What Postio is

Postio is a local-first, keyboard-first email client built for people who have too much email.

Read less. Find anything. Act faster.

If you’ve used a mail client that makes you wait — for the inbox to load, for search to come back, for a click to register — Postio is built to never do that. It keeps a full copy of your mail in a local database with a built-in search index, so opening the app, searching, and moving around never touch the network. Every action you take — archive, flag, move, delete, undo — applies instantly to that local copy and is sent to the server in the background. You are never staring at a spinner waiting for your own mailbox to respond.

The three things it has to be better at

Speed. Startup, navigation, and search are held to a real budget — under half a second to a usable inbox, under 100ms for a search — and it’s checked automatically, not just claimed.

Search. Search isn’t a box in the corner; it’s a primary way to move through your mail. from:ada after:2026-01-01 has:attach is a query you can type, save, or pin as a folder — one language, everywhere it appears.

Keyboard. Every action has a shortcut. j/k move, e replies, a archives, u undoes anything, / searches, Ctrl+K opens the command palette, ? shows the full cheat sheet. The mouse works too, and is never required.

What v1 does

One IMAP + SMTP account, authenticated with a password or an app-specific password. Inbox, folders, threads. Read/unread, archive, delete, flag, move. HTML and plain-text reading, attachments, quoted-message folding. Compose, reply, reply-all, forward, drafts. Local full-text search with operators. Vim-style navigation and a command palette, every binding rebindable. Background sync, full offline reading, undo.

What it deliberately doesn’t do yet

Postio is Linux-only for now (GTK4/libadwaita), and v1 has no AI features — not because they aren’t planned, but because shipping AI over a mediocre mail client would just produce a mediocre mail client with AI in it. Core mail, search, and the keyboard come first. Rules, contacts management, and snooze/scheduled send are also out of v1, each with its own tracked issue.

Ready to try it? See Installing Postio.

This is the reference documentation. The Postio home page is the wider tour: what it looks like, what it is for, and where the project stands.