Talanoa

The chat like layout sounds simple but could make a real difference when following long back and forth conversations. Nice approach.

I like the privacy angle of it: on-device, no cloud sync. The clean chat view is a nice bonus too. Does the on-device AI work offline?

@bettercallj0hn Congrats and happy launch! I like the idea and support the local & offline approach. Maybe mcp would be a great feature for those who have their own agents running for managing mail.

Congrats on the launch @bettercallj0hn!. Re-framing email as pure chat while keeping everything local and on-device without cloud sync is a huge win for privacy.Question: How does on-device AI perform with massive, multi-gigabyte mailboxes when indexing or searching past threads for the first time?

I like the idea of turning long mail threads into something that feels more like a normal chat. That clutter gets annoying fast.

Hello @bettercallj0hn , glad to see you launching the app on PH !I'm following Talanoa since the beginning and it's awesome how the app is growing fast. So many killer features that help me to keep my emails clean.Since I'm using it, impossible to get back to the original Gmail inbox ! Oh and I really appreciate receiving the "new in talanoa" email and I'm always excited to see what's new.Excited for the future ! Keep going ! :)

i've known talanoa since the very beginning, i was one of the early beta testersand it's been crazy to watch it grow from that first version to what's launching todayhonestly this kind of tool is an absolute bangerthere's nothing more boring than an inbox, and john somehow made it funthat changes your day to day more than you'd thinkit's just a pleasure to use, and i really think it has huge potentialcongrats on the launch john

@bettercallj0hn Congrats on the launch! Love your approach and fresh take on emails / conversations! Do you have a mobile app?

Hey Product Hunt 👋

I’m John, the solo maker behind Talanoa.

Funny enough, Talanoa was never supposed to become a product.

I originally built it just for myself.

I spend a huge part of my day in email, but I never really liked using traditional email clients. So instead of looking for yet another one, I started building the inbox I wanted for myself.

Then I showed it to a few friends.

They loved it. They started using it. And eventually, they put enough pressure on me to turn my little personal project into a real product.

So… here we are.

Along the way, one idea became increasingly obvious to me:

Email is a conversation that forgot it was one.

A thread between two people is basically a chat. A message, a reply, a reply to the reply. Yet email clients still show repeated quotes, signatures, headers, footers and years of clutter.

So I rebuilt Talanoa around a different idea: what if email felt more like a messenger?

Today, Talanoa turns your inbox into clean, chat-like conversations, while keeping everything that makes email, email.

But it goes further:

💬 Emails become actual conversations
✅ Any email can become a todo with a next step and due date
📅 Your calendar lives alongside your conversations
✨ AI helps you search, summarize and write, entirely on-device
📥 Gmail, Outlook, iCloud and IMAP accounts can live in one inbox
🔒 No cloud sync, no tracking. Your emails stay on your computer.

I’ve been building Talanoa independently, talking to users, breaking things, rebuilding them, and questioning quite a few assumptions we’ve had about email for the last 30 years.

What started as a tool I built for myself has slowly become something much bigger, and this version finally feels like the Talanoa I always wanted to use.

I’d genuinely love your feedback, especially on one thing:

Does the “email as a conversation” approach change the way you feel about your inbox?

And if there’s one thing your current email client does that you couldn’t live without, tell me. I’m listening 👇

Thanks for checking out Talanoa ❤️

John