Sift is a desktop email client for people who treat their inbox as private property. Everything is indexed on your machine, encrypted at rest, and answerable to no server. No accounts on our end. No analytics. No "AI" quietly parsing your conversations.
Most clients bolt privacy on as a toggle you can forget to flip. Sift is built so the invasive option simply doesn't exist in the code. These three principles are the contract.
No content ever leaves your device for us to see. Search, filters, and smart sorting run entirely in a local index. There is no server-side parsing because there is no server of ours in the path.
No analytics SDKs, no crash beacons phoning home, no "anonymous usage" loophole. The only network calls Sift makes are to your own mail providers, and you can audit every one of them.
Messages are encrypted at rest with a key only you hold. Export anytime in open formats. Self-host the sync relay or skip it entirely. No vendor lock, no hostage situation.
Everything a heavy inbox demands — minus the surveillance tax. Sift is a native desktop app, not a browser wrapper, so it stays quick even at a quarter-million messages.
Triage, label, snooze, and jump to any thread without touching the mouse. A vim-style keymap ships in the box and rebinds in seconds.
⌘K · 140+ actionsA full-text index lives on your disk. Sub-50ms queries across attachments, headers, and bodies — with nothing indexed in anyone's cloud.
SQLite · on-deviceRemote images proxied or blocked, read-receipts neutralized, and known spy pixels stripped before a message ever renders.
Default: strictInline OpenPGP signing and encryption with a key manager that doesn't require a PhD. Bring your own keys or generate them locally.
RFC 4880 · WKDIMAP, JMAP, Gmail, Proton Bridge, and self-hosted mail in a single unified inbox — or kept rigidly separate. Your call.
IMAP · JMAP · SMTPA genuine OLED-friendly dark theme, scalable density, and zero web-bloat. Reads like a terminal, feels like a desktop app.
macOS · Windows · LinuxSift is sold the old-fashioned way: a single, fair price for a license you keep. No subscription, because we don't run servers that need feeding — and we'd rather not depend on your inbox for monthly revenue.
A subscription would mean we need ongoing access to something — usually your data — to justify the recurring charge. We deliberately built Sift so that we have nothing of yours to monetize. The price reflects that.
Need volume or team licensing? Email licenses@sift.app — flat per-seat, still no subscription.
Download Sift for your platform. It runs offline-first, opens in under a second, and will never ask you to sign in to anything of ours.