iHeartMail is an app that runs on your own device. It connects to your Gmail, reads your mail, and sorts it into categories you can change. Then it writes you a short briefing about what needs your attention.
The part that makes it different: the reading and summarising happen on your own computer, not on ours.
iHeartMail groups your mail into categories — Finance, Work, Shopping, whatever you end up needing. It learns from your corrections: file a sender somewhere once, and it remembers.
For each category it writes a short summary, and pulls out anything that looks like a deadline. The briefing on your dashboard is those summaries gathered in one place.
iHeartMail is a mail client, not just a viewer. From inside the app you can:
Everything you do here happens in Gmail too. Trash a message in iHeartMail and it's in your Gmail Trash, recoverable for as long as Gmail keeps it.
iHeartMail never permanently deletes anything. There is no action in the app that bypasses Trash.
The categorising and summarising are done by a language model that runs inside the iHeartMail app, on your machine.
It's downloaded once when you first set up the app — about 1.3 GB — and checked against a known fingerprint before it's used. After that it lives on your computer and runs there. It doesn't call out to anything.
This is why iHeartMail can say your mail is analysed in the app and nowhere else. We don't run a server that your email passes through. There isn't one to run.
To be quick and to work offline, iHeartMail keeps a local cache: who sent what, when, the subject, a short preview, and the category it landed in. That lives in a database file on your computer.
There's no account to make with us, and no data of yours for us to hold.
When you connect your account, Google asks whether you'll allow iHeartMail to read and modify your mail. That's a broad-sounding permission, so it's worth saying what it's for.
iHeartMail needs to act on your mail, not just look at it — marking messages read, moving them to Trash, sending replies. Gmail doesn't offer a narrower permission that covers those actions.
What it does not ask for is Gmail's full-access permission, the one that allows permanently deleting mail outright. iHeartMail doesn't need it, because it never deletes anything permanently.
You can withdraw access whenever you like, from your Google Account permissions page or by signing out in the app.