Example: Ingest .eml Files

This example shows the shortest file-based ingest path for individual .eml messages.

Use this when you have exported messages on disk, synthetic fixtures for tests, a small set of messages to inspect manually, or parser changes you want to test against known inputs.

For a full walkthrough, use Quickstart.

Before you start

python -m pip install mailatlas
export MAILATLAS_HOME="$PWD/.mailatlas"

If you need sample fixtures:

git clone https://github.com/mailatlas/sample-data.git

Ingest one .eml file

mailatlas ingest sample-data/fixtures/eml/atlas-market-map.eml

Expected output shape:

{
  "status": "ok",
  "ingested_count": 1,
  "duplicate_count": 0,
  "document_refs": [
    {
      "id": "<document-id>",
      "subject": "<subject>",
      "source_kind": "eml",
      "created_at": "<timestamp>"
    }
  ]
}

Ingest multiple .eml files

mailatlas ingest \
  sample-data/fixtures/eml/atlas-market-map.eml \
  sample-data/fixtures/eml/atlas-founder-forward.eml

MailAtlas stores each unique message as a document in the same workspace.

Inspect and export

mailatlas list
mailatlas get <document-id>
mailatlas get <document-id> --format markdown --out ./eml-example-markdown

What this example writes

MailAtlas can write raw email bytes to raw/, normalized HTML to html/, extracted inline images and attachments to assets/, metadata to store.db, and exports to the path passed with --out.