JMAP accounts
Connect Fastmail with an API token, or another JMAP server with a token or password. Push brings in new mail, and sending uses the server’s identities.
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Your inbox.
With room to do more.
Read your mail, keep a searchable copy, and take your archive with you. Manual backups are free forever; Premium takes care of the recurring jobs.
Email Management
Everything you need to read, compose, and organize your email. Sign in with one click, search with precision, and manage your inbox effortlessly.
- Compose, reply, reply all, and forward with attachments
- Gmail & Microsoft 365 OAuth2 one-click sign-in
- Connect Outlook.com through Microsoft’s supported sign-in flow
- Advanced search with filters — sender, date range, attachments, folder
See all 17 capabilities
- Instant indexed search for locally stored mail — results come from the private index in your vault, even offline
- Search history & popular filter suggestions
- Mark read/unread, star/flag emails
- Undo send — global default plus per-compose override (15s to 5 min)
- Outbox tray — local stage-then-send with cancel and retry on in-flight messages
- Sent folder sync — outgoing mail is copied to your server's Sent folder after SMTP send
- Move to folder — reorganize emails between server folders
- Email templates — save and reuse compose snippets
- Contacts picker and address book — suggestions when composing, contact history, merge and vCard import/export
- Group by sender — toggle to organize your inbox by contact, with sent replies threaded inline
- DNS-based server auto-detection — SRV records, Mozilla autoconfig, MX fallback, and known-provider mapping
- Inline embedded images — CID-referenced logos and photos render inside the email body
- Link safety — detect phishing links and sender impersonation with visual warnings
Email Threading & Conversations
Follow a conversation from first message to final reply. Related emails stay together, with quoted text folded away until you need it.
- Gmail-style threaded conversations using the JWZ algorithm
- Thread conversation view — all emails stacked chronologically
- Configurable sort order — oldest-first or newest-first
- Quote folding — quoted replies collapsed for cleaner reading
See all 5 capabilities
- Signature folding — 4 modes: Smart, Always Show, Always Hide, Collapsed
Chat View
A unique messaging-style email experience. Sent and received emails merge into one continuous conversation with chat bubbles, just like your favorite messaging app.
- Unique messaging-style email view
- Sent and received emails merged into one conversation
- Chat bubbles with sender avatars
- Progressive body loading with per-bubble spinners
Explorer
A second way through the same mailbox. Explorer folds the messages you already have into groups — by date, by sender, or by conversation — so you walk down into what you are looking for instead of scrolling past everything else.
- Browse by date, at month or day detail
- Browse by sender — every message from one person in one group
- Date → Conversation — a month opens into the threads inside it
- Every group shows how many messages it holds, how many are in your vault, and how many are unread
See all 8 capabilities
- Search inside the group you are standing in, or jump straight out to a whole-mailbox search
- Tick a group to select every message in it, then archive, delete or export the lot
- Breadcrumbs remember where you were, per folder and per account, across a restart
- Keyboard: j and k step through groups and messages without leaving the list
Insights
A picture of who you actually hear from. Insights reads the message headers already on your disk — who wrote, who you wrote to, and when — and draws three views of your correspondence. No bodies are read and nothing is uploaded.
- Sender map — every correspondent a bubble, sized by how much they write and placed by how recently
- Timeline — one lane per sender, with received and sent marks along a real time axis
- Activity — a calendar grid showing how busy each day was
- Click any bubble, lane or day to see the messages behind it and read them without leaving the page
See all 8 capabilities
- Scope it by account, by date range — 30 days, 90 days, 12 months, or dates you pick — and by direction
- Hide likely automated senders in one tick, so newsletters stop crowding out people
- Says what it is based on: which folders are cached locally, and how much of the mailbox that covers
- Built from local headers only — no cloud service, no account, and nothing leaves your machine
Security & Privacy
Your emails stay on your machine. MailVault verifies senders, stores credentials in macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Manager or Linux Secret Service, and runs sandboxed. No MailVault mail-storage service, no telemetry. Optional AI endpoints receive only the text you approve; Gmail mail stays on-device.
- Link safety — detects phishing links where displayed text doesn't match the actual URL destination
- Email tracker blocking Premium — finds the hidden 1×1 pixels marketing mail uses to report when you opened it, and strips them from the HTML before the message renders
- Network Activity: every connection MailVault and its background helper make, with host, purpose and data sent and received, kept only on your computer
- Sender impersonation detection — warns when display name fakes a different email or domain
- Click confirmation — modal warning before opening suspicious links with URL comparison
See all 11 capabilities
- Sender verification badges — SPF, DKIM, and DMARC checks
- Header mismatch detection — From vs Reply-To spoofing alerts
- macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Manager & Linux Secret Service credential storage
- macOS App Sandbox — runs in a secure container
- No MailVault mail-storage cloud, no tracking, no telemetry
- Source live on GitHub, so you can read the code
Storage & Backup
Your emails stored in standard formats you can read anywhere. Archive locally with one click, export as ZIP, and restore on any machine. No vendor lock-in, ever.
- Standard Maildir + .eml (RFC 5322) format — never locked in
- One-click archive to local storage
- ZIP backup export — archived only or all emails, with settings
- Portable import — restore on any machine
See all 9 capabilities
- External backup folder — mirror .eml files to Dropbox, iCloud Drive, or any external location with persistent macOS security-scoped bookmarks
- Empty-cache corruption prevention — rejects suspicious empty server results when prior cache had data, preserving mailbox trees and email headers
- Configurable cache size limit and duration
- Background caching pipeline — syncs silently
- Background helper — keeps mail syncing even when the app window is closed
Bulk Operations
Select hundreds or thousands of emails at once and archive, delete, or do both in a single operation. Pick a date range, watch the progress, and cancel anytime.
- Multi-select with floating action bar
- Batch archive, delete, or archive + delete (Premium)
- Date range selection — by year or custom range
- Progress bar with cancel button
See all 5 capabilities
- Crash-safe operation recovery
Multi-Account
All your email accounts in one place. Switch between them instantly — no loading delay. Combine them into a unified inbox, or customize each with its own display name and color.
- Add unlimited email accounts
- Unified inbox — see all accounts in one merged view
- Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, ProtonMail (Bridge), Fastmail, Zoho, and any IMAP provider
- Custom display names and avatar colors
See all 8 capabilities
- Account reordering and hide/unhide
- Instant account switching with LRU state cache
- Per-account mailbox memory — remembers your last folder
- Sender panel — exchange history and frequency per contact, beside the message you are reading
Layout & Customization
Make MailVault yours. Choose your theme, rearrange panes, pick a date format, and fine-tune the interface to match how you work.
- Dark mode and light mode, with a separate per-email theme toggle for message content
- 3-column or 2-column layout with resizable panes
- Collapsible sidebar with icon-only mode
- Default or compact email list style
See all 10 capabilities
- Configurable date formats — US, EU, ISO, human-readable, or custom
- Desktop notifications and dock badge
- Keyboard shortcuts for all core actions with customizable bindings
- Notification customization — per-account, per-folder controls
- View source — inspect raw email RFC 5322 source
- Open email in new window
Performance & Technology
Built with Rust and Tauri for native speed and minimal resource usage. Smart sync protocols, virtual scrolling, and pre-fetching keep everything fast.
- Built with Rust (Tauri) — not Electron
- Native IMAP via async-imap — no Node.js sidecar
- CONDSTORE delta sync — zero IMAP calls when nothing changed
- COMPRESS=DEFLATE — 70-80% bandwidth reduction
See all 9 capabilities
- Virtual scrolling — handles 17,000+ emails smoothly
- Email body pre-fetching — next 3 emails loaded instantly
- Native Sparkle auto-updater on macOS — signed appcast, in-app download and install
- Cross-platform — macOS (Apple Silicon & Intel), Windows 10/11 (64-bit) and Linux (.deb, Snap)
- System tray — syncs silently in background
53 MB
macOS download
Memory usage
~345 MB
CPU idle
~0%
Startup time
<1s
Memory measured on a Mac with a 10,000-message inbox, every process counted, the web view included
Premium Features
Unlock advanced capabilities with a Premium subscription. Start with a 14-day free trial on the yearly plan.
- Scheduled automatic backups Premium — hourly, daily or weekly per account with time-of-day control and folder-level checkpoints, or at set hours: pick the hours of the day a backup may start, for a vault on an external drive something else is already using. Every schedule waits until the app is idle
- Backup health monitoring — verification view showing server vs. local vs. external counts per folder with status indicators
- Cross-account mailbox migration Premium — move emails between IMAP accounts with folder mapping and progress tracking
- Guided server change — switching mail hosts? Enter the new server once: IMAP and SMTP are verified, your vault can be uploaded to the new server, and a DNS health check (MX/SPF/DKIM/DMARC) warns about delivery problems
See all 14 capabilities
- Scheduled Send Premium: pick the exact date, time and time zone an email goes out, with the recipient's zone suggested for you. How it works
- Faster multi-folder search Premium — search up to five server mailboxes and unindexed local folders at once, with a concurrency level you control
- Hoarder Premium: a download mode that fetches every folder and all history in the background and keeps it on this computer, instead of just a recent window
- Email Cleanup with Naive Bayes classifier Premium — learns to categorize your mail into Newsletter, Promotional, Transactional, Personal, Work and Spam, with per-category keep/archive/delete actions
- Time Capsule Premium — create point-in-time snapshots of any mailbox and browse its state as it was on any previous date
- Email tracker blocking Premium — strips tracking pixels out of every message before it renders, so senders are never told you opened it. Spotting the tracker is free for everyone; removing it is what the subscription adds. See before and after
- Auto-cleanup rules — automatically delete or archive emails older than a set threshold per account and folder
- Export as image or HTML Premium — save one message or a whole thread as a PNG, or as a single self-contained HTML file that folds the thread into a dated list you can expand message by message. Remote images are mirrored into the file, so it still reads years later with the network unplugged
- Focus sessions Premium — a timer covers MailVault for the minutes you choose, presets or your own number, and holds every notification until it ends; quit and relaunch and the countdown is still there
- 5-device subscription — use Premium on up to 5 installations with automatic device management
Premium
14 days free on yearly
then $25/year · or $4/month
No credit card required to try
Cancel anytime during trial
Full premium features during trial
Multi-currency: EUR, USD, GBP & more
Scheduled Send
Write an email now and have MailVault send it at an exact date and time, in any time zone. Scheduling is part of Premium; delaying a send by up to 5 minutes is free. Scheduled Send questions
- Date and time in one field, with every time zone listed by its UTC offset, like (UTC-04:00) New York, and searchable by city or by an offset such as +2
- Suggests the recipient's time zone from the offset in their last email to you, or the zone you last used for them
- Shows the time now, here and in the chosen zone, and when the email goes out in your own time
- Scheduled emails wait in the Scheduled folder: open one to edit it, or reschedule it, cancel it or send it now
- The background helper sends them. With Keep running in the background on, they go out while MailVault is closed; otherwise the next time you open it
More ways to use your mail
JMAP vault storage
Choose Maildir or JMAP storage in Settings > Storage. JMAP keeps original message bytes and JSON records, sharing identical messages across folders. Convert either way with verification and restart recovery.
Learn moreContacts
A local address book with correspondence history, suggestions, a review queue, merge and undo, and vCard import and export. Included in backups; no provider contact sync.
Learn moreNotes to Self
A board of mail you send yourself, across accounts. Subject #tags make columns; other notes sort into Links, Files, Photos or Notes. Star a note or mark it done without deleting the server copy.
Verification codes
A new code, one-time passcode or PIN appears in a small bubble with Copy and Copy & delete. Copy & delete moves the message to Trash with undo; the bubble dismisses itself after ten minutes.
Privacy mode and social export (Premium)
Mask names, addresses and phone numbers while reading or recording. Export redacted images or HTML, or a styled social image. Image contents are not masked, and attachments are not redacted.
Learn moreFollow-up and attachment reminders (Premium)
Use the compose bell for a reminder in 1 day, 3 days or a week if nobody replies. Follow-up reminders are unavailable on Microsoft Graph accounts. Send also warns when you mention an attachment but have not added one.
Learn morePortable MailVault (Premium)
Settings > Portable copies MailVault and its data to a USB stick or external drive. Take your local mail with you. Portable mode is unavailable in the Mac App Store build.
Learn moreReady to try MailVault?
Download for free and start reading, searching, and backing up your emails locally. Core features are free forever. Premium features like scheduled backups, migration, and auto-cleanup are $4/month or $25/year, with a 14-day free trial on the yearly plan.
Looking for a MailStore alternative?
Start with our MailStore alternative for Mac guide, compare MailVault vs MailStore Home, or read the MailStore alternatives comparison.