Herald
Local-first terminal email client
Details
- External ID
- 47975663
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Herald
- Website domain
- herald-mail.app
- Launched
- May 1, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.1147011308562197
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Hi folks,Some time ago I tried to find a way to clean up my 10k emails inbox and could find anything which worked for me. So I built built my own tool which evolved into a client.More that out of necessity but for fun add semantic search, LLM based tagging, and clean up rules through Ollama.It has a demo mode to try without configuring anything.On Mac:brew tap herald-email/herald brew install herald herald --demoWith Go:go install github.com/herald-email/herald-mail-app/cmd/herald@latest herald --demoThe DEMO uses pre-populated synthetic data so no risk for your inboxes.Any feedback will be highly appreciated.
Enrichment
- Theme
- email design, templates, and productivity
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Communication
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- local-first terminal email client
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Building an email client from scratch that safely implements IMAP/SMTP, Gmail API, CalDAV, OAuth, MIME/HTML sanitization, and complex recurrence rules while preserving user data requires immense protocol-level engineering.
What it would actually take: Constructed using Go or Rust with a TUI framework (such as Bubble Tea or Ratatui). The critical challenge is the sheer complexity of email/calendar standards: edge-case rich MIME multi-part parsing, HTML email rendering/sanitization inside a terminal, robust bidirectional IMAP/CalDAV synchronization state machines, and RFC 5545 recurrence rule engines.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 32 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #29 of 33 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 131 days after the earliest competitor.
- Cover letter generator with Ollama/local LLMs (Open source) · hn · 2025-12-30 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Marco, a privacy-first, offline-first email client (IMAP-native, no AI) · hn · 2026-03-25 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Avec · hn · 2026-04-15 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Make senders work to get into your inbox · hn · 2026-07-15 · 44 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Keyboard First Email Client · hn · 2026-04-11 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Mail client optimized for self-hosted email across multiple domains · hn · 2026-08-20 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Maillune · hn · 2026-06-09 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- TabMail 1.8 · ph · 2026-09-17 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.33
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.