Postvak

Rules for your IMAP inbox. Test them with a dry run and undo any delete. Postvak syncs your mail into a local store and runs your rules: move mail into folders, mark it read, or delete transient mail such as sign-in codes and magic links once you no longer need it. Without rules, it leaves your mail alone.

It runs headless as a background service, at login, on a server or in Docker. On top come a keyboard-driven mail window for reading (postvak gui), a full command line, and an MCP server for agents (see Agents over MCP). Postvak reads and sorts mail; it does not send it. It runs on macOS and Linux; see Install.

Install Postvak, add an account and write your first rule: see the Quickstart.

Many AI mail clients hand every message to a model and let it decide what happens. Postvak sorts with rules you can read, and lets AI help you write them.

• Predictable. The same mail gets the same outcome, every time. A model can file a message differently tomorrow, or delete one it misread.
• Reviewable. A rule is a few lines of TOML. rules test shows what it would do before it does it, and postvak log says which rule did what.
• Safe from the sender. Mail is written by strangers. A rule matches patterns, so instructions hidden in a message cannot change what it does.
• Private. Your mail is never sent to a model to be sorted. Rules run on your own machine or server, and agents see only what you grant: by default headers, no bodies.
• Free and fast. No tokens per message and no API key. Rules run on every sync, without a round trip to a model, across years of mail.
• AI where it helps. An agent over MCP reads your inbox, proposes a rule and shows its dry run. You approve it once, and from then on the rule does the work without the model.

• Works with any IMAP server, without Sieve or a webmail settings page.
• Rules go further than most filters: regex on any header or the body, age, size, read and flagged state, aliases and tags, combined with any and none; actions move, archive, tag, flag, mark read, delete or silence notifications. See Rules.
• Rules run on every sync, not once on delivery, so they can act later: an hour after you read a sign-in code, or once a newsletter is a week old.
• rules test shows what every rule would do before it does it, and deleted mail can be restored.
• Passwords stay in the macOS Keychain or the Secret Service, or come from a command such as pass.

Postvak is licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option. The mail window's HTML view includes Stylo, the CSS engine from Servo and Firefox, which is under MPL-2.0. The mail window is made with Slint under its royalty-free licence; Help ▸ About Postvak shows its attribution.

• Documentation: install, accounts, rules, agent guide and CLI reference
• Contributing and Code of Conduct
• Security policy: how to report a vulnerability
• Changelog