Kirby
A Mac email app that stays out of your way.
Download for Mac Free with one mailbox · macOS 15 or later · Apple silicon and Intel
A Mac email app that stays out of your way.
Download for Mac Free with one mailbox · macOS 15 or later · Apple silicon and IntelMost mail apps treat a message from your sister and a 40%-off email as the same kind of thing, arriving in the same list, competing for the same attention. Kirby doesn't.
Mail lands in bundles — people, notifications, newsletters, promotions — so a sale never sits on top of something that matters. Roll the noisy ones up and deal with them when you feel like it.
People, notifications, newsletters and promotions each get their own bundle. Archive a whole one in a click.
Make a pile, call it anything — Flat, Freelance, Mum — then drag mail into it. After three, Kirby files the rest there by itself, worked out on your Mac rather than on somebody's server. Drag one back out and it takes the hint.
Your mail lives in a database on your Mac. The window is instant, search works on a train, and anything you do offline is sent the moment you're back.
Full text across everything, plus from:,
is:unread, has:attachment and
dates. Ten thousand conversations, still instant.
Archive twenty conversations and change your mind: one ⌘Z brings back twenty, locally and on Gmail.
The folder Kirby opens on holds people — plus any conversation you've written in, whatever it started life as. A delivery notice you replied to is a conversation; the next one from the same shop isn't.
The contract you can't find is an attachment, not a subject line. ⌘⇧L lists every file anyone ever sent you, searchable by name, sender or what the message was about.
A folder of everything you sent that got silence, three days old and up. Not newsletters, not no-reply addresses, not notes to yourself — conversations where somebody was actually going to answer.
Your mail travels between Google and your Mac, and nowhere else — unless you switch on the AI features, which is the one thing that sends a message anywhere. It's off until you turn it on.
Remote images are blocked until you ask for them, so senders can't see when you opened something. Sender photos come from your own address book — not Gravatar, not the sender's website, both of which mean telling a third party who you correspond with.
It counts them, too. Settings › Privacy shows what tried to watch you this week, which company was behind it — Mailchimp, SendGrid, HubSpot and the rest — and which senders used them. A tracking pixel is counted; a newsletter's own header picture isn't, because calling that surveillance would make the number say less than it looks like it says.
One setting deliberately goes the other way. Kirby can put your mail in the Mac's Spotlight index so ⌘Space finds it — and Spotlight's index belongs to macOS, so other apps on the Mac can search what's in it. That's why it's off until you switch it on, why only the sender, subject and preview line ever go in, and why switching it off deletes what was added rather than merely stopping.
No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting service, no licence check that phones home. If Kirby crashes it writes a note on your Mac and shows it to you; it goes nowhere unless you send it yourself.
The one thing that sends a message off this Mac, stated plainly: turn on Summarise, Ask AI or AI Reply and the message you use them on is sent to Anthropic, by way of a small server that holds the key. It says so before you agree, it's off until then, and everything else in Kirby works exactly the same either way. The full policy is here, and it's in the app too.
One mailbox
Everything above, plus
Free stays free — no countdown, no nagging, no features quietly taken away later to make a point. Monthly, yearly or once-and-done; prices are shown in the app in your own currency.
Kirby isn't published yet. The first build is signed, notarised by Apple and ready to go — what's left is the App Store paperwork, not the app.
When it lands it'll be a plain disk image: drag it to Applications and open it. No installer, no account to create, nothing to configure. Connect a Gmail account and it starts working.
Requirements: macOS 15 or later, Apple silicon or Intel.
One autistic developer, working alone, who cares — maybe a little too much — about getting the small things right. Every purchase comes straight to her: no investors, no ads, nothing about you sold to anyone. People who use the thing pay for the thing.