Records & correspondence
Paperline
A self-hosted pipeline for long investigations. Point it at your folders of email and documents; it produces a hash-verified, full-text-searchable archive — with a master timeline, version diffs between document revisions, and an append-only audit log.
- License
- MIT
- Runtime
- Python 3.12+
- Status
- Beta v0.2
- Price
- Free
What it is
A record you can still trust a year later.
A long investigation drowns in email exports and document versions. Paperline is the pipeline that turns that pile into a record you can search, verify, and trust a year later — on your own machine, not a shared platform.
Decision support and chronology generation from records. Not a substitute for forensic preservation. Any chain-of-custody standard your jurisdiction or counsel requires is on you.
01
Hash-verified records
Every file gets a sha256 in a sibling manifest; an append-only audit log records every ingest. Re-run the verifier and it re-hashes everything — the record can show it was not quietly changed.
02
A timeline that builds itself
Drop email and documents into folders. Paperline emits a master timeline, a document-version map, and clause-level diffs between revisions — searchable in SQLite FTS5 or rendered for Obsidian.
03
Capture where the mail is
Pluggable capture: Yahoo Mail over browser automation, Gmail over IMAP. A small interface makes adding another provider straightforward when you need it.
What a run produces
Reports, not just a database.
Each pipeline run regenerates the derived layer — the parts a person actually reads.
Timeline
Master timeline
Every record placed in chronological order — the spine of the investigation, regenerated on every run.
Diffs
Version & clause diffs
A document-version map plus section-level diffs between revisions — what changed between draft three and draft four.
Integrity
Verification report
A per-run hash-integrity check and a duplicate report — proof the corpus is what it was, and free of accidental copies.
Who it's for
If this sounds like you, it will fit.
- Investigative reporters and freelance journalists running multi-month stories with source correspondence and document trails.
- Compliance officers building an investigative record of who said what, and when — for internal review and decision support.
- Archivists who need a verifiable, searchable record on their own machine — no cloud, no shared platform.
Plainly
What it does, and what it doesn't.
What it does
- Walks content folders into a hash-verified SQLite FTS5 corpus
- Emits timeline, version-map, clause-diff, duplicate, and integrity reports
- Captures mail from Yahoo and Gmail
- Renders the record as Obsidian-readable markdown
- Keeps an append-only audit log and chain-of-custody log
What it doesn't
- It is not a SaaS — you self-host it
- It is not a multi-user platform — it is single-operator by design
- It does not back up your data for you — that stays your responsibility
Get it
One tier. Free.
Paperline v0.2 is a single free, MIT-licensed release. Clone it, run it, keep it.
The whole pipeline
Free
The complete records pipeline, nothing held back.
- The full capture-and-build pipeline
- Yahoo + Gmail capture providers
- All reports — timeline, diffs, integrity
- Journal and reference subsystems
- A worked example to learn from
No account. Clone it and it is yours.
No paid tier in v0.2. If a supported or hosted version is worth building, it follows real user demand — not the other way around.
Start the record before the story gets long.
Clone Paperline, point it at the folders you already have, and run the pipeline. The record gets easier to trust the earlier you start it.