Postvak
Your inbox, organized by rules you write. Test them with a dry run and undo any delete. Postvak syncs your mail into a local store and runs your rules: move mail into folders, mark it read, or delete transient mail such as sign-in codes and magic links once you no longer need it. Without rules, it leaves your mail alone.
It runs headless as a background service, at login, on a server or in Docker. On top come a keyboard-driven mail window for reading (postvak gui), a full command line, and an MCP server for agents (see Agents over MCP). Postvak reads and sorts mail, and sends it from the command line (see Sending mail). It runs on macOS and Linux; see Install.
Quickstart
Install Postvak, add an account and write your first rule: see the Quickstart.
Why rules, not an AI that sorts your mail?
Many AI mail clients hand every message to a model and let it decide what happens. Postvak sorts with rules you can read, and lets AI help you write them.
- Predictable. The same mail gets the same outcome, every time. A model can file a message differently tomorrow, or delete one it misread.
- Reviewable. A rule is a few lines of TOML.
rules test shows what it would do before it does it, and postvak log says which rule did what.
- Safe from the sender. Mail is written by strangers. A rule matches patterns, so instructions hidden in a message cannot change what it does.
- Private. Your mail is never sent to a model to be sorted. Rules run on your own machine or server, and agents see only what you grant: by default headers, no bodies.
- Free and fast. No tokens per message and no API key. Rules run on every sync, without a round trip to a model, across years of mail.
- AI where it helps. An agent over MCP reads your inbox, proposes a rule and shows its dry run. You approve it once, and from then on the rule does the work without the model.
Why not server-side filters?
- Works with any IMAP server, without Sieve or a webmail settings page.
- Rules go further than most filters: regex on any header or the body, age, size, read and flagged state, aliases and tags, combined with
any and none; actions move, archive, tag, flag, mark read, delete or silence notifications. See Rules.
- Rules run on every sync, not once on delivery, so they can act later: an hour after you read a sign-in code, or once a newsletter is a week old.
rules test shows what every rule would do before it does it, and deleted mail can be restored.- Passwords stay in the macOS Keychain or the Secret Service, or come from a command such as
pass.
See how Postvak compares to imapfilter, Sieve, mail client filters and AI sorters.
Postvak is licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option. The mail window's HTML view includes Stylo, the CSS engine from Servo and Firefox, which is under MPL-2.0. The mail window is made with Slint under its royalty-free licence; Help ▸ About Postvak shows its attribution.
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