Help
Everything you need to know about Premail, collected in one place.
What is Premail?
What Premail is: a local companion that monitors your inboxes, classifies mail with your AI model, and applies your rules automatically.
Privacy & Your Data
Premail has no servers processing your private data. Learn exactly what stays on your machine and what gets sent to your AI provider.
Adding Email Accounts
How to connect Gmail, Outlook, and iCloud Mail to Premail, including OAuth sign-in, app-specific passwords, and connecting several accounts at once.
Why iCloud Mail is Slower Than Gmail
Gmail reacts to new mail faster than iCloud because of API differences. Here's the technical reason, and what it means for how quickly Premail acts.
What Happens When Your Computer Sleeps
Premail catches up on emails that arrived while your computer was asleep, processing the backlog the moment it wakes. Here's exactly how that works.
Start at Login
Premail starts automatically when you log in so it can keep protecting your inbox. How to toggle it, and what to do if it stops launching on its own.
AI Model Configuration
Choose between Anthropic, OpenAI, or a local Ollama model for private email classification, and set your own API key so no email text leaves your machine.
Getting an AI API Key
A step-by-step walkthrough for creating an Anthropic or OpenAI API key, what it costs, and the free local alternative if you'd rather not have one.
Built-in Email Rules
Premail ships with 20 default categories covering common inbox clutter. Configure the action and confidence threshold for each.
Custom Email Rules Guide
Write plain-English rules to handle anything the built-in categories don't cover, from cold pitches to receipts. Describe it and Premail does the rest.
Contacts and Address Book
Sync your address book from Gmail, Outlook, or iCloud so people you know are treated as known senders during rule processing.
Allowed Senders
Add senders to the allowlist so Premail always delivers their email to your inbox without applying any rules, no matter what the AI would otherwise do.
Blocked Senders
Block a domain or address and every email from it goes straight to trash, no AI involved. A simple, deterministic backstop for senders you never want.
Manage Email Subscriptions
Premail scans your inbox for mailing list subscriptions and lets you unsubscribe from recurring senders in one click, without hunting through each email.
Setup & Learning Mode
What the setup wizard does, and why every account starts in Learning mode, showing what Premail would do until you trust the results and switch to Live.
Bulk Inbox Cleaner
Bulk-process your existing inbox backlog using your current rules in a one-time sweep, catching up from thousands of unread to a manageable list.
Test Rules with Dropzone
Drag and drop .eml files into Premail to preview how your rules classify and act on each message before letting them loose on your live inbox.
Email Activity Log
A live feed of everything Premail has done: classifications, rule matches, actions taken, and the AI's reasoning.
Email Filtering Analytics
A persistent dashboard of every email Premail has handled, with date-range filters, per-action and per-account breakdowns, and an estimate of time saved.
Reputation Shield
Reputation Shield checks sender domains against the Spamhaus DBL before any rule runs. Messages from known spam or phishing domains are trashed immediately.
Premail Rule Packs
Pre-configured rule sets you apply with one click: free packs for organizers, Pro packs for specific inbox types like recruiter noise and conference spam.
Community Rule Import/Export
Save your entire rule configuration to a JSON file, share it with others, or load a setup from another machine. A simple way to back up and reuse rules.
Settings Backup & Restore
Export every setting in one Premail installation to a single file and restore it into another. Your accounts and passwords never leave your Mac.
Rule Explainability
A Pro feature that shows the AI's full reasoning for why a message matched or didn't match your rules, so no classification is ever a black box.
Work & Professional Inboxes
Pro users can connect work email addresses with custom domains: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 business, and any non-consumer email.
Human Support for Pro
Pro users can submit support requests and get a response from a real person on setup, billing, accounts, and troubleshooting Premail.
Send feedback to Premail
Send Premail a bug report, feature idea, or comment anonymously from Help or the public form, and optionally leave an email if you want a reply.
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