Skim
Free, open-source AI email client for Windows
278 followers
Free, open-source AI email client for Windows
278 followers
Skim is a free, open-source (MIT) email client for Windows. ✂️ Minimal on purpose: no calendar, no rules engine, no bloat. Fewer buttons, less cognitive load. ⚡ Native Rust core (Tauri 2): ~5 MB installer, sub-second cold start, instant full-text search. 🔒 Local-first, offline-ready, zero telemetry. ✦ AI on your terms: bring your own Anthropic or OpenRouter key and Skim drafts replies in your voice and answers questions across your whole mailbox.
@nikita_zarubin I've migrated from Windows this year, but upvoted for branding only - great job, I like the anti-boring approach ;)
@nikita_zarubin Congrats on the launch! LOVE the website - you clearly put a lot of thought and personality into it.
@anna_ludwinowski that's true, I did! So glad you liked it! 🫶
Curious how you handle Gmail OAuth secrets in a public repo though! Great launch, refreshing branding, and love every MIT license.
@aidan_codefox Hey, I'm flattered you love the branding! It's something I'm secretly proud of. At first I went the usual route - you know, purple, polished, sterile shit - but then I thought, "Hey, it's free and open source, right? Fuck it, let's have fun," and ended up with this wonderful zine landing you're looking at.
Okay, flex time's over - to your question.
tl;dr: there are no secrets in the repo. The magic is called PKCE.
Brace for the AI-slop explanation, if you're curious:
Do you have plans for Mac or Linux, or is Windows the main focus? The ~5MB installer and sub-second startup would be a pretty strong selling point for anyone tired of bloated Electron apps, so I'm wondering if expanding makes sense or if you want to keep it tight and focused.
@talhakhalidmtk I'd rather focus on Windows, but not because it's against product philosophy, but because I use only Windows 😄 If you want to add a builder for another OS - feel free to contribute!
love that this is BYOK instead of yet another subscription tier, that's rare for an email client. since the AI can answer questions across the whole mailbox, does it send full email bodies to the API per query or is there some local pre-filtering first so you're not shipping your entire inbox history every time you ask something?
@omri_ben_shoham1 nice one! And no, it doesn't ship your inbox on every query. Retrieval is local first.
Under the hood the AI is a tool-calling agent. When you ask something, it searches your mailbox on your machine. What crosses the wire from that search isn't email bodies, it's compact rows: date, sender, subject, and a snippet capped at ~160 chars. That's the pre-filtering step you're hoping for: the full-text index narrows thousands of emails down to a handful before anything touches the network.
Full bodies go out only for the specific emails the model then chooses to open - and even those are truncated (roughly 6k chars per email, ~10k for a whole thread). Per query it's bounded to about a dozen reads, not your entire history. Trash and junk are excluded unless you explicitly ask for them.
love how lean this is, the rust footprint is wild. one thing that would sell me even more is proper vim keybindings for the inbox and reading panes, j/k navigation feels like a natural fit for something this minimal.
@yamurobancsyyp Yeah, j/k navigation works in inbox!
The 5MB Rust install is genuinely impressive, and it actually opens faster than Outlook does. Curious to see how the BYOK AI drafting holds up on longer threads.
@eymenevf2 comparing to Outlook it opens instantly 😄
As for drafting - I personally use it all the time, it keeps context well as I can see. But I'm curious to learn your use cases and experience to make things better. Do not hesitate to open a Github issue or text me here.
love that it's local-first and tiny, but honestly a unified inbox view would be a game changer for me. like, one screen where i can see all my accounts side by side instead of toggling between them. would make it feel even more minimal and way faster to triage.
@rem1219681 oh this one I love. You actually nudged me over the line - unified inbox is happening.
The plan: all your mailboxes merged into one view by default (not just the inbox - sent, archive, everything), Each message tagged with a little colored dot + letter so you always know which account it's from. And if you ever want the old one-account-at-a-time mode, it stays a toggle.
Wrote it all up here, design + open questions - would love your take:
https://github.com/nikserg/skim/issues/10
Thanks for the push 🙌