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The client itself: the sync engine and mirror, the Gmail and IMAP providers, the screener, the three boxes and two piles, compose and send, the sanitiser and tracker stripping, contacts, clips, backup, notifications and the guide. The pipeline that ships it. Three runners now build in parallel and the publish gate wants all four platform keys in latest.json before a release leaves draft. Linux gets two more packages Tauri does not build: a flatpak repackaged from the deb against GNOME 48, and a Nix package that relinks the deb against nixpkgs so it runs as a native Wayland client rather than through Xwayland. CI runs the Rust suite on all three desktops rather than on Linux alone, and rebuilds the flatpak manifest on every push to main. Two things that were only ever exercised on macOS and were wrong everywhere else. The menu bar was built by adjusting the submenus macOS is given, so on a platform whose default menu has no File or View the new File menu landed after Edit, Check for Updates landed nowhere, and the three places and the reading pane had no menu at all. The deb declared libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0 and libgtk-3-0 twice, because tauri.conf.json named the dependencies Tauri already emits. The updater key exists now, so releases can sign their artifacts.
9.8 KiB
Design
A mail client for Gmail, macOS first and then the iPhone, that borrows the two ideas worth borrowing from HEY and the two worth borrowing from Superhuman and refuses the rest of both. It exists because the email experience should belong to the person reading it, not to whoever stores the bytes, and because nobody has built a native, quiet, keyboard-driven Gmail client with sender screening. The research behind every claim here is in research/, and the screens are in ui.md.
What we took and what we refused
From HEY: consent and separation. Nobody reaches your Inbox until you have said yes to them once, and mail from people is kept apart from newsletters and receipts by a decision you made, not by a classifier guessing. Reply Later and Set Aside are physical piles rather than flags. Read mail sinks rather than nagging. Notifications are off until you ask for one. Trackers are stripped and named. We refused HEY's layout (one column, a page per thread, a round trip for everything), its insistence that routing is per sender only, and its refusal to let you archive.
From Superhuman: speed and the keyboard. One key per verb, the key printed on every button, and a command palette that reaches every place, every command and every setting, so the app teaches itself. A list beside a reading pane, so you triage without leaving the list. Remind me if no reply, undo send, the contact card. We refused the tracking pixels, the AI surface that ships your mail to a vendor, the inbox-zero streak, the tiny fixed type, and the price.
From neither: the app is the only place your state lives, and that state is yours. Your piles, screening decisions, notes, renames and clips are keyed on the mail itself (the RFC Message-ID and the sender's address), not on Gmail's identifiers, and they are kept in a local database that backs up to a store you choose. Move to Fastmail or Proton next year and every decision comes with you. Gmail is storage and transport. It never sees a HEY-style label, a note, or a rule.
The four places
There are three boxes and one gate, and every sender has exactly one destination among them.
Inbox is for people and for the few services you want to hear from as they arrive. It is a stream, not a queue: what you have not looked at sits under New for you at the top, and everything you have opened or sent sinks to Previously seen beneath it. Neither group carries a count. A reply pulls a thread back up. There is an archive key, because some people need an empty list to feel finished, but nothing in the design pushes you towards it.
Feed is for newsletters and long reads. Every item is already open, in one scrolling column, newest first, with a marker where you left off. There is no read state and no obligation. You scroll it when you want to read, and it never tells you how far behind you are.
Paper Trail is for receipts, confirmations and notifications: things you file and later search for. A flat list, no read state, senders who flood you bundled into one row.
The Screener holds the first message from anyone new until you decide. The card shows who they are, what they sent, and what Margin thinks the right box is and why: written by a person, so Inbox; carries an unsubscribe header, so Feed; sent by a service on someone's behalf, so Paper Trail. One key accepts the suggestion, one picks elsewhere, one says no. No is silent. The decision can be per address or per domain, which is the thing HEY's users ask for most and HEY will not give them. Replies to a thread you are already in bypass the whole system and land in the Inbox, because the sender rule is about first contact, not about conversations.
On first run there is no Screener avalanche. Everyone the account already knows is screened in, routed by the same suggestion rules, and movable later from their contact card: your Google contacts, everyone in the mail that came down with the first sync, and everyone you wrote to in it. Only genuinely new senders from that point on are held.
The two piles
Reply Later and Set Aside sit at the foot of the list as two stacks of cards, always visible, each showing what is on top. A thread you pile leaves the list. Reply Later is for what you owe; Set Aside is for what you need to hand (a ticket, an itinerary, a code). Focus & Reply lines up everything in Reply Later on one page with a reply box beside each, and sending a reply clears the thread from the pile.
Snooze covers the rest: later today, tomorrow, the weekend, a date, or if no reply by a date. A snoozed thread leaves the list and comes back to the top of the Inbox when it is due. There is no scheduler and no server. Whichever of your devices next opens the app checks what is due and brings it back. That is honest about what a client without a server can do, and it is enough.
Keyboard first, mouse whole
Every verb is one unmodified key, the same key Gmail and Superhuman use where they agree
(j, k, e, r, a, f, c, /, x, u, z) and HEY's letters for HEY's verbs (l
Reply Later, s Set Aside, b snooze, y note, m ignore). Number keys go to places. There
are no two-key chords, nothing is modal, and the key is printed on every button so the mouse
teaches the keyboard. Cmd-K opens the palette, which reaches every place, every command and
every setting, though settings itself is a screen you can sit in rather than a list you pass
through. The full map and the reasoning for each conflict are in keyboard.md.
Quiet by design
No unread count, no streak, no photograph when the list is empty. No notification unless you turned it on for that thread or that person. The one number anywhere is the dock badge, and it counts New for you rather than unread mail: what is waiting for a decision once the Screener, the Feed and the Paper Trail have taken everything that is not. That is a fact about your Inbox rather than a reason to open the app, and it turns off in Notifications. Remote images do not load until you ask, tracking pixels are removed before the message renders, and the banner tells you whose pixel it was. Nothing you send carries a tracker and nothing reports when it was opened. Links open with their tracking parameters removed.
There is no AI in this version. Classification is by headers and by your decisions, the way HEY does it, and it is explainable in a sentence on every Screener card. The design leaves a seat for a local model later; it does not leave one for a cloud one.
Reading, writing, and the things HEY owns
Reading happens in a pane beside the list. Long threads collapse quoted text and older messages;
n and p step through messages. A calendar invite renders as a card with accept, maybe and
decline, and a link that opens the event in Margin Calendar. A sender's name opens their contact
card: where their mail delivers, whether they notify you, your note about them, recent threads,
files.
Replies are written under the last message. New mail is a card floating over the list that can expand to the whole window. Every send waits ten seconds with an undo, then leaves. Remind me if no reply is a toggle on the send button.
Notes, renames, merges and clips are the features HEY can offer only because it owns the data model. We can offer them because we keep our own, beside the mail rather than inside it. A note is a private block in the thread and a line under its row. A rename changes the subject for you alone and says so. A merge shows several threads as one and can be undone. A clip is a saved passage with a link back. All of it roams through the backup store, none of it touches Gmail.
What it is not
Not a team tool: no shared threads, comments, or read statuses. Not a calendar: invites hand off to Margin Calendar. Not a scheduler: no send later in this version. Not an assistant: nothing is summarised or drafted for you. Not an archive: the device keeps a window of recent mail, a month unless you ask for more, and the rest stays on Gmail where a search still reaches it. Not a Gmail skin: the Gmail web UI is not a consideration, since the whole point is never opening it.
Visual language
Lifted from margin and the calendar unchanged: warm paper, ink and two softer inks, hairline
borders, a four-step type scale, three radii, one easing curve, light and dark driven by
data-theme. Hanken Grotesk for the interface, Literata for the subject line and for message
bodies, because mail is reading and reading deserves a text face. Both are the default rather than
the law: Appearance offers the six faces the suite bundles and whatever else is on the machine. The additions are mail-specific:
a row hover and a row selection wash, a warmer band for Previously seen, a note surface, a dot
colour for new mail, and the eight muted hues the calendar already uses, here for avatars and
account edges. No CSS framework, no component library, hand-written CSS on tokens.
Rows are two lines: sender and time, then subject and snippet. New mail gets a dot and a heavier sender; nothing else is bold. No chips, no labels in the row, no icons appearing on hover. The reading pane has one bar of verbs with their keys, a serif subject, and messages separated by hairlines rather than cards.
On a phone
The list is the screen, the piles sit above a tab bar with the three boxes and a write button, and a thread is a page with a floating action bar where the thumb is. Swipes are Reply Later to the right and Set Aside to the left, both changeable. Nothing that only appears on hover exists on a phone; there is no hover. Notifications remain opt-in per thread and per person, and there is no badge. The same premise, the same four places, the same two piles.
Licence and ownership
FSL-1.1-MIT, as margin is: use it for anything except a competing product, and each version turns MIT two years after release. Ownership is a feature, not a slogan: mail exports as mbox, contacts as vCard, and every piece of app state as JSON, from settings, at any time.