Colibri Mail

Inbox zero has a keyboard shortcut.

Colibri is a Mac email client that puts every account in one list and a command on every key. Archive, reply, search, jump — one keystroke each, answered in under 100 milliseconds, because your mail already lives on your machine. And the AI it's growing works the same way — through your commands, with your undo, on your terms.

Free to use. Gmail on macOS (Apple Silicon) first.

⌘KThis page runs on commands too.

The pitch

You already have email. Here's why people switch.

Coming from Superhuman?

Keep the speed, drop the $30 a month — the client is free to use. And you get the thing it still won't give you: work, personal, and the side project in one single list. Your muscle memory mostly carries over; the rest you can rebind in a minute.

Coming from Apple Mail?

Apple Mail stores email. Colibri gets you through it. One key archives and advances to the next thread. Search covers every message you've ever received and answers before you finish typing the word.

Coming from Spark or the Gmail tab?

Your mail shouldn't commute through someone else's cloud. Colibri keeps the whole archive on your Mac — there is no server of ours that sees it, and tracking pixels are blocked before they fire.

How it feels

Everything is a command.

Press ⌘K and type what you want. Every action in Colibri lives in one registry, so the palette can find it, a key can fire it, and you can rebind it. No mouse-only features, no menu spelunking.

⌘KThe palette. Fuzzy, grouped, and every row shows its shortcut.
e c rArchive, compose, reply. One letter each. E also advances to the next thread — triage becomes a rhythm.
⌃n ⌃pVim motion is built in, next to the arrows: gg, G, ⌃d, ⌃u. Twenty years of muscle memory, honored.
SpacePeek at a thread without leaving the list. Enter opens it fully. Escape always backs out one level.
RebindAny key, any action — including the defaults we're proudest of.

The Colibri Mail command palette open over the inbox, showing grouped commands with their shortcuts — The palette. Every row is an action the keyboard can also reach directly.

Accounts

One inbox. Every account. No context switching.

Work, personal, and the side project land in one list, in the order they arrived. Each account gets a colour on the row, the rail shows who's who, and you stay in one place the whole time.

Replies from the right address, always

A reply goes out from the account the mail came to. Sending from a different one takes a deliberate step and a confirmation — the cross-account slip that makes your stomach drop can't happen by accident.

Nine accounts, one key each

⌃1 through ⌃9 switches accounts instantly. Your folder stays put when you switch, and your account stays put when you change folders.

Gmail first, done right

One provider polished before the next one starts. IMAP and Microsoft are on the roadmap; the beta is Gmail and honest about it.

The Colibri Mail unified inbox: an account rail on the left and one message list, each row carrying its account's colour — One list, every account. The dot's colour is the account; the rail is the legend.

Speed

Your whole mail history, already on your Mac.

Colibri mirrors your entire history — every year of it — into a local database and reads from there. That's the whole trick. Nothing sits between your keystroke and the answer except your own SSD.

Real app, real time: search answering mid-word, a peek, an archive. Nothing here is waiting on a network.

Search that finishes first

Press / and type. Gmail syntax works out of the box — from:, is:unread, has:attachment — across every message you've ever received, and results update mid-word.

Offline is a feature

Read, archive, and reply on a plane. Everything queues locally and syncs when you land. No spinners, no 'reconnecting…'.

Ten seconds of takeback

Undo send holds your message for a real ten seconds, in your own outbox, before anything leaves the machine.

Speed with receipts

The 100 ms budget has a harness behind it: CI drives the message list at 100,000 rows, and a missed frame is a failed build.

What's nextComing soon

Next up: an inbox that knows what needs you.

You come back to fourteen new emails. Three actually need you. Colibri's next act is knowing which three, and showing you the evidence for each one. Everything else stays exactly where it was: nothing hidden, nothing reordered, no mystery folders.

Every reason is a fact pulled from the mail itself. If it isn't in the text, Colibri doesn't say it.

One narrow question

Does this need a reply or a decision from you? That's the entire question it answers. No importance scores, no sender prestige, no guessing. An empty section is a trustworthy answer.

A brief that ends

Mornings become a finite session: summary cards, up to three suggested actions each, 1-2-3 to run them, E for done. The counter hits 14/14 and you're out.

Replies in your voice

Pick a stance — yes, no, later — or brain-dump half-sentences and get the polite version, drafted from how you actually write to that person. Every draft waits in the composer for your ⌘Enter.

Ask your inbox

"What did the accountant say about Q3?" — answered with citations that click through to the real messages.

Design mockup: a peek card where an 'AI says' panel reads — a routine receipt. Autopilot filed it under Receipts; nothing needs a reply. — From the design mockups — this is where Colibri is headed. A routine receipt, already filed, explained in one line.

Same rules as your keyboard.

One registryThe assistant fires the same commands your keys do. No private API, and every act lands in a log with one-keystroke undo.
Gated at startupEvery action declares whether AI may run it, and the program checks the table on every launch — a dangerous action that claimed AI could run it unattended crashes the app at startup. Loading remote images is marked never: an assistant must not confirm to a sender that you read their mail.
Never sendsIt drafts, you send. There's no setting that changes this.
Nothing retainedCloud requests pass through our server and leave nothing behind — no table, no log line, no cache. The test is literal: grep the server for your content and find none.
Or fully localPoint it at Ollama and mail never leaves your machine at all.

When it ships: bring your own local model and the AI costs nothing. The cloud version — Colibri AI Pro — will be a paid plan at an everyday-tool price. The client underneath stays free either way.

Defaults

Private by default.

Tracking pixels don't fire

Remote images stay blocked until you load them, per message. Nobody learns when you read.

Your archive, your disk

The mirror is a database in your own Library folder. We don't have a copy. We don't have anywhere to put one.

Mail can't run code

HTML mail renders sanitised and sandboxed — no scripts, no forms, no surprises.

Beta

Get in early.

Free to use. One email when there's a build worth your time — that's the whole newsletter.