Zmail
A local mail client for people who work with AI agents.
What Zmail does
Zmail is a macOS app. It reads your mail from your own mail accounts over IMAP, keeps a copy on your computer, and shows it in a quiet, frosted-glass window with the inbox sorted into people, notifications and newsletters.
You can also let AI agents you choose, such as Claude Code, work through your mail. Zmail gives them zmail commands. Each command runs on your computer as a short-lived process that prints its result. An agent can search mail, read a conversation, mark it read, archive it, and move it to a folder or to junk. It cannot send, reply or delete mail.
Your mail stays with you
- Mail is stored in a database on your own computer. Zmail has no server and no account system, and collects no analytics.
- Passwords and sign-in tokens are kept in the macOS keychain. Agents cannot read them.
- Zmail runs no background service and listens on no port. An agent reaches your mail only by running
zmailcommands on your computer.
Hide sensitive details
Zmail can hide sensitive details in its window and in what agents read: email addresses, phone numbers, bank cards, ID numbers, verification codes, passwords, keys, salaries, amounts and addresses are shown as blurred text. An optional model, AstrLink Guard, runs on your Mac and also finds names and addresses. Hiding is off until you turn it on, and the model is used only while it is on.
AstrLink Guard is a small open model (Apache-2.0) by QuantumNous, read by code adapted from magpie. Its files (about 39 MB) are downloaded once from Hugging Face the first time hiding is on with the model. Mail is never sent there.
Supported mail services
| Service | Sign-in |
|---|---|
| Gmail and Google Workspace | OAuth through your browser, or an app password for personal Gmail |
| Aliyun Mail | Account or client password |
| QQ Mail | Authorization code |
| iCloud Mail | App-specific password |
When you sign in to Google, Zmail asks for access to your mailbox so it can read mail and change its read state, archive it and move it between folders. That is all it uses the access for. See the privacy policy for how Google data is handled.
Source and license
Zmail is source-available under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0: free for personal and other noncommercial use. Using it for a commercial purpose needs a license from the maintainer; see how to ask.