I would personally prefer MailMate to stay focused on being an email
client.
One of its greatest strengths is that it follows the classic Unix
philosophy: do one thing and do it well. In my opinion, MailMate is the
best email client available today precisely because of that focus.
I can see tremendous value in AI agents for email workflows, but I would
rather have them integrated around MailMate than inside MailMate.
MailMate for email. Agents for AI. Each tool doing what it does best.
Best,
Luís Trevisan
On 31 May 2026, at 12:21, Matthias via mailmate wrote:
on Sun, 31 May 2026 13:36:57 +0200
Robert M. Münch <[email protected]> whispered:
I want to get some best practices and thoughts on the future of local
email clients, which I much prefer to using a web mailer, and on the
deeper integration of AI agents as the universal assistant into
almost
any application. However, most of these applications are web-based.
Mailmate is a IMAP-mail client - imho the best and should't do
anything
else.
If Benny implements stuff like that, I'll delete MM and install Claws
Mail on my Mac as well.
Let's not start a discussion about whether this is a good or bad
trend; it's happening, and everyone can decide for themselves whether
they like it. So, if you don't like it, good, and this discussion is
mostly not for you.
My main question is about any form of "AI Inbox" or "AI helper" that
I
can ask, like, "Who is waiting on an answer from me?" "Summarize me
the conversation with company X", "What are the next 10 deadlines I
have to care about?", etc.
GMail introduced "AI Inbox" in the US; it's not yet available in
Europe. We will see... but having an AI agent besides pure search can
be a huge help in handling many emails and parallel topics.
Some unsorted thoughts:
* Load all messages into a database that has full-text search, vector
similarity, and graph traversals over multimodal data, combining it
with RAG. Something like https://github.com/antflydb/antfly, or even
a
NotebookLM-like backend.
* Link MM to such a system, maybe natively or via a plug-in, or ...
and let me access such a backend through the search interface.
* Maybe MM should become an MCP server, to which I can connect my
agent. But I could connect the agent directly to Gmail.
* Let the agent work with Gmail directly, and somehow bridge its work
into MM, where I'm the human-in-the-loop. The simplest would be to
let
the agent draft a bunch of emails with a specific review label.
So, my main line of thought is that there will be a nearby point
where
having an agent available for my email management creates a lot of
value, and increasing utilization will render the desktop client
obsolete.
Any thoughts, or maybe practical experiences, work patterns, best
practices?
Viele Grüsse
--
Robert M. Münch
cheers
Matthias
_______________________________________________
mailmate mailing list
Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
_______________________________________________
mailmate mailing list
Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
