Ultimate Guide: Build an AI Email Assistant with OpenClaw & Himalaya

Managing email is one of the biggest productivity drains for any developer or CTO. We spend hours filtering out newsletters, reading long threads, and drafting replies that could easily be automated.

What if you could manage your entire inbox from the terminal, using an AI agent to read, summarize, and draft replies for you?

In this guide, I will show you how to combine Himalaya - a blazingly fast CLI email client - with OpenClaw to build your own autonomous email assistant.

Why Himalaya and OpenClaw?

I've tried many email clients, but when you want to build AI automations, you need tools that work well in the terminal.

• Himalaya is written in Rust, handles IMAP/SMTP efficiently, and can output everything in JSON or plain text.
• OpenClaw is a framework that connects AI models to local tools, allowing your agent to run Himalaya commands, reason about the output, and take action.

By combining them, the AI can literally read your inbox and type out replies.

1. Setting Up Himalaya

First, you need to install Himalaya. If you are on macOS, you can use Homebrew:

brew install himalaya

Next, configure your email account. You can run the interactive wizard (himalaya account configure) or manually create the ~/.config/himalaya/config.toml file.

Here is a basic IMAP/SMTP configuration:

[accounts.personal]
email = "[email protected]"
display-name = "Your Name"
default = true

backend.type = "imap"
backend.host = "imap.example.com"
backend.port = 993
backend.encryption.type = "tls"
backend.login = "[email protected]"
# Store passwords securely!
backend.auth.type = "password"
backend.auth.cmd = "pass show email/imap"  

message.send.backend.type = "smtp"
message.send.backend.host = "smtp.example.com"
message.send.backend.port = 587
# ...

Once configured, verify it works by listing your latest emails:

himalaya envelope list

2. Connecting OpenClaw

OpenClaw has a built-in skill for Himalaya. You just need to ensure the framework is installed and ready.

When you ask OpenClaw to check your emails, it will automatically discover the himalaya CLI tool and use it.

3. Automating Your Workflow

Now comes the fun part. Here are three powerful ways you can use your new AI assistant.

The Morning Triage

Instead of opening your email client and getting overwhelmed, you can ask OpenClaw:

"Check my unread emails from yesterday, summarize the important ones, and list what I need to reply to."

OpenClaw will run himalaya envelope list, read the specific message IDs using himalaya message read <id>, and give you a concise bulleted list.

Drafting Replies

If an email requires a standard response, the AI can draft it for you and save it or send it directly.

"Read email ID 42. Draft a polite reply saying I am unavailable for a meeting this week, but I can do next Tuesday."

The agent will use Himalaya's template system to draft the response:

cat << 'EOF' | himalaya template send
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Meeting Request

Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out! I am unavailable this week, but let's connect next Tuesday.
Best,
Matteo
EOF

Intelligent Archive & Tagging

You can run an OpenClaw script daily to clean up your inbox. The agent can loop through your emails, identify newsletters, and move them to an "Archive" folder using:

himalaya message move <id> "Archive"

Security & Local Models

When giving an AI access to your email, privacy is paramount. Do not use cloud models for highly sensitive inboxes.

Instead, configure OpenClaw to use a local model via Ollama (like llama3 or qwen). Local models are now smart enough to summarize and draft emails, and your data never leaves your machine.

Conclusion

Automating email doesn't mean you stop reading it. It means you stop managing the repetitive tasks. With OpenClaw and Himalaya, you can treat your inbox as an API and let the AI do the heavy lifting.

Have you tried automating your inbox? Let me know your setup!