Skim — Email at the speed of thought

Why Skim

Most mail clients are either web apps in a trench coat or twenty-year-old battleships. Skim is neither.

⚡

Native & fast

Rust core + WebView2 UI (Tauri 2). A few-megabyte installer, instant cold start, tiny idle memory. No Electron.

🔒

Local-first & private

Mail syncs over IMAP straight into a local SQLite cache. Works offline, search is instant, zero telemetry.

✦

AI on your terms

Bring your own key — Anthropic or OpenRouter. Requests go directly from your machine to the provider. No key? Still a great client.

🌍

Built for humans

11 languages, light & dark themes, keyboard-first. Switchable at runtime, no restart.

Everything you need, nothing you don't

One account, three panes, and a command palette that gets out of your way.

Any mailbox

Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, or any IMAP/SMTP server. Google sign-in via OAuth or an app password. Autoconfig for the big providers.

Offline-first actions

Archive, delete, star, read/unread and send apply instantly and queue in SQLite — Skim syncs when the network returns.

Instant search

Full-text search (SQLite FTS5) over subject, sender, recipients and bodies. Ctrl+K palette jumps anywhere as you type.

Real threading

Conversation threading via References / In-Reply-To with subject fallback. Reply, reply-all and forward with proper headers.

Push & tray

IMAP IDLE push + polling, new-mail notifications with a mark-read action. Lives in the tray, syncing in the background.

Safe HTML mail

HTML sanitized in Rust (ammonia), rendered in a sandboxed iframe with strict CSP. Remote images blocked by default.

Ctrl K · palette Ctrl N · compose j/k · move e · archive # · delete s · star u · unread r · reply / · search

✦ Bring your own key

AI that respects your bill and your privacy

Paste an Anthropic or OpenRouter key and the ✦ violet buttons light up. Your key, your bill — no markup, no proxy, no accounts. Stored in Windows Credential Manager.

Draft reply — tell Claude what to say, get a draft in your voice; make it shorter, warmer or more formal in one click.
AI Recap — one click digests every unread email in your inbox, action items first with cited sources, and marks them read.
Summarize — long threads in a few bullets, action items called out.
Ask about this — question any specific email.
Mailbox chat — "which invoices are still unpaid this month?" Answers cite the source emails as clickable chips.
Your writer, your voice — set your name and style, give the AI standing instructions. Two providers: Claude direct, or OpenRouter for GPT, Gemini, Grok and hundreds more.

Install in seconds

Download the latest installer — the .exe (NSIS) installs per-user without admin rights; an .msi is published for managed environments. Requires Windows 10/11 with WebView2 (preinstalled on Windows 11).

⬇ Get the latest release