Lodestar
A desktop email assistant. Each PC has one Lodestar, and it works for one person. You add your mailboxes (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, a work or custom domain), decide what Lodestar may do in each one, and press Start watching.
Lodestar was previously called Inbox Pilot. Its data folder (%APPDATA%\inbox-pilot), app ID and update feed are unchanged, so existing installs carry over.
From then on it reads new mail with a local AI model (Ollama) and helps you:
- understand what matters: the Today screen, priorities with reasons, whole-conversation summaries
- decide what to do next: open questions, reply drafts, deadlines and bills checked against the email
- remember commitments: follow-ups, promises and plain-English reminders
- find anything: Ask my inbox, with cited answers
- automate safely: rules you teach it, and a preview mode with approvals, an activity log and undo
Your email is processed on your PC; Lodestar has no server. Its data and sign-ins are stored encrypted with Windows. See docs/STATUS.md for what's done and what's left, docs/SECURITY.md for every data flow, and docs/VERIFICATION.md for production readiness.
How it works for the person using it
- First launch: Lodestar asks your name, then asks for your first email address.
- Type an email address and Lodestar works out the provider:
gmail.com and Google Workspace domains → Sign in with Googleoutlook.com, hotmail.com and Microsoft 365 domains → Sign in with Microsoft- Yahoo, iCloud, AOL, Fastmail, Zoho, GMX, Comcast and most other providers → server settings are filled in automatically, and you paste an app password (Lodestar links you to the page that creates one)
- Custom domains are identified from their MX records and Mozilla's ISP database (the one Thunderbird uses).
- Set permissions: a new mailbox starts paused. On each mailbox's card on the Mailboxes page, choose what Lodestar may do there:
- Read new mail and add it to my updates (the watch switch)
- Alert me about important mail (Windows notifications)
- Archive emails when I ask
- Replies: Suggest only / Save drafts / Auto-send to trusted senders
- Trusted senders and a signature for this mailbox
- Start watching: Lodestar checks every few minutes (5 by default) and fills the Updates list.
Look and feel
Lodestar uses a calm, compact design called Graphite: a sidebar with simple line icons, lists and tables instead of stacks of cards, and the Inter font bundled with the app. It comes in Light and Dark, or Match Windows to follow your Windows setting. The moon/sun button at the bottom of the sidebar switches between light and dark; all three choices are in Settings → General → Appearance, and the change applies straight away, including the window frame. The app is named Lodestar and its logo is a four-point star.
How mail is read (the pipeline)
- Your rules run first. A rule for a sender or domain always wins over the AI.
- Deterministic rules classify obvious mailing-list mail (newsletters and promotions) instantly, with no AI. Bulk mail that mentions accounts, money, school, security or deadlines in its subject or preview is never decided this way.
- A quick AI read handles automated senders and important-looking bulk mail.
- A full AI read handles personal mail. It's the only stage that drafts replies.
Every email shows a Why: line with its reason, its stage and how long it took. Settings → How your mail was read shows counts, average time and how often you had to correct each stage. On the first real inbox (28 emails), stage 2 handled 18 instantly without burying any important mail.
Conversations
Personal email is read together with its whole conversation, up to the last 8 messages, with quoted history stripped. Each email shows what's still waiting on you and what you promised earlier, and a Conversation panel shows the messages, highlighting the ones the summary is based on. If you've already replied after a message, Lodestar checks that directly in your mailbox and won't draft another reply.
Notifications
On the Notifications page:
- Choose where alerts go (this PC, the ntfy phone app, or your own Telegram bot) and what triggers them: important email, reminders, the morning briefing, bills and deadlines 24 hours ahead, follow-ups that come due, replies you were waiting on, and approvals.
- Each channel has a privacy level:
- Minimal: "you have an important email", with no details. This is the phone default.
- Sender: who and the subject. This is the desktop default.
- Full: includes the summary.
- Quiet hours hold notifications and send one short summary afterwards. Important email can be allowed through.
- Duplicates are never sent, and phone alerts are rate-limited.
- Phone channels are off until you set them up. ntfy.sh and Telegram are cloud relays; for fully private delivery, run your own ntfy server. Tokens are stored encrypted on your PC.
The morning briefing can be set to every day or weekdays only, with the sections you want.
Ask my inbox
Press Ctrl+K, or open Ask, to search or ask questions in plain English: "What did Tennessee Tech say about admissions?", "When is my next deadline?", "from:chase last month".
- Matching emails appear instantly as you type, from a local keyword index.
- Ask has your local AI answer using only those emails (plus tracked dates and your commitments when relevant), citing them as numbered chips you can click to see the exact excerpt.
- If your email doesn't contain the answer, it says so instead of guessing.
- Optional semantic search (Settings) adds a small local embedding model (about 270 MB, downloaded only when you click) that also finds emails phrased differently.
Everything stays on your PC.
Today
Today is the home screen. It shows five tiles (need you today, overdue, replies you owe, waiting on others, awaiting approval), the morning briefing, what needs you now, and one 7-day timeline. The timeline merges bills, deadlines, appointments, your promises, follow-ups and reminders, with overdue items first.
Deadlines & bills
Lodestar pulls bills (amount and due date), deadlines, appointments, events and deliveries out of your email. Each item is checked against the email text:
- Stated in the email: the date and amount appear word for word in the quoted sentence.
- Check the details: something was ambiguous or conflicting. For example, "11/05" is read in US month/day order, or the email mentions several amounts. Each note says exactly what to check.
- AI guess: the model's quote wasn't found in the email.
If the AI and the email disagree, the email wins. Amounts the email doesn't contain are dropped. Times given in another time zone are converted to yours. Several emails about the same bill are merged into one item. Show source displays the exact sentence. Lodestar never pays bills or moves money.
Follow-ups
The Follow-ups page tracks:
- emails you owe a reply,
- emails you sent that asked something, where you're waiting on them,
- commitments you made ("I'll send it Friday"), from your sent mail and from conversations.
It suggests a nudge after a stated deadline, or after 3 working days by default (Settings). Draft a nudge saves a polite follow-up as a draft; it's never sent automatically.
Remind me… accepts plain English, such as "Friday", "tomorrow at 3pm", "in 2 days" or "Monday if they haven't replied", and shows exactly when it will fire before you save. "If they haven't replied" reminders check the real conversation first and quietly skip themselves when the reply has arrived.
Teaching Lodestar
Each email has More important, Less important and Junk. These change only that email. To change all future mail, use Always from this sender…, which creates a rule for that sender or their company domain. Domain rules for shared webmail such as gmail.com aren't allowed. After two corrections in the same direction for one sender, or when you keep archiving or replying to a sender's mail (three times in 60 days), the Rules page suggests a rule; Not now hides a suggestion. You can edit, switch off or delete any rule there.
Describe a rule on the Rules page takes plain English, such as emails from [email protected] are important or hide anything with "webinar" in the subject. Lodestar shows what the rule means and which current emails it would change before you save it. Rules can match a sender, a domain, words in the subject, or a domain plus subject words. They only sort mail; they never send, delete or unsubscribe.
Working faster
- Keyboard:
j/k move between emails, e archive, d done, s snooze, r reply, o open in your mail, g then u/t/d to jump to Updates/Today/Deadlines, Ctrl+K to Ask, ? for the list.
- Undo: Done, Snooze and Archive show an Undo button in the message at the bottom for 8 seconds.
- Snooze… offers Tomorrow, Next week, Until they reply (it comes back when the sender writes again, or after 2 weeks), or any time in plain English.
- Bulk cleanup (Subscriptions page): archive promotions, newsletters, notifications or spam older than 7–60 days. You see how many and which first; important emails and emails waiting on your reply are never included; Undo all puts them back.
- Your writing style (Replies page): Lodestar reads up to 40 recent sent emails once and keeps a one-line description (greeting, sign-off, length, tone) that drafts follow. Forget it removes it.
- Your week on Today: emails received, what Lodestar and you did, bills and deadlines in the next 2 weeks, and the noisiest senders. On Mondays a count-only notification sums it up.
- Similar emails are grouped: repeats of the same alert or notification within a week show as one card with "+N similar" and a Mark all done button.
- Calendar-aware replies: Mailboxes → Connect calendar grants free/busy access only. When an email asks to meet, reply suggestions offer two or three of your free working-hour slots, and the reply box has Insert my free times. Lodestar never books or accepts anything.
- Three reply versions: in the reply box, Suggest 3 versions writes brief, friendly and formal replies aware of the whole conversation. They say you'll check rather than invent an answer.
- PDF attachments: bills, invoices and tickets attached as PDFs are read locally, so their due dates and amounts reach Deadlines and Ask my inbox. The card says which attachment was read.
Activity, preview mode and undo
- Every action is logged under Activity: label, archive, draft, send, unsubscribe. Each entry records when it happened, which mailbox and email, why, whether it was automatic or yours, and whether it was done, failed, rejected or undone. An action is marked done only after the mail provider confirms it.
- Preview mode (Settings → Automation, on by default) turns every automatic action into a proposal you approve or reject, either in Activity or on the email itself. "Approve all" never includes sending a reply; each send needs its own approval.
- Archive and label can be undone. Send, draft and unsubscribe can't, and Activity says what to do instead.
Autopilot
Each mailbox's card on the Mailboxes page also has the autopilot settings. Everything there is off until you turn it on:
- Sort mail with labels (still named
Pilot, so existing labels keep working): Gmail gets labels such as Pilot/Action and Pilot/Newsletters, Outlook gets categories such as Pilot: Action, and IMAP mailboxes get keywords where the server supports them.
- Archive automatically once summarized: choose newsletters, promotions and/or notifications. Archived mail stays in the mailbox's archive and on the Done tab. Anything priority 1 or waiting on a reply is never archived, and this needs the "Archive emails when I ask" permission.
- Unsubscribing:
- Suggest lists bulk senders under Subscriptions, each with an Unsubscribe button. It uses one-click unsubscribe if the sender supports it, otherwise an unsubscribe email, otherwise it opens their page.
- Automatic also unsubscribes on its own after 3 newsletters or promotions from the same sender in 30 days, but only through the sender's RFC 8058 one-click link. Lodestar never visits an unsubscribe web page by itself.
Morning briefing (Settings, on by default at 08:00): once a day Lodestar writes a short summary of what needs you, deadlines and waiting drafts. It shows the summary as a Windows notification and at the top of Updates. If the PC was off at that time, the briefing comes at the next launch.
If the chosen Ollama model isn't installed, Lodestar switches to an installed chat model on its own.
Reply rules (shared by all mailboxes) set which kinds of email get replies, the tone, a daily auto-send limit, and whether auto-sent mail says an assistant wrote it.
Auto-reply safeguards
These checks live in code, so nothing written in an email can talk the model past them:
- It never replies to newsletters, promotions, notifications or spam, to mailing-list or bulk mail, to no-reply senders, or to yourself.
- It sends at most one reply per thread.
- Auto-send works only for that mailbox's trusted senders, under a daily cap. Everyone else gets a draft.
- The model is told never to agree to meetings, payments or deadlines. Email text is passed to it as untrusted data.
Sharing with family and friends
- Send them the install guide: https://kaeden-martinson.github.io/Lodestar/install.html (download link, SmartScreen, setup).
- Add each Gmail address as a test user before they sign in: Google Auth Platform → Audience → Test users → Add users (up to 100). Without this Google shows "Access blocked".
- On first run, Lodestar installs Ollama for them (official installer, signature checked) and downloads a model sized to their PC:
qwen2.5:7b with 16 GB RAM or a 6 GB+ graphics card, qwen2.5:3b with 8–16 GB, qwen2.5:1.5b below that.
- They'll see "Google hasn't verified this app" and must re-sign-in about weekly (Reconnect button) until the app is verified by Google.
- Yahoo, iCloud and other IMAP mail work with an app password. Outlook needs the Azure client first.
Developer setup (one time)
People using the app just click "Sign in with Google/Microsoft". For that to work, the app ships with its own OAuth clients, which you create once and put in oauth-clients.json next to package.json. Copy oauth-clients.example.json to start. Yahoo, iCloud and other IMAP mailboxes need no setup.
For production readiness (verification requirements, privacy policy draft, data flows), see docs/VERIFICATION.md, docs/PRIVACY_POLICY.md and docs/SECURITY.md.
Google client (Gmail and Google Workspace)
- In Google Cloud Console, create a project and enable the Gmail API (APIs & Services → Library). For calendar-aware replies, also enable the Google Calendar API.
- Configure the OAuth consent screen (Google Auth Platform): app name Inbox Pilot, user type External, and add the scope
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.modify (plus gmail.readonly for read-only mailboxes and calendar.freebusy for Connect calendar).
- Under Credentials → Create credentials → OAuth client ID, choose Desktop app.
- Put the client ID and secret in
oauth-clients.json under google. For desktop apps Google says the secret can't be kept confidential, so shipping it inside the app is normal.
Going beyond yourself: while the app is in Testing, only up to 100 listed test users can sign in, and their sign-ins expire every 7 days. gmail.modify is a restricted scope, so publishing to everyone requires Google's verification, including a yearly third-party security assessment (CASA). Plan for this before a public release.
Microsoft client (Outlook.com and Microsoft 365)
- In the Azure portal, go to App registrations → New registration.
- Supported account types: Accounts in any organizational directory and personal Microsoft accounts.
- Redirect URI: Public client/native (mobile & desktop) →
http://localhost/callback (the path must match; Microsoft ignores the port for localhost).
- Under API permissions → Microsoft Graph → Delegated, add
Mail.ReadWrite, Mail.Send, User.Read, offline_access and Calendars.ReadBasic (for Connect calendar).
- Under Authentication, set Allow public client flows to Yes.
- Put the Application (client) ID in
oauth-clients.json under microsoft, with tenant common.
Anyone with a Microsoft account can sign in right away. Some work and school tenants require an admin to approve third-party apps, and publisher verification makes the consent screen show your verified name.
Testers can also enter their own clients under Settings → Advanced, which override the built-in ones.
Local AI
Install Ollama and pull a model, for example:
ollama pull llama3.1:8b
Then choose it under Settings → Model → Find installed. Any chat model works, such as qwen2.5:7b or gemma4:e4b. Expect roughly 10–40 seconds per email on a mid-range GPU.
Run from source (development)
npm install
npm start
Running from source turns on developer mode: Ctrl+Shift+I opens DevTools, and logs are echoed to the console. You can add --dev to an installed copy for the same behavior.
Build the Windows installer
npm run dist
This produces release/Lodestar Setup <version>.exe, a per-user installer (no admin rights needed) with Start Menu and desktop shortcuts. It installs to your user profile and lets you pick the folder. Uninstalling keeps your data. npm run dist:dir builds an unpacked copy in release/win-unpacked/ for quick testing.
- Data location: always
%APPDATA%\inbox-pilot, whether you run from source or install. Updates and reinstalls keep your mailboxes, rules, history and sign-ins.
- Start with Windows is on by default for the installed app: Lodestar starts hidden in the tray when you sign in (turn it off in Settings → General). The installer creates a desktop shortcut and opens Lodestar when it finishes.
- Updates: Lodestar checks this repository's latest GitHub release daily (Settings → Updates; another feed can be set there, either a JSON file
{ "version", "url", "notes" } or a GitHub "latest release" API link). Lodestar only tells you about a new version; you download and install it yourself.
- Releasing: bump
version in package.json, npm run dist, then create a GitHub release tagged v<version> and attach release/Lodestar Setup <version>.exe.
- Website:
docs/ is the GitHub Pages site (homepage and privacy policy, https://kaeden-martinson.github.io/Lodestar/). After editing docs/PRIVACY_POLICY.md, run npm run site to regenerate docs/privacy.html.
- Code signing: the installer is unsigned, so Windows SmartScreen will warn when you run it. To remove the warning, buy a code-signing certificate and add it to the
build.win settings in package.json (see electron-builder's code-signing docs).
Reliability and troubleshooting
- Encrypted data: Lodestar's data is encrypted with Windows (DPAPI) by default (Settings → Privacy). Sign-in tokens always are.
- Backups: one backup per day is kept for 7 days in
backups/. If the data file is ever unreadable, it's kept aside (never overwritten) and the newest good backup is restored, with a notice.
- Saving: writes are atomic, and Lodestar waits for pending writes before quitting or when Windows signs out.
- Crashes: if the window's renderer crashes, it reloads automatically. Unexpected errors are logged, not fatal.
- Logs: structured logs are kept in
logs/ for 14 days. They never contain email text, addresses or passwords. Settings → Troubleshooting opens the logs and data folders.
- Rate limits: Gmail and Outlook rate limits and server errors are retried with backoff (honoring Retry-After). An expired or revoked access token is refreshed once automatically, and refreshes are single-flight per mailbox.
Tests
npm test
The tests cover the safety rules (reply blockers, trusted senders, the daily cap, auto-archive and auto-unsubscribe limits, header injection), the prefilter, learned rules and corrections, and the guard rails on model output.
To try the interface with sample data and no accounts:
npm run demo
Where things are stored
All in %APPDATA%\inbox-pilot\ (demo mode uses a demo subfolder):
state.json: your name, settings, mailboxes and their permissions, and the updates list. Up to 1000 emails are cached, and finished items are pruned after 14 days.tokens.bin: OAuth tokens and IMAP app passwords, encrypted with Windows DPAPI via Electron safeStorage.
Removing a mailbox deletes its sign-in and its updates from the app. Nothing in the mailbox itself is deleted.
Project layout
src/
main/ Electron main process
main.ts window, tray, notifications, IPC
engine.ts watch loop, pipeline, autopilot, activity log, rules, briefing
core/ pure, unit-tested logic: policy.ts (safety), prefilter.ts, rules.ts
clients.ts built-in OAuth clients (oauth-clients.json) + overrides
oauth.ts desktop OAuth (PKCE + loopback redirect)
secrets.ts encrypted tokens and passwords
store.ts JSON state + defaults
ai/ Ollama client and triage prompt/schema
providers/
discovery.ts email address → provider + server settings
gmail.ts Gmail API
outlook.ts Microsoft Graph
imap.ts IMAP/SMTP for everything else
preload/ the window.api bridge
renderer/ UI (plain TypeScript, no framework)
shared/types.ts types shared across all three
Ideas for next steps
- Calendar awareness, so drafts can propose real free times
- Reading other attachment types (Word documents, images with OCR)
- Publishing the Google app (needs the homepage and privacy policy hosted, for example on GitHub Pages)
