Skim

No rules, no filter, no snooze… sounds like you cut away a bit too many features…

love that it's local-first and tiny, but honestly a unified inbox view would be a game changer for me. like, one screen where i can see all my accounts side by side instead of toggling between them. would make it feel even more minimal and way faster to triage.

Honestly the 5 MB installer is kind of wild for an email client, opened it up and was reading mail before my coffee was ready. The bring your own AI key approach feels right too, no weird data stuff happening behind the scenes.

Love that you kept it under 5 MB while still shipping full-text search and AI drafting. The local-first approach with bring-your-own-key feels rare these days.

Love how lightweight this feels, especially coming from bloated desktop clients. One thing that would make it a daily driver for me: add support for PGP or at least S/MIME signing and encryption. Local-first is great, but most of the work I get requires signed replies, so I keep having to fall back to Thunderbird for that.

5mb installer and sub-second cold start on windows is honestly kind of wild, my current client takes forever to open. love that ai is opt-in too.

been using it for a few days and honestly the instant full-text search is kind of wild, way faster than outlook. the minimal vibe is actually refreshing, feels like it respects my time

Sub-second cold start from a 5 MB installer is genuinely impressive craft, especially with native search baked in. Really respect the discipline of cutting the calendar and rules engine instead of bolting them on.

Tried it on my old laptop and yeah, the cold start is genuinely instant which is wild for an email client. Love that the AI stuff is opt-in instead of shoved in my face.

Hey Nikita, congrats!Any plans to release a Mac version?

The Rust-backed cold start is genuinely instant, feels closer to opening a text editor than an email app. Glad the AI part is opt-in with your own key instead of some bundled subscription, keeps things lean.

Curious how you handle Gmail OAuth secrets in a public repo though! Great launch, refreshing branding, and love every MIT license.

I will take a look because anything has the be better than MS Outlook these days! Does it handle multiple email accounts?

I built Skim because I wanted a Windows email client that doesn't suck that hard and couldn't find one. Now I wanna share it with you.

Skim is open source and MIT-licensed, free forever. No subscription, no telemetry. Join as a contributor plz! 🙏 https://github.com/nikserg/skim

Skim is small: a native Rust core (Tauri 2, no Electron), a ~5 MB installer, offline-first IMAP sync into local SQLite, instant full-text search, and a keyboard-first UI with a Ctrl+K palette.


✦ The AI part works on your terms: paste your own Anthropic or OpenRouter key to enable AI features:

✍️ it drafts replies in your voice (and can learn from your sent emails)
📥 summarizes your unread mail
🔍 answers questions across your whole mailbox, with cited sources

Pretty basic, huh? Right. That's all I need, and I believe there are people who need the same. Requests go straight from your machine to the provider: no middleman, no markup, no subscription.


Let me share a bit of the philosophy I try to follow while building Skim:

✂️ Minimalism. It's an email client and that's it. No integrations -> no bloat. Cognitive load matters!
🎯 Contextual actions. Skim tries to be the kind of software that thinks FOR you to save your cognitive resources. Buttons show up only when needed, the app always does the most obvious thing, and the defaults should be the best ones.
⚡ Resource efficiency. Skim is built to run in the background 24/7, so it stays as humble as possible and eats as few resources as it can. That's why the installer is under 5 MB 😄


So, with all that said: please, have fun with Skim! I'd love your feedback, especially from folks tired of heavy clients. What would make you switch? What's missing? How could I trick you into contributing? 🤘