Private AI email filtering for Mac, Windows, and Linux

Most email tools ask you to move in. Premail does not. It sits in your menu bar or system tray and works on the inbox you already have, in the client you already use, whether that is Apple Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, or a browser tab. When a new message arrives, Premail reads it, decides what kind of mail it is, and applies the rule you set for that category - archive it, trash it, move it to a folder, quarantine it, or leave it alone.

The classification runs against an AI model of your choosing. You bring your own Anthropic or OpenAI key, or you point it at a local Ollama model and nothing leaves your machine at all. There is no Premail server in the middle reading your mail, because there is no Premail account: you download the app and it talks to your mail provider directly. That is the whole difference from cloud filtering services, and it is why we publish a Trust Center and a third-party security assessment rather than asking you to take it on faith.

It is built for people whose inbox has stopped being useful: engineers buried in recruiter outreach, founders drowning in cold email, anyone with a decade of newsletters they never unsubscribed from. If you have tried organizing your inbox by hand and watched it refill in a week, that is the problem this solves - not by giving you another folder system to maintain, but by handling the mail before you ever open the client.

Nothing is destructive by default. Every account starts in Learning mode, where Premail shows what it would have done without touching a single message, so you can check its judgement against your real mail before you hand it the keys. The Activity log records every decision it makes, and an allowlist guarantees the senders you care about are never filtered at all.

You still do not want to babysit an inbox, even a quiet one, so Briefings writes you a short scheduled digest instead: what needs a reply, what is still waiting, and how much Premail already handled without you. Read it on your own schedule and skip the inbox entirely.

Premail runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and it is free for up to two personal inboxes. Pro adds professional inboxes, unlimited custom rules, and Reputation Shield, as a subscription or a one-time Lifetime license. If you are weighing it against a hosted service, the SaneBox comparison lays out where each one genuinely wins.