scheduled send, signatures, translation, and solid search.
- Contacts and calendar too: syncs with Google, Outlook, CardDAV, and CalDAV. Drag events around, send invites, RSVP right from the email, and add Meet or Teams links.
- Your data stays yours: export mailboxes as mbox, import from other apps, move mail between accounts, and take your whole setup to another Gofer.
- For you, your family, or your office: run it with no login, as one protected profile, or for several users with their own admins.
- Safe by default: encrypted credentials, remote images blocked, and MFA with passkeys or TOTP.
- Make it yours: three looks (Classic, Minimal, and a retro one called Express), flexible layouts, and push notifications.
Grab a binary from the releases page, run it, and open http://localhost:8090. IMAP accounts work right away. Gmail and Outlook need your own OAuth app for now (I'm working on that).
Prefer Docker? There's an image at ghcr.io/cristianadrielbraun/gofer and an example compose.yaml; see docs/setup.md.
Auth modes, accounts, upgrades, and deployment are all in docs/setup.md. Please keep backups before upgrading.
To build from source you need Go 1.27.1+, templ, tailwindcss, and task:
task dev # dev server with hot reload, at http://local.localhost:8090
task release # self-contained binary at ./dist/goferEasier first-run setup, Gmail and Outlook without your own OAuth app, clearer reconnect flows, more calendar providers, more shortcuts and bulk actions. Ideas and bug reports are welcome.
I build Gofer with a lot of help from AI coding tools. I decide what goes in, review it, and use the result every day.
Some of the main libraries and tools Gofer leans on, because pretending I wrote the whole mail stack from scratch would be absurd:
- templ for Go-based views
- templUI for several UI components
- HTMX for server-driven interactions
- Tailwind CSS for styling
- modernc.org/sqlite for SQLite storage
- emersion's Go mail libraries, including go-imap, go-smtp, go-message, go-sasl, and go-vcard, which provide much of Gofer's mail, MIME, auth, and contact-format foundation
- golang.org/x/oauth2 for OAuth flows
- webpush-go for Web Push notifications
- Lucide icons through templUI's icon component
