Evolution Assistant

A GNOME Evolution plugin that integrates AI (Claude/Anthropic) directly into the email client. It adds AI-powered actions to the email reader, composer, and inbox.

Features

• Reader: Summarize emails, extract action items, or run custom prompts on the current message
• Composer: Reformulate, shorten, or draft replies for the text in the composer
• Inbox: Automatically classify and archive emails using AI

Requirements

• GNOME Evolution ≥ 3.36
• libsoup-3.0
• json-glib-1.0
• CMake ≥ 3.28
• A C compiler (GCC or Clang)

Build & Install

mkdir _build && cd _build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

make install kopiert das Plugin direkt in das Evolution-Modulverzeichnis:

sudo cp _build/src/libevolution-assistant.so /usr/lib/evolution/modules/

To install into a custom prefix instead of the system Evolution module directory:

cmake -DFORCE_INSTALL_PREFIX=ON -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local ..

Configuration

Copy config.json.example to ~/.config/evolution/assistant/config.json:

mkdir -p ~/.config/evolution/assistant
cp config.json.example ~/.config/evolution/assistant/config.json

API Key

The plugin reads the API key from ~/.authinfo (netrc format) — no environment variable needed. Add this line:

machine api.anthropic.com login apikey password sk-ant-YOUR_KEY_HERE

The api_key_machine field in config.json controls which hostname is looked up in ~/.authinfo.

{
  "backend": "claude",
  "model": "claude-sonnet-4-6",
  "api_key_machine": "api.anthropic.com",
  "max_tokens": 2048,
  "inbox_folder": "Processed",
  "inbox_prompt": "...",
  "prompts": [...]
}

Prompts

Each prompt entry has:

Field	Description
name	Label shown in the UI
context	"reader" or "composer"
prompt	System prompt sent to the AI

Uninstall

cd _build
sudo make uninstall

License

GPL-3.0