Snug is a native macOS client with an AI concierge that reads every arrival on your Mac, files the informational majority into real IMAP folders, and hands you one calm daily brief. Zero isn't a discipline. It's the resting state.
Other clients help you sort mail. Snug's position is that most of it should never have reached your attention at all — and every piece of that machinery is inspectable, reversible, and yours to tune.
Mail from a first-time sender holds in a New senders tab — nothing moves on the server, it's simply out of view. A approves, B blocks, each with a six-second undo. Reading a held message lets nobody in.
Turning the Screener on causes no retroactive chaos: everyone you've ever corresponded with is grandfathered, and anyone you email first is automatically welcome.
High-confidence informational mail — receipts, codes, shipping, subscriptions, newsletters — files itself into its own label folder. Real IMAP folders, real keywords: your filing is visible from any other client. Actionable mail, favorites, and first-time senders are never touched, and a Standard / Conservative dial sets how bold it's allowed to be.
Triage survives the tunnel, too — archive on the train and the action queues, outlives quitting the app, and retries until the server agrees.
The Handled tray ( G R ) — a ledger of everything the concierge did on its own. Nothing silently handled ever just vanishes.
Every message sorts into one of 15 categories and into your account's own label folders — the model's vocabulary is your filing system, not a hardcoded taxonomy.
On-device Apple Intelligence by default — free, private, nothing leaves the Mac. Prefer a bigger model? Bring your own key. Cloud providers are opt-in per provider, with a plain statement of exactly what would be sent and what it costs.
The two local options never send a byte off your Mac.
Verification codes and money amounts are extracted deterministically — never model-guessed. A login code surfaces as a Copy pill and can file itself once it's done its job.
Change a label and Snug offers to apply the rule to that sender, their whole domain, or the thread. Rules are deterministic and beat the model, listed per account in Settings.
Receipts, bills, subscriptions, income, codes, and tasks are extracted as structured records — a queryable memory of your email life that powers the Press's money section and recurring-charge detection.
Anything doable is doable by key. Single keys are focus-aware — they never fire while you type — and ? opens a contextual cheat sheet anywhere.
watch: J walks · E archives · Z undoes
E archive · # trash · ! spam · * flag · U read · V move · L label · T tasks · Z undo
C compose · R reply · ⇧R reply all · F forward · ⌘↵ send · ⌘⇧↵ send & done
J K next / prev · X select · Space scroll · ↵ open · / search
G I inbox · G S sent · G B today's brief · G R handled tray · G G any folder
A approve · B block · J K walk senders · ↵ read first
Once a day, on your schedule, Snug composes and delivers a designed digest of everything it handled — what needs you, what it filed, and the money that moved. The Press is the safety net that makes the autonomy trustworthy: nothing the concierge touches ever just vanishes.
Multiple briefing groups, each covering chosen accounts, delivered to a chosen account, on its own schedule. Finances graduate to a Weekly Ledger — a subscriptions table, stacked spend bars, and recurring-charge and price-change detection.
Drag-order the modules: your RSS feeds, weather, today's agenda, tasks due, a word of the day, a joke with a comfort dial, a micro-poem, this day in history — or a fully custom prompted article.
Name the paper, name the byline. The assistant's closing journal remembers what it has already told you and doesn't repeat itself.
Search filters as you type against the local store — subject,
sender, and body, one account or all of them, on a plane. Structured
tokens compose as chips: from: to: label: has:attachment is:unread date: larger: and more.
Or skip the grammar. Plain English is parsed on-device into a structured query, and semantic search ranks by meaning alongside the full-text index. When local results run dry, one click searches the server for mail you haven't downloaded yet.
Circles make people searchable as units — from:kids school
matches every parent, teacher, and office address you've grouped,
across all accounts.
Live syntax highlighting with an Editor / Split / Preview toggle.
Mail sends as per-element CSS-inlined HTML with your Markdown as the
plain-text fallback — tables, task lists, admonitions,
syntax-highlighted code, and ==highlights== that
survive the recipient's dark mode.
Snippets think: {{to.first}} fills the recipient,
a date library fills next Friday, and
{{cal.free_slot_today}} fills your next real
calendar gap. Fill-in blanks tab like a form, and a pre-send audit
catches any you left behind.
⌘↵ holds the send for an undoable 10 or 30 seconds. ⌘⇧↵ sends and archives the conversation in one stroke.
Switching mail clients is expensive, so Snug didn't ship thin. The long tail is on the features page; here is the shape of it.
Month to 3-Day views of your system calendars; create, edit, drag,
and cancel events; invites ride your emails as real
method=REQUEST parts; Zoho Meeting links mint
themselves into the ICS. Nothing ever emails an organizer without
asking.
127 ms
Thread documents are pre-painted and byte-stable; opening a message adopts finished pixels. Measured: 891–2,410 ms cold renders down to 127–236 ms.
Addresses and domains treated as one correspondent — one sidebar lens, one search term, one VIP unit. The school, the building, the client team.
SPF / DKIM / DMARC plus lookalike-domain checks roll into a three-state seal beside every sender. A suspected spoof is quarantined — readable, links locked — never silently deleted.
Opening a thread doesn't blanket-mark it read. A message clears only when its card actually reaches the top of your viewport — and read state fans out to every copy, locally and on the server.
Autoconfig resolves custom domains by MX lookup; Proton connects first-class via Bridge; Gmail and Outlook work with an app password. Credentials live in the macOS Keychain.
Everything synced is readable, searchable, and composable offline. Sends queue in the Outbox; triage actions retry until the server agrees. The local database is the source of truth.
New-mail, send, archive, and trash cues are Snug's quiet sounds, not the system honk — plus a soft thinking tone, in time, while the AI works.
Your whole mailbox lives in a local database on your Mac. No cloud account, no telemetry of message content — architecture, not policy.
Mail, search index, and the capture ledger live on disk; credentials live in the macOS Keychain. Remove an account and its cache and Keychain entry go with it — mail on the server is never touched.
Cloud AI is opt-in per provider, with a plain statement of exactly what would be sent and per-model costs. On-device and Ollama give zero-egress AI. Avatar lookups are individually opt-in, off by default.
Every body is sanitized before rendering; remote images stay blocked for untrusted senders; link hover shows the true URL; no read receipts, ever.
Apple Mail shows you everything, then leaves you to sort it. Superhuman is fast — and it's the cloud, at $30 a month. Snug is keyboard-fast too; the difference is where the intelligence runs and what happens to the noise.
| Capability | Apple Mail | Superhuman | Snug Email |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where the AI runs | Apple hardware-gated | In the cloud | On your Mac |
| Free, private on-device AI | Thin | — | Apple Intelligence |
| Bring your own AI key | — | — | Claude · GPT · Gemini · Grok · Ollama |
| Removes mail from your attention | — | Labels & splits it | Files it, with an undo ledger |
| Structured memory — receipts, subscriptions, spend | — | — | The capture ledger + Weekly Ledger |
| Markdown-native compose | — | — | Editor / Split / Preview |
| Screener for first-time senders | — | — | With grandfathering |
| Daily brief, as a newspaper | — | AI summaries | The Morning Press |
| Full calendar inside the client | Partial | Partial | Full section, invites included |
| Works fully offline | Partial | Limited | Local DB is the source of truth |
| Price posture | Free | $30 / month | Early access · on-device AI free · cloud is your key |
| The feeling | Utilitarian | Sleek & cool | Cozy & warm |
Comparisons reflect each product's default posture; competitors evolve, and we've tried to be fair rather than flattering. Gmail and Outlook connect over IMAP with an app password — there's no one-click OAuth sign-in yet.
All caught up. Go make a cup of coffee.
An inbox that holds only what needs you, an assistant that runs on your own machine, and a client that didn't skip the hard parts. That's Snug Email.
v0.8.0 is in private beta — mail us and we'll get you a build.
macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon · any IMAP account & Proton via Bridge · your mail stays yours.
