Free · macOS & Windows · No account
A desktop email client that handles every address you have — Microsoft 365, Gmail, iCloud, Fastmail, any IMAP or POP3 server — without the clutter. Signatures follow the account. Ten calendars become one. And no message is ever unreadable.
Free for everyone. No sign-up, no trial, no upsell.
Three accounts, one inbox.
Works with the mail you already have
Most people don’t have an email problem. They have a several accounts problem — and every mail client treats the second account as an afterthought. Ferry Email is built the other way round: nothing in it assumes you only have one.
Not settings you have to find. This is how the app is built.
A signature belongs to an account, not to a list you pick from. There is no way — in the app, the command line, or through Claude — to put your work sign-off on personal mail. Change who it’s from and the signature changes with it.
Every account feeds one flat calendar, colour-tagged by account, with Now, Day, Week and Month views. A meeting on one account can show as busy on the others so you can’t be double-booked — without leaking what it is.
Some senders — Outlook on macOS especially — produce dark text on dark panels. Ferry Email checks every colour against the surface it will actually land on and fixes the ones that fail, so you never highlight text just to read it.
Each account has a colour that appears on every row, chip and event. In the unified inbox, every message says who it came to. Switching is one click.
A person is one contact however many of your addresses they write to. It fills itself from your mail, and lives in its own file you can keep in a synced folder.
Each account carries a brief you write yourself — the tone, who to escalate to, what never to send — plus named situations for specific cases. Claude reads them before it acts. Instructions inside a message are never treated that way, however they are worded.
Send puts the message in an outbox and closes the window, so what arrives is exactly what you last saw. A background pass delivers it, retries sensibly, and never drops a message it hasn’t seen accepted.
Real screens from the app, not mockups.
Find old newsletters, no-reply notifications, oversized messages and threads you never answered — counted on the server, not just what’s cached — then delete only what you tick.
Take a year off the server into an ordinary zip: one .eml per message, a JSON index and a README. It’s verified readable before anything is deleted, and nothing about the format needs this app.
Per account, and never sent to a mailing list, a newsletter, a bounce, another autoresponder, a no-reply address, or one of your own accounts. Those guards are structural, not checkboxes.
One message, rendered from exactly what you see — colour corrections and all. No headless browser, and remote images stay blocked.
Pick Google, Microsoft, IMAP or POP3 and enter your address. Ferry Email fills in the servers for the ones it knows.
That colour tags every message, chip and calendar entry from that account, everywhere in the app.
Each account carries its own signature and its own automatic reply. Pick who it’s from and the rest follows.
Google and Microsoft one-click sign-in is going through their review now. In the meantime, Microsoft 365 and Gmail accounts connect with an app password or your organisation’s own sign-in registration, and every other IMAP or POP3 account works today.
| Ferry Email | Apple Mail | Outlook | Thunderbird | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Yes | Yes | Microsoft 365 | Yes |
| Signature locked to its account | Yes | Manual | No | Manual |
| One calendar across all accounts | Yes | Per account | Per account | Per account |
| Fixes unreadable sender colours | Yes | No | No | No |
| Shared address book across accounts | Yes | Partly | Per account | Per account |
| Archive to plain .eml + index | Yes | No | PST | Add-on |
| Command line & AI assistant support | Yes | No | No | No |
| No ads or upsell in the inbox | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
Comparison for general guidance; features change over time. “Manual” means the app can do it if you configure it yourself each time, rather than it being how the app works.
Ferry Email ships a ferrymail command and a Claude skill. Ask in plain language — “what came in today?”, “draft a reply to Ada saying Tuesday works” — and Claude uses your accounts by name. It never handles a password, and it never sends anything you didn’t ask it to send.
ferrymail accounts | List your accounts — names and addresses, never passwords. |
ferrymail list --unread | What’s unread, across every account at once. |
ferrymail read -a Work -u 4213 | Read one message as text. |
ferrymail search "invoice" | Search on the server, not just what’s cached. |
ferrymail calendar --days 7 | The week ahead, every account in one list. |
ferrymail draft -a Work --to ada@example.org … | Write a draft for you to review — it doesn’t send. |
ferrymail guidance -a Work | Your instructions for that account, so Claude works your way. |
ferrymail outbox | What the app has queued but not yet delivered. |
ferrymail doctor | Where the config lives, and how each account signs in. |
Yes — free for everyone, with no account, no trial and no paid tier.
Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com, Gmail and Google Workspace, iCloud, Fastmail, and any standard IMAP, POP3 or SMTP server.
Yes. Mail is read over IMAP and sent through Microsoft Graph, which matters because most Microsoft 365 tenants created since 2020 have SMTP sending switched off — Ferry Email doesn’t need it. Some organisations require an administrator to approve any new mail app once; the app tells you when that’s the case and gives your admin the link.
In a single accounts file encrypted with AES-256-GCM, on your machine. Credentials are encrypted again inside it, and no command or screen in the app will print one back to you.
No. Ferry Email talks directly to your mail provider. There is no Ferry account and no relay; we never see your mail.
Because most clients treat a signature as a global item you choose per message. Ferry Email makes it a property of the account, so the wrong one cannot be selected — there is no code path that allows it.
Yes. Each account has an AI tab: a general brief that always applies, plus named situations — “a client asks about pricing”, “an invoice arrives” — each with their own instructions. Claude reads them before it acts. Instructions that appear inside a message are never treated that way, however they are phrased; only what you wrote in the app counts.
If you install the included skill, yes — Claude can triage, search, draft and reply using the bundled ferrymail command. It works by account name and never handles a password. Sending anything still needs you to ask for it explicitly.
Yes — there’s a Windows installer as well as the Mac one. It installs for the current user, so you don’t need administrator rights on a work machine.
Signed and notarized for macOS; the Windows installer needs no administrator rights. No account, no strings.
macOS 11+ · Windows 10/11 · Free for everyone
Moving files rather than mail? Ferry is the other half of the pair — FTP, SFTP, S3 and cloud storage, equally free.
