Alternatives
Products that do what Herald – Local-first terminal email client does
Hi folks, Some time ago I tried to find a way to clean up my 10k emails inbox and could find anything which worked for me. So I built built my own tool which evolved into a client. More that out of necessity but for fun add semantic search, LLM based tagging, and clean up rules through Ollama. It has a demo mode to try without configuring anything. On Mac: brew tap herald-email/herald brew install herald herald --demo With Go: go install github.com/herald-email/herald-mail-app/cmd/herald@latest herald --demo The DEMO uses pre-populated synthetic data so no risk for…
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- 2OO
I just shipped something I’ve needed for years - a more efficient email client. I finally built Omnia OS because my inbox turned into a landfill of AI-generated noise. If you're going to email me going forward, I suggest including a more compelling subject and opening line, otherwise all emails from unknown people will not make it to my inbox. AI draft-suggestion tools never solved the real problem: finding the messages, files, or company I actually need to follow up with. After securing AI systems for a living, I know how easy it is to weaponize prompt injection, so bolting AI onto email…
Oct 2025 · omniaos.co
- 3OS
We've tried systems like OSTicket, OTRS etc, but never found anything to our liking. Most systems were cluttered, slow or too advanced. Brimir is simple but usefull.
2013 · github.com
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- 5IB
Bookmarks which you wanted to read, but simply forgot... It happened to me all the time. I bookmarked the articles to read later and simply forgot about them. Forever. I built Mailist to help with that. Already 2350 users enjoy their "weekly digests" composed from their bookmarks. It makes me super happy! So now, https://mailist.app Pro account allows you to send an email newsletter every day, built from your bookmarks. Does it sound interesting? The free version (weekly email) is available for everyone! Let me know what you think. PS. Unlike other tools, we care about your privacy…
2020
- 6OS
Hi all, I've posted a few times here about Maildown, a startup that I've been trying to validate lately. Due to lack of time to focus on this, I've taken the decision to abandon the project as a startup, but to make it available as an open source solution instead. The (still very basic) github repository is here: https://github.com/chris104957/maildown Maildown now exists as a simple CLI wrapper for Amazon SES which bakes in Markdown and styling support, making it much easier to get transactional mails up and running in any project Thanks for looking, Chris
2019
- 7KF
My email clients/inbox really fu*ing annoyed me. Tallyman is what happened next: a keyboard driven email client on top of Gmail and Outlook. Your vim muscle memory works (j/k, gg, relative line numbers, counts, ...) 39 rebindable shortcuts, command palette, email templates, themes ... No migration. OAuth only. Verified by Microsoft and live now. Google verification is under review. 30 day free trial, $9/mo per inbox after that. Write me an email if you need an extended trial: [email protected]
Apr 2026 · tallyman.io
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Hey HN. I'm Isaac, and I'm building Marco (https://marcoapp.io), a cross-platform email client that works with any IMAP provider. macOS, iOS, and web today. I started Marco because I finally lost patience with Apple Mail, and the email client market has a weird gap. Legacy clients look terrible and/or are not cross-platform. The good ones scan your data or cost $300+/year. And there's a graveyard of startups (Tempo, Big Mail, Caley) who built beautiful products and shut down after a year or two. I made a few opinionated bets early on: 1. IMAP-first, not Gmail API-first.…
Mar 2026 · marcoapp.io
- 9OC
I built an open source version of OpenAI Chronicle. Some design decisions I made: 1. Local first: OCR uses Apple Vision, summarization supports local AI providers via Vercel AI SDK. Nothing leaves your computer. 2. Multiple Provider: exposes MCP so any coding agents can use it. 3. Swift menubar app: efficient, low-footprint 4. Blacklist apps: password managers, messaging apps (Slack, WhatsApp, Messenger), mail clients are on default blocklist. Current Limitations: 1. Mac only. Mac-first is a feature. 2. Small local models with weak structured-output support will fail on generateObject. 3.…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 10AD
Hi all, I threw together a small prototype I am calling “Notepad.ai”. A new take on UIs for interacting with LLMs. While I enjoy using LLM’s in the chat format I wanted to see what it would be like to do it in a more long form style. It let’s you write in a pretty free form, much like Window’s Notepad, but you can choose to hit ctrl+[ to analyze the text with a preset prompt of your choosing. It has a few other small features. It’s WIP and very experimental. I would appreciate any feedback or thoughts. Video: https://youtu.be/ntdlgFmSxQY Live Demo:…
2024 · github.com
- 11GA
Glyph is an open-source, local-first Markdown notes app for macOS built with Rust (Tauri) It stores notes as plain files, supports fast search, wikilinks/backlinks, and includes optional AI chat, including implementation of Codex so you can use your chatgpt sub, all without requiring a cloud-first workflow. https://glyphformac.com/
Mar 2026 · glyphformac.com
- 12IB
Hello HN, around October last year, I started to work on campaignkit.cc as a side project. It is a service to detect invalid and malicious email addresses. You can upload text files, and use the REST API or direct integration to retrieve a detailed report for each email address. End of March I added Stripe Payments and got my first paying customers via SEM. A coworker suggested starting a Show HN thread, so here we are :) I used golang for the backend since I wanted something lightweight with fast compilation times (coming from scala). For the frontend, I'm using Next.js and TailwindUI. On…
2022 · campaignkit.cc
- 13ME
Alot of companies (Including the one i work at fulltime) use third party email builders to provide custom email functionality to users. However this is a niche sector and the prices are... insane? So to try and fix this i built Maillune, a embeddable emailbuilder sdk that is alot cheaper with a usable free tier for hobby projects. The entire goal was to make the features transparent and logical. With lower focus on feature paywalls and aiming on a more "Out of the box" approach. This is one of my recent projects ive built in parallel with my fulltime job. All feedback is welcome, good or bad!
Jun 2026 · maillune.com
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Hey HN, I’d like to share an open-source project I’ve created. It is an email archiving tool that can back up your whole email system with full-text search capabilities. The project is called Open Archiver, and it is able to archive and index emails from cloud-based email inboxes, including Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and any IMAP-enabled email inbox. You can connect it to your email provider, and it copies every single incoming and outgoing email into a secure archive that you control (Your local storage or S3-compatible storage). Some features: - Archive and index all emails and…
2025 · openarchiver.com
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Hello everyone, I've built a simple macOS app for chatting with models downloaded by Ollama - https://github.com/sheshbabu/Chital It's written in Swift, consumes less memory and loads fast. It has these features: * Support for multiple chat threads * Switch between different models * Markdown support * Automatic chat thread title summarization It's my first time working with Swift and Xcode, and it has been an interesting journey. The performance of the application is a big plus when building native apps, but I wonder if I'll be able to add features like document…
2024 · github.com
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Hey everyone! For the past two weeks my friend and I have been heads-down building Cloi, a fully local debugging agent that runs right in your terminal. You probably know the drill—every AI coding tool asks for API keys, subscriptions, and uploads your entire codebase to the cloud. Cloi does none of that: it runs entirely on your machine, with no cloud, no API keys, no subscriptions, and zero data leaving your system. What Cloi does: - Contextual error capture: Grabs your stack trace, local files, and environment to understand the issue. - Local LLM inference: Spins up Ollama on your box and…
2025 · github.com
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Capturing emails always sucked. I don't want to add a full-blown newsletter API. That's why I've created my own tool. Would love your feedback on this
2024 · mailee.dev
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Hey Hacker News! I built Writekin over the past week because I was tired of AI writing that didn't sound like me, even though I had just used AI to clean it up, rather than wholesale write it. The usual fixes I found online for this were: - Some sort of SKILL.md, or - A system prompt full of rules to strip the generic AI tells (e.g. no em-dashes, none of the stock phrases, varying the sentence length, etc). While those cleaned up the surface a bit, Pangram still came back as ~100% AI written, which was frustrating, as again it was mainly taking my sloppy copy and tweaking it. So when…
Jul 2026 · github.com
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Hi HN, I'm excited to share a project I've been working on: UnwrapEmail(https://unwrap.email), an API designed to detect and verify disposable or temporary email addresses. Features: - Detect disposable email addresses - Extract labels from email addresses (e.g., Gmail) - Normalize addresses by removing labels or special characters (e.g., Gmail) - Validate MX records of domains - Check whether it’s safe to send to a given email to reduce bounces and maintain sender reputation Why I Built This: As the owner of an AI wrapper app, I've seen decent traffic thanks to SEO efforts + ads,…
2024 · unwrap.email
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After seeing a cool demo of a hack on Twitter, I built a cross platform version of it that works well and uses streaming. From anywhere on Mac and Linux, trigger Ollama and optionally feed it your clipboard. I built it yesterday and it's already very useful to me. I'm pretty excited about it and wanted to share!
2024 · github.com
- 21IB
hey hn, I built an open-source Perplexity clone that can run local LLMs and cloud LLMs. It's fully self-hostable through Docker and uses ollama to support local LLMs. The demo video in the repository shows me running it locally with llama3 on my M1 Macbook Pro. I'm open to any suggestions or feedback, thanks!
2024 · github.com
- 22ME
I read Markdown all day, mostly Claude .md, and other AI outputs. Every app I have tried felt janky or too much work to just read an md file. I just wanted to open a .md file and read it the way Preview opens a PDF. So I built Kite, a Markdown reader for Mac. It has QuickLook just like Preview and I have baked in features that help people reading lot's of AI markdowns. It one-time purchase, no subscription. I put it on TestFlight so you can try it before paying anything. I would really like this crowd to try to break it. Tell me which files render wrong,what feels off, what is missing.…
Jun 2026 · kitemarkdown.com
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Finally made something I've always wanted, using the model we built. • SOTA omni embedding model, fully local, indexes text, PDF, image, audio, and video • Swift-native app UI + mlx-swift-transformer core. No Python. • Tested on M3 Pro 18G / M3 Ultra 512G / M4 Pro 48G. All work fine. • HTTP server exposes search to local agents like OpenClaw & Hermes − Indexing still feels slow even on the latest M3 Ultra, ranging from 10K tps to 300 tps depending on file type − Fans go crazy, high power draw while indexing − Search is near-instant. Multimodal relevance is sometimes arguable, but…
Jun 2026 · hanxiao.io
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I built TraceAIO, an open-source tool that prompts LLMs on your behalf and tells you whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini mention your brand — and which competitors and sources show up instead. Yeah, this category smells a bit like a grift, same as early SEO. And I think over time it will become just SEO again, and become about good content. The tool just helps you monitor over time. It queries the browser products through real browser sessions, not APIs, runs on Docker, with an MCP server so you can query your own data through an LLM. No business model, Apache 2.0, self hosted. If you…
Jun 2026 · traceaio.org
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