In build · Mac · Gmail

Open Gmail. It is already sorted.

Sift is a small Mac app that reads your inbox on your own machine, applies rules you wrote in plain English, and marks, labels and archives accordingly — the whole inbox at once, in seconds, not one message at a time.

No cloud. No browser extension. No account. Your mail never leaves your Mac.

Launching soon · $5 for the first 50 · $19 lifetime

Monday morning, one pass

Rules look like this

• Mark as read every newsletter I have not opened in a month.
• Label anything from a client as Clients, and star it.
• Archive receipts under 50 euros.
• Leave anything that looks like a reply to me alone.

A local language model turns the sentence into a rule once, when you write it. After that, every email is checked by the small classifier — which is the part that has to be fast, and is why the whole inbox finishes before you have finished reading the first message.

How it works

1. 01

   Connect Gmail once, with an app password. It stays in your macOS Keychain and nowhere else.

2. 02

   Write a rule the way you would say it out loud.

3. 03

   Sift runs in the background, on a schedule you set, and applies the result to Gmail's servers — so it shows up wherever you read mail, phone included.

Could you script this yourself?

Yes, and the model call is the easy part. I run a directory of 685 builds on this exact class of model, so I know how fast that bit comes together.

What takes the rest of the month is everything around it: a password in the Keychain rather than a config file, IMAP that survives a dropped connection without labelling the same message twice, a scheduler that wakes the way macOS wants rather than a terminal you forgot to leave open, the model downloaded and sized for your machine instead of your server, and an undo for the morning a rule does something you did not mean.

Sift is that month, for the price of lunch.

Price

One payment, no subscription at launch. A yearly renewal comes later, priced once v1 is out and I know what it costs to keep updated — and lifetime stays lifetime whatever that number turns out to be. Nothing is charged today.

Questions you should be asking

When does it ship?

It is being built now. I am not going to invent a date, but it is close enough that the price is already set. The list gets it first, and the founding slot is held for the first 50 people on it.

Do I have to change how I read email?

No. Sift is not an email client and there is nothing to install in your browser. It talks to Gmail's servers directly, so the sorting is already done when you open gmail.com — in Chrome, on your phone, anywhere you read mail.

Does my email leave my Mac?

No. The model that reads your mail runs on your machine. There is no account to make, no API key to paste and no server of mine in the path. That is the whole reason to build it this way rather than as another web app.

Which model is it?

An open System One model running locally — small, and fast enough to answer a question about a message in milliseconds — plus a local language model, through Ollama, that turns your rule into something the classifier can check. It is not Jev itself: TypeSafe has not published Jev's weights or a licence to run it.

Gmail only?

Gmail first, because that is what I use. Anything reachable over IMAP works the same way, so Fastmail, iCloud and Outlook come along with it.

Am I paying now?

No. Joining the list is free and nothing is charged until there is something to download. The list is how the founding price gets held for you.