Skim
Skim is a small, fast email app for Windows that keeps everything on your machine and lets you draft replies with AI trained on how you actually write — without sending your inbox to anyone's cloud.
🔗 Visit Skim
Description
Most modern email clients are Electron apps that eat memory and quietly send your messages through someone else's servers for the AI features to work. Skim takes the opposite approach: a native Rust app (~5MB installer) that syncs your mail to a local SQLite database and keeps everything, including AI processing, on your own machine if you choose.
Skim is offline-first with full-text search across your mailbox, keyboard-first navigation (a Ctrl+K command palette, vim-style shortcuts), an AI copilot trained on your own sent messages for consistent tone, mailbox-wide AI search, and support for Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud and generic IMAP/SMTP. It deliberately omits calendar, contacts, rules and filters to stay small, and AI features work with your own API key (Anthropic, OpenRouter, or any OpenAI-compatible provider) rather than a bundled subscription. It's free, open source under MIT, and actively maintained.
💬 Our review
The short version: Skim is for a Windows power user who wants a genuinely fast, private email client and doesn't mind a narrower feature set in exchange — not for someone who wants calendar and contacts baked in.
The zero-telemetry, local-first design is the real selling point, and it's backed up by the technical choices (native Rust, no Electron, local SQLite sync) rather than just marketing language — a 5MB installer that's genuinely fast is rare in this category. Letting users bring their own AI API key instead of bundling a subscription is honest and keeps ongoing costs transparent and usually cheap. The deliberate omission of calendar, contacts, rules and filters is a real trade-off, not just a missing feature — if you rely on email rules to manage a busy inbox, Skim will feel incomplete. Being a small open-source project also means less polish and fewer integrations than a funded competitor like Superhuman.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Gratuit et open source (MIT) ; fonctionnalités IA facturées séparément par votre fournisseur de clé API
Pros
Zéro télémétrie, tout en local
Application native ultra-légère (~5MB)
IA avec votre propre clé API, pas d'abonnement forcé
Navigation clavier complète
Cons
Pas de calendrier ni de contacts intégrés
Windows uniquement
Projet open source jeune, moins poli qu'un concurrent financé