PyGrunn: how to sort and route your (physical) mail - Bart Dorlandt¶
(One of my summaries of the 2026 one-day PyGrunn conference in Groningen, NL).
Full title: how to store and route your (physical) mail like a pro - personal edition.
How do you deal with your mail? Your physical mail? How do you store it? If the tax people want to have some information, can you find it, for instance?
Bart’s motto is there must be a better way. So what is the pragmatic approach to better physical mail handling? A mail handling system that is flexible, automated, searchable and easy to use.
He discovered paperless-ngx, an open source document management system that allow you to store, organize and search your documents. Web interface, api, it can also read emails (via the “gotenburg” plugin). It can watch folders for new docs to process. It has features for structuring, self-improving (without AI). Tags. And you can have workflows.
Nice. Documents can go to Paperless. But he still has his bookkeeping system (he has his own company). And the bookkeeper wants emails with documents that are in Paperless. Can he improve this? For instance for receipts. He didn’t want to scan all of them to PDF. And regular phone cameras don’t produce PDFs.
He started using “dropbox camera”. It works great for scanning receipts and documents. It recognizes corners and pages and enhances the contrast. It produces PDFs and uploads them to dropbox. (You must accept the fact that it ends up in the cloud: he build all this pre-Trump…)
He has a Synology NAS at home. That has a CloudSync app that you can use to sync the dropbox folder to the NAS.
He wanted to make some python glue gode. Ability to send to multiple destinations. Process folders for new files. Moving files to a “done” folder. Python looks at the various folders: he configured a specific custom “processor” per folder. So a move-to-paperless processor, for instance. And a processor that emails the scanned receipts directly to the bookkeeper.
Lots of it is automated. Just drop a PDF in a folder and the system takes care of it. Once in a while he checks Paperless and categorizes/stores what’s left in the inbox.
It was a personal project, so he used it to experiment with Dataclass and Protocol. Don’t forget to learn when you create/automate something for yourself.
He finds it awesome that something this easy saves him hours! What can you automate in your life?
Unrelated photo: the “lac de Kruth-Wildenstein” reservoir during a family holiday in France in 2006.