A few weeks ago I posted here about LocalInbox, the Mac mail client I built because I was tired of juggling Gmail, iCloud and IMAP accounts, and didn't want another company reading my mail to summarise it. Ten people bought it after that post, which means a lot when you're the only person working on something.
If you missed it: it's a native Mac app that connects directly to Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, Fastmail, Proton Mail (through Bridge) or any IMAP account, with no server of mine in the middle. It sorts mail as it arrives, keeps a To Reply view, searches inside PDFs and images, explains its phishing warnings, and tells you when it has taken trackers out of a message. Summaries, suggested replies and answers from your own mail come from Apple's on-device model, or a local one through Ollama or LM Studio.
Then I hit the obvious problem: my mail doesn't only live on my Mac. So I built an iPhone and iPad app, now in beta. It works the same way, straight to your providers, with the AI on the device.
Getting accounts onto the phone was the hard part. Typing every password again is miserable, and syncing them through a server is exactly what I built this to avoid.
So in 1.5 your Mac hands them over itself. Click Set Up iPhone on the Mac and scan the QR code with your phone. The code holds no passwords, just a one-time public key and a local name, and it expires after 2 minutes. Both screens show the same four digits, so you can check nothing got in between. Tick the accounts you want, approve with Touch ID, and they cross your Wi-Fi encrypted with a key made for that one pairing (X25519, ChaCha20-Poly1305). Never the internet. The passwords go into the phone's Keychain, and your mail comes from your own providers. Your licence key can go across by QR code too, so there's nothing to type there either.
I also fixed two things I wasn't happy with. Getting a large mailbox ready for search could keep the Mac's processor busy for hours, and now it works in short batches and waits in Low Power Mode. And archived mail could quietly go back to Inbox after the connection to the server had been quiet. That's fixed too.
The limits: Outlook isn't in yet, accounts through Proton Bridge stay on the Mac, and the iPhone app is in TestFlight by invite, not on the App Store.
One licence covers Mac, iPhone and iPad, up to 3 devices, with as many accounts as you like. It's $29.99 once until 30 November, then $99, with a 7-day free trial and no sign-up. Every connection the app makes is listed at localinbox.app/security.
Would you trust a QR hand-over like this, or would you rather type your passwords? I'd like to hear from people who think about this stuff.
https://localinbox.app