flectar/mail

Flectar Mail

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Email, made fast again

Built from the ground up for speed. Flectar Mail delivers native performance, instant startup, and as little as 90 MB of RAM.

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Flectar Mail is a lightweight, native home for your email, calendars, and contacts. It is engineered to open instantly, stay responsive, and use a fraction of the memory of a typical web-based mail client.

• Fast from the first click. A native interface and local-first data path get you to your inbox without waiting on a browser runtime.
• As little as 90 MB of RAM. Flectar Mail is deliberately designed to keep memory use low, even with a full-featured inbox at your fingertips.
• Everything in one place. Move between mail, calendars, and contacts without stitching together separate apps.
• Offline by design. Your mailbox and calendar are stored locally, so your synced data remains useful without a connection.
• Works with your accounts. Connect Gmail, Outlook and Microsoft 365, or standards-based IMAP/SMTP, JMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV services.
• Privacy-conscious defaults. Remote images are blocked until you allow them, helping prevent tracking pixels from reporting when you read a message.
• Security by architecture. Email content is never opened in a WebView. Flectar Mail renders HTML and CSS through its own Rust-native pipeline, does not execute email scripts, and blocks remote images by default. This avoids the embedded-browser attack surface by design.
• An experimental Rust renderer. Building an email renderer without a browser engine is new territory. Rendering issues are expected, especially in complex messages, while compatibility continues to improve.
• Made for every screen. Spacious and minimal desktop layouts share the same experience as the touch-friendly compact interface.
• Native and open source. Built from the ground up with Rust. It is not a browser wrapped in a window, and it is released under the AGPLv3.

Browse JMAP/WebDAV storage, search mail attachments, keep files offline, and preview PDFs, images and text.

Settings → Accounts → Signatures & OpenPGP provides named signatures, separate new-message and reply defaults, and a composer signature selector. Desktop OpenPGP/MIME signing and encryption use installed GnuPG 2.x with pinentry for private-key passphrases. Required encryption blocks delivery when recipient keys are missing or invalid; protected drafts remain local until Send.

S/MIME and mobile OpenPGP are not currently supported.

To keep the client fully native and memory usage around 90 MB, Flectar Mail renders email HTML with Blitz, a Rust HTML/CSS renderer from the Dioxus team, instead of embedding a browser or WebView.

Desktop builds include CPU — Low Memory and GPU — WGPU under Settings → General → Renderer. CPU is selected initially and does not initialize WGPU. The GPU option uses Slint and Vello on a shared WGPU 30 device; changing the setting takes effect after restarting the app. A failed GPU startup falls back to CPU automatically.

As far as we know, Flectar Mail is one of the first projects using Blitz for arbitrary, real-world email HTML. Email markup contains plenty of unusual HTML and CSS, so this pushes the renderer into demanding territory. We currently carry several patches on top of Blitz and hope to upstream as much of that work as possible over time.

If you find an email that renders incorrectly, please report it. This approach is still experimental, but it is also a major reason Flectar Mail can remain so lightweight compared with WebView-based clients built with frameworks such as Tauri or Wails.

Choose the workspace that fits the way you handle email. Keep the detailed three-pane layout, switch to a streamlined minimal view, choose a light or dark theme, select a built-in color palette or create a custom one, and show or hide sender avatars.

Message appearance can follow the app theme or stay light or dark independently. It uses your selected color palette for HTML, plain text, and Reader mode. To temporarily show the sender's original colors, use the contrast icon between Find and Reader mode in the desktop message toolbar, or choose Show original colors from the message's three-dot menu on any screen size.

The full workspace keeps your folders, message list, and selected email visible together. The minimal layout reduces visual noise and gives each part of your inbox more room when you need it.

Group related accounts into named profiles such as Work or Personal, then give each profile its own color. In Settings → Accounts → Profiles, you can assign accounts, override an individual account's color, and show the effective color along the left edge of every message. The markers make accounts easy to tell apart while working in the unified inbox; the example below uses purple for Work and orange for Support.

Replies stay grouped in chronological order, with the active message expanded inside the reading pane.

Use Up/Down to navigate messages, Home/End to jump to the first or last loaded message, and Page Up/Page Down to move a page at a time. Enter opens the current message and focuses its content; Space checks or unchecks it for bulk actions. Tab/Shift+Tab move between controls. In the full workspace, F6 moves focus between the message list and reader. In the minimal layout, arrow keys highlight messages and Enter opens them; Escape or F6 returns to the list.

Keep several places open at once with browser-style tabs. Each tab remembers its own location: a mailbox, search, or open conversation, or the calendar, contacts, or files. Middle-click or Ctrl/⌘-click a message to open it in a background tab (add Shift to switch to it), or choose Open in new tab from its menu. Drag tabs to reorder them, middle-click a tab to close it, and pick up where you left off the next time you open Flectar Mail.

Ctrl/⌘+T opens a new tab and Ctrl/⌘+W closes the current one. Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab cycle through tabs, Ctrl/⌘+1–8 jump to a tab, and Ctrl/⌘+9 jumps to the last.

Full workspace	Minimal workspace

Teal	Green	Purple	Custom

Turn on Frameless window in Settings → General → Interface to replace the system title bar with window controls in the toolbar. Each platform keeps its own behavior: macOS keeps the native traffic lights, Windows keeps Snap Layouts and the system menu, and Linux follows the button order and title-bar actions configured for GNOME or KDE.

macOS	Windows
Linux (GNOME)	Linux (KDE)

Calendar	Contacts	Files (WebDAV/JMAP)

Settings → Storage shows how much space mail, attachments, offline files, and databases use on the device. From the same page, you can export verified database snapshots or transfer connected-account setup and preferences through a backup. Passwords and OAuth tokens stay in the system keyring, so a restored device asks you to sign in again.

The compact interface keeps the important actions within reach while giving messages, events, and contacts the full screen when they need it.

Light	Dark

Flectar Mail is currently in development and is not yet stable.

Builds without OAuth app keys keep Gmail and Outlook sign-in disabled. Use the Sign-in settings cog on the welcome screen to save your own Google or Microsoft app registration, or connect an IMAP/JMAP account. Custom keys are shared with Settings and take precedence over bundled keys; clearing a custom client ID restores the defaults when available. Each provider enables separately once its configuration is saved.

When preview builds are published, download them from GitHub Releases and look for the Pre-release badge:

• Linux x64: AppImage, Debian/Ubuntu .deb, Fedora .rpm, or a sideloaded Flatpak preview bundle
• Windows x64: Setup .exe or portable ZIP
• macOS Apple silicon or Intel (macOS 14+): DMG or application ZIP
• Android arm64 (Android 8.0+): Experimental test APK in prereleases

Windows previews are unsigned; macOS previews are ad-hoc signed and not notarized, so operating-system security prompts are expected. Install updates manually.

The Flatpak preview is provided as a standalone test bundle. It is not yet a Flathub package and therefore does not receive automatic Flathub updates. Its close-to-tray option is disabled until the tray backend can use a sandbox-safe D-Bus name.

Install the downloaded Linux package with either sudo dnf install ./flectar-mail-<version>-linux-x64.rpm or flatpak install --user ./flectar-mail-<version>-linux-x64.flatpak. Launch the Flatpak with flatpak run com.flectar.mail.

Each GitHub release includes SHA256SUMS and signed build-provenance attestations. With GitHub CLI installed, verify a download with gh attestation verify <download> --repo flectar/mail.

Android APK updates require the same signing key; builds without a persistent test key may require uninstalling the previous app, which deletes local app data.

You can also build Flectar Mail from source with the Rust toolchain:

cargo run --bin flectar-mail

Linux desktop OAuth uses the system browser through the desktop portal and stores refresh credentials through the freedesktop Secret Service. A normal desktop session therefore needs an xdg-desktop-portal backend and a Secret Service provider such as GNOME Keyring. Release builds stop before opening the OAuth page when secure credential storage is unavailable, so an authorization grant can never be completed without a safe place to persist it.

Podman and Docker development shells commonly have neither the host session D-Bus nor the host browser's loopback network. Debug builds support that setup with a clearly marked, owner-only development credential file and an accordion for pasting the final loopback callback URL. The file backend is excluded from release builds.

Flectar Mail is built for everyone, and we'd love your help making it available in more languages!

We're using Weblate to manage community translations. Whether you'd like to translate Flectar Mail into your native language, improve an existing translation, or help review translated strings, every contribution is welcome.

Start translating Flectar Mail →

Getting started is easy:

1. Create an account on our translation platform.
2. Select your language, or start a new translation if it isn't available yet.
3. Translate strings directly through Weblate, no programming or GitHub experience required.

Translations are synchronized with our GitHub repository and submitted as pull requests for review. Contributors can also receive GitHub attribution for their work.

Flectar Mail is one open-source application. There is no separate community edition. The client is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3. Read the licensing overview for the practical details, or see CONTRIBUTING.md to help shape the project.

Flectar Mail is made possible by the work of these projects and their contributors:

• Slint, the native UI toolkit that powers the Flectar Mail interface.
• Blitz, the Rust HTML/CSS renderer from the Dioxus team that powers the email reading experience.