Mail Works

Privacy and security

Private by design, not by setting

Mail Works protects you out of the box. There is nothing to turn on and no account to create with us.

Your mail stays with you

Mail Works has no servers of its own. It talks directly to your mail provider and keeps a copy of your mail in a database on your computer, so it opens instantly and works offline.

Passwords in your own keychain

Saved passwords and sign-in tokens are encrypted by your operating system: Windows data protection, the macOS Keychain, or the GNOME or KDE keyring on Linux.

Sign in without sharing your password

Google and Microsoft accounts sign in through your web browser. Mail Works only receives permission to read and send your mail, never your password.

Trackers held back

Images from the internet and tracking pixels stay blocked until you choose to load them. Even then, tracking cookies and referrers are stripped.

Scripts never run

Every email is shown in a sandbox with scripts switched off. Links open in your own browser, and only web and email links are allowed.

Safer attachments

Only documents, photos and media open straight from a message. Programs, scripts and archives can be saved, and they carry the "downloaded from the internet" mark so Windows and macOS still check them.

In plain English

What Mail Works connects to

There are no analytics, no telemetry and no advertising in Mail Works. It only ever connects to:

  • Your own mail servers, to fetch and send your mail
  • Google or Microsoft sign-in pages, when you sign in with them
  • Server-settings lookups when you add an account (your provider's settings file and Mozilla's public database of mail servers)
  • Anthropic, only if you turn on AI assist and add your own key
  • Calendar links you subscribe to, and Mail Works Calendar if you connect it (both optional)
  • mailworks.au, once a day, to check for a new version (sends only the version number; you can turn it off)
Mail Works holding back the images and tracking pixel in a newsletter

Built carefully

Mail Works runs each window in a locked-down sandbox with a strict content security policy, and the app files are sealed against tampering. Before release, Mail Works 1.0 went through a dedicated security review covering how email is displayed, how attachments are handled and how passwords are stored, and every significant issue it found was fixed.

Found something we should know about? Please tell us through the contact form.