How To Use Your Email Client For Physical Mail

Whether it's to re-read a conversation, find a plane ticket I ordered or check when a meeting was planned, I often find myself looking up old emails. It's usually easy to do so because email clients are designed for the task: Many of them support full-text search and some even complement that with neat tagging and categorization systems. To be honest I have become completely dependent on those features for my day to day life. Having full-text search and some sort of categorization for email can be a huge time saver. When it comes to physical mail however, I still have to browse through stacks of paper to (hopefully) find what I'm looking for. I figured that it'd be nice to use my fancy email client to deal with physical mail as well, so I found a way to do just that. Turns out it's pretty simple!

The main objective here is to transform our physical mail into an email that can be received, indexed and read by our email client of choice. Now, one way to do that would be to type the contents of our mail into an email by hand, but ain't nobody got time for that!. The (more appealing) alternative is to use a document scanner. I have a single purpose scanner unit from Canon that I hook up to my laptop for just this purpose.

It isn't as simple as just emailing a scanned document to ourselves though: email clients are smart, but they can't understand a word of text in our PDF or JPEG of a physical document. They need content to be in plain text form in order to provide us with some of their best features like full-text search. We'll have to somehow transform our scanned documents into plain text that we can include in our email. To do this, we can use tesseract. Tesseract is an optical character recognition (OCR) engine, meaning that it can recognize text in images and extract it for us. Installing it should be easy on Debian derivative distros like Ubuntu. My laptop is running Debian unstable so I just ran apt install tesseract and started using it. Using it is as easy as upening up a terminal and typing tesseract FILE.jpg OUTPUT. That command will save all the text that tesseract is able to recognize in the image FILE.jpg to a file called OUTPUT.txt.

All we have to do from there is copy-paste the contents of that file into an email and send it to ourselves! Depending on the formatting of the input document, the output may not always be pleasant to read. We can account for this by including the original document as an attachment to the email. That way we get the best of both worlds: we can use the search functionality of our email client to find the document, and then read it in its original form by opening the attachment.

This is all easy enough, but I'm lazy. I didn't feel like opening up my email client and doing manual copy-pasting, so I decided to automate the process a little further. I have postfix setup on my system to relay to my mail server, so I can simply use the mail command to send emails without a GUI mail client. I combined that with tesseract in a little bash script. The script iterates through all of its arguments and interprets them as filenames of scanned documents. It calls tesseract to extract text from them, concatenates the results, attaches the files to an email and sends it to my personal email address. Now all I have to do is run the script with filenames of some documents and my job is done. If anyone is interested in an actual program that does the same thing and doesn't require you to setup postfix, let me know! I might consider authoring one if it's useful to more people than just myself. The script I'm currently using can be found here (pretty) and here (raw), but I don't recommend using it if you don't fully understand its contents, it's not a polished user experience 🤓.