Velo
Open-source, keyboard-first email client in Tauri and Rust
Details
- External ID
- 47096524
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- —
- Website domain
- —
- Launched
- Feb. 21, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 7
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.38207547169811323
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
I built Velo because I wanted Superhuman's speed and keyboard workflow without the $30/month price tag or sending all my data through someone else's servers.Velo is a local-first desktop email client. Your emails live in a local SQLite database - no middleman servers, no cloud sync. It works offline and your data stays on your machine.What makes it different:- Keyboard-driven - Superhuman-style shortcuts (j/k navigate, e archive, c compose, /search). You can fly through your inbox without touching the mouse - Built with Tauri v2 + Rust backend - ~15MB binary, low memory usage, instant startup. Not another Electron app - Multi-account - Gmail (API) and IMAP/SMTP (Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, Fastmail, etc.) - AI features (optional) - Thread summaries, smart replies, natural language inbox search. Bring your own API key (Claude, GPT, or Gemini). Results cached locally - Privacy-first - Remote images blocked by default, phishing link detection, SPF/DKIM/DMARC badges, sandboxed HTML rendering, AES-256-GCM encrypted token storage - Split inbox, snooze, scheduled send, filters, templates, newsletter bundling, quick steps, follow-up reminders, calendar syncTech stack: Tauri v2, React 19, TypeScript, SQLite + FTS5 (full-text search), Zustand, TipTap editor. 130 test files.Available on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Apache-2.0 licensed.GitHub: https://github.com/avihaymenahem/velo Site: https://velomail.appI'm a solo developer and would love feedback, especially on UX, features you'd want, or if you run into issues. Happy to answer any questions about the architecture or Tauri v2 in general.
Enrichment
- Theme
- self-hosted infrastructure and security tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Communication
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- keyboard-first email client
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The desktop UI and local SQLite cache in Tauri are straightforward, but handling full offline-capable IMAP/SMTP synchronization across diverse email provider edge cases is notoriously difficult.
What it would actually take: The system requires a Tauri frontend with a Rust backend utilizing libraries like `async-imap` or `email-lib` combined with SQLite. The core difficulty is building a resilient IMAP synchronization engine that handles arbitrary server quirks (Exchange, Gmail specific extensions, Yahoo), MIME parsing of corrupt multi-part payloads, threading heuristics, and two-way sync state conflicts. This requires specialized protocol engineering and deep familiarity with decades of messy email RFCs.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 46 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #31 of 47 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 108 days after the earliest competitor.
- Sklad · hn · 2026-02-02 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Marco, a privacy-first, offline-first email client (IMAP-native, no AI) · hn · 2026-03-25 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Velo 2.0 · ph · 2026-05-05 · 580 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Housecat.com · hn · 2026-07-22 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- BAREmail · hn · 2026-04-08 · 44 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- VaultSandbox · hn · 2026-01-06 · 58 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Secure Gmail Sender Verifier · ph · 2026-09-20 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- SmakMail · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.35
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.