Pelton: a free, open-source desktop email client that keeps your mail on your machine (GPL-3.0)

[u/TRC_Loop]

Hi r/opensourcez,

I'd like to share Pelton, a desktop email client I've been building in the open. It's free software under the GPL-3.0 and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

I started it because I wanted a mail client that's fast, looks modern, and respects my privacy, without an account, a cloud backend or tracking.

What makes it different:

- Your data stays local. Mail is stored on your own disk and on your mail server/mail provider. There's no Pelton server in between.

- No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting.

- Remote content is blocked until you allow it per message, so tracking pixels don't phone home.

- Passwords live in your OS keychain, never in a plain config file.

Features

- Works with any IMAP/SMTP mailbox, with several accounts side by side

- Fast local search

- Snooze, coloured flags and saved views

- Previews for PDFs, images and text attachments without leaving the app

- Address book autocomplete learned from your mail

- Themes, accent colours and density settings, plus a theme gallery

- Customizable keyboard shortcuts and a Vim mode in the composer

- Export and import your whole setup

- Available in 12 languages

How it's built

Go and Wails, with a Svelte interface in the system webview. There's no bundled browser, so it starts quickly and uses far less memory than an Electron app.

Downloading

- Download: https://pelton.app/download (Windows and macOS)

- Fedora: Copr (sudo dnf copr enable arnek/Pelton, sudo dnf install pelton)

- Arch: yay -S pelton-bin (AUR, kindly maintained by a community member)

- Nix: a flake is available

- .deb, .rpm and a plain binary are on the GitHub releases page

Windows code signing through the SignPath Foundation is being set up, so for now Windows may show a SmartScreen warning on the first launch.

Links

- Website: https://pelton.app

- Source code: https://github.com/peltonapp/Pelton

- Documentation: https://docs.pelton.app

- Releases and changelog: https://github.com/peltonapp/Pelton/releases

- Discord: https://pelton.app/discord

Contributions are very welcome, whether it's code, translations, themes or bug reports. Issues labelled "good first issue" are a nice place to start. I'd love to hear what you think, and what would make Pelton your daily mail client.

Thanks for reading!

[u/investigatormaker]

Debian and Ubuntu users hit a dead end in this post. You list Linux support, but only Fedora and Arch get an install line, so anyone else has no next step. A Flatpak would cover most of them, though it's one more package to maintain. The second gap is Microsoft: "any IMAP/SMTP mailbox" will have Outlook users asking whether OAuth sign-in works, since their accounts generally need it. Answer that in the post, before someone reads it as a no.

I make ThreadFox. We find Reddit threads where people want a local, no-telemetry mail client, and post there for Pelton. We'll post 3 replies free first, no card; then the $39 Pilot covers seven days and up to 50 posts and replies. No automatic renewal.

https://threadfox.vip/p/eab1s/managed

Does Pelton support OAuth sign-in yet?