emdash-inbox

The mailbox UI for EmDash CMS. Read, thread, reply, pin, snooze, and mark-done the email your site sends and receives, right inside the admin panel.

Outbound goes through the native Cloudflare Email Sending Workers binding — no API token to manage. Inbound arrives via a small Cloudflare Email Worker sidecar that POSTs to a webhook-secured endpoint. The whole UI is one EmDash plugin.

---

Status

Pre-alpha (v0.7.0). The plugin works end-to-end for outbound + inbound + threading + reply + grouped inbox with per-message read state. M1–M7 shipped: outbound and inbound email work end-to-end via the native CF Email Sending binding; the admin page is a card-based Inbox with pin / snooze / done, filter tabs, date buckets, and a cron-driven wake path for snoozed messages; clicking a card opens a thread-grouped detail view with sanitized HTML body rendering and thread-level bulk actions; the thread view has an inline TipTap-based reply form (pre-filled To / Subject / quoted body, Cmd+Enter to send); the inbox list collapses messages to one card per thread with participant chips, message-count badge, and a faded second snippet when the thread has history; and an admin-auth MCP route (messages/mcp) exposes 7 inbox tools over JSON-RPC 2.0. Inbox list aggregates threads client-side over all messages on every list-view fetch — fine for personal mailboxes (<5K messages), revisit before v1.0 if running at higher volumes.

Built against EmDash v0.14.0 (bumped from 0.12 — see CHANGELOG). Expect breaking changes between commits as EmDash itself matures.

Why this exists

EmDash (Cloudflare's WordPress successor, released April 2026) ships with a plugin system, a media library, content types, and an MCP server — but not with email. Cloudflare Email Service (public beta, April 2026) provides a native Workers binding for sending and a receive pipeline via Email Workers.

emdash-inbox is the missing piece: one plugin that makes EmDash a CMS and an email client, using the platform Cloudflare stack underneath.

Operator setup

1. Onboard your sender domain to Cloudflare Email Sending (Dashboard -> Compute & AI -> Email Service -> Email Sending -> Onboard Domain). One-time.
2. Add the send_email binding to your host's wrangler.jsonc:

   "send_email": [
     { "name": "EMAIL", "remote": true }
   ]

3. Wire the plugin into astro.config.mjs alongside the existing ssr.noExternal: ["emdash-inbox"] entry. Under EmDash 0.12 the plugin's runtime deps (TipTap, dompurify, postal-mime) also want to be listed in vite.ssr.noExternal to avoid Vite optimizer cascades during dev — the browser still serves correctly without it, the cascades are just noisy.
4. Configure plugin settings in the admin: senderAddress (your verified sender) and inboundSecret (a long random string shared with the inbound sidecar worker).
5. Deploy the inbound sidecar Worker under examples/inbound-email-worker/ and bind it to your domain via Cloudflare Email Routing. The sidecar POSTs raw RFC822 to POST /_emdash/api/plugins/emdash-inbox/inbound, gated by X-Inbound-Secret matching the value you configured in step 4.

Operators upgrading from 0.6.x: the accountId and apiToken fields are gone — existing rows for those settings are cleared automatically on first request after upgrade. The CF API token they referenced can be revoked.

Troubleshooting

• No email provider configured / EMAIL_NOT_CONFIGURED after install. Tail the host worker (wrangler tail) and look for [hooks] Plugin "emdash-inbox" declares email:deliver hook without hooks.email-transport:register capability — skipping. That message means your host is on EmDash 0.14+ and is bundling an older definePlugin from emdash-inbox's nested node_modules. Make sure emdash-inbox's devDependencies.emdash matches your host's installed version (≥0.14) and rebuild the plugin with pnpm install && pnpm build. The current main branch is already set up for 0.14.
• Magic-link URL contains localhost:4321. EmDash stores the base URL under the emdash:site_url option in the database, set during initial setup. Setting SITE_URL in wrangler.jsonc afterwards does not back-fill that row. Update it directly: wrangler d1 execute <db> --remote --command "UPDATE options SET value='\"https://your.domain\"' WHERE name='emdash:site_url';"

Roadmap

Milestone	Deliverable
M1 ✅	email:provide claimed; email:deliver hook sends via Cloudflare Email Service (REST path in M1; migrated to the native binding in M7). Outbound proven end-to-end.
M2 ✅	Inbound via Cloudflare Email Worker; basic list-view admin page.
M3 ✅	Inbox-by-Google UX: card-based list, pin / snooze / done, filter tabs, date buckets, cron wake path for snoozed messages.
M4 ✅	Threading (derived from In-Reply-To / References at ingest), message detail / thread view, sanitized HTML body rendering with external-image gating, thread-level bulk actions.
M5 ✅	Inline reply / compose in the thread view (TipTap StarterKit editor, pre-filled To / Subject with Re-prefix dedup, quoted-body seed, Cmd+Enter to send, Esc to discard); shared deliverEmail() extraction so both the email:deliver hook and the new messages/reply route dispatch through one path.
M6 ✅	Thread-grouping in the inbox list (one card per thread with participant chips, message-count badge, two-snippet preview when N≥2); per-message read state with auto-mark-read on thread open; latest-message-wins filter behavior; new <ThreadCard> with fan-out hover actions matching <ThreadView>'s bulk-action pattern.
M7 ✅	REST-to-native binding migration for outbound (drops the accountId / apiToken settings + the network:fetch capability); admin-auth messages/mcp route exposing 7 inbox tools over JSON-RPC 2.0 (list_threads, get_thread, search_messages, mark_read, pin_thread, snooze_thread, mark_done); typed EmailBinding + DeliverError + wrapBindingError() helper module.
M8	Compose-from-scratch + reply-all + CC / BCC, attachments (unblocked by M7's binding migration), drafts, signatures, toast undo, pagination for messages/list. Compose surfaces in both the admin UI and the messages/mcp MCP route, so AI clients can send mail (not just triage existing threads).
M8b	Complete the messages/mcp triage suite so anything possible in the admin UI is also possible through Claude / other MCP clients: compose, reply, reply-all, draft save, attachment upload, plus the existing read + status tools. Target: "full inbox in a Claude chat."
M9	Bundle classification (Orders, Shipping, Commissions, Fans, Promos, Updates) + highlights — structured field extraction surfaced as inline cards. Reminders, content linking. v1.0.

Attribution

Informed by patterns from SaasMail (Apache License 2.0) — particularly around Cloudflare Email Workers inbound handling, MIME parsing, and the rich-text composer. See NOTICE.

License

Apache License 2.0.