What Postel does

Postel is a fast, native Mac app for Gmail. It works the way Gmail works — conversations, labels, categories, search — and keeps everything between your Mac and Gmail. What follows is the whole of it, described the way it actually behaves.

Every account, one window

Connect each of your Gmail accounts with Google Sign-In. Postel presents one unified Inbox, with unified Starred, Sent, and Drafts alongside the per-account mailboxes, and one search that fans out across every account and answers together. Compose always knows which account you’re sending from; change your mind mid-draft and the draft moves to another account intact — recipients, text, and attachments alike.

Scheduling that stays on your Mac

Snooze a conversation and it leaves the Inbox until the time you chose, then returns — with five seconds of Undo, like every Postel action that moves mail. Send Later holds a finished message in a Scheduled mailbox where you can send it now, change the schedule, or cancel it. Templates keep the replies you type constantly, owned by the account they belong to and stored only on this Mac.

Postel schedules on your Mac, not on a server. Overdue snoozes return and scheduled mail goes out the next time Postel is running and online — it never hands your mail to someone else’s computer to do it sooner.

Invitations, without handing over your calendar

When a message carries a calendar invitation, Postel shows a native summary — title, organizer, time, recurrence, location — read from the bytes already in the message, downloading nothing. If you ask, it can check your primary calendar’s free/busy for that time, or RSVP, requesting only the narrowest Google Calendar permission for exactly that action. It never reads your event titles, guests, or calendar names, and Gmail’s vacation responder is right in Postel’s settings, fetched only for the account you’re editing.

Ghost Mode

Choose received conversations — or a synced Gmail label — and Ghost Mode hides them from Postel’s lists while locked. Unlock to bring them back. It protects against a glance over your shoulder in a shared room; it is deliberately not encryption, and Postel says so in the setting itself. Your Mac account and FileVault protect what’s on disk.

Private by architecture

Mail HTML is sanitized through an allowlist before rendering, with JavaScript disabled — scripts in a message never run. Remote images are blocked by default, so tracking pixels never fire; senders learn neither your IP address nor whether you opened their message until you choose to load images. Postel adds no read receipts and no tracking to your outgoing mail, and images you attach are stripped of EXIF, GPS, and other identifying metadata as they enter the draft. No BNFY server reads, stores, or relays your mail — your Mac talks to Gmail directly.

Careful with your words

Postel never retries a send when the failure is ambiguous, so a message cannot be silently duplicated. Malformed mail still renders — broken encodings and damaged markup fall back through sanitized HTML to plain text rather than a blank pane. Archive works instantly, with five seconds to change your mind.

Updates you can verify

Updates arrive through Sparkle, cryptographically signed and verified on your Mac before they install. Automatic checking is off until you say otherwise — Postel asks once, on its second launch — and an update check carries no account, mail, or device identifier.

Ready to try it? Download Postel Mail — or read why it works this way.