Everything on this page is in the build you can download today
(beta 0.7.5). Anything still being built is listed at the bottom,
separately, so this page never describes a feature you do not have.
1. Accounts
Gmail — sign in with Google. Mail, labels,
threads, search and folders, kept in step both ways.
Outlook and Hotmail — receiving over IMAP, and
sending over Microsoft Graph rather than SMTP, which is what makes
sending work on accounts Microsoft has locked down.
Yahoo, iCloud and any standard IMAP host — server
settings, app passwords, SMTP submission.
Several accounts at once, each with its own folders,
rules and signature. Sync All refreshes every one of them
in a single press.
Bring your own Google credentials if you would rather
not share the project's, via Tools → Add Account.
The first download is fast. Halyard fetches the sender,
subject and date for your whole mailbox in large batches, and downloads
the body of a message when you open it. A mailbox that would once have
taken hours to become usable now takes minutes. Your most recent mail is
downloaded in full up front, so the inbox you land on opens instantly.
The first download can be paused and picks up where it
stopped — including after you close and reopen Halyard.
2. Reading and writing
A real three-pane desktop client. Folder tree, message
list, reading pane — or list-beside-pane if you prefer it that
way. Movable, resizable, sortable columns that stay where you put them
— right-click a column title to hide the ones you don't use.
Compose, Reply, Reply All, Forward, with a
rich-text signature placed above the quoted message, and drafts that
auto-save every sixty seconds and survive a restart.
Attachments you can manage — drag files onto the
message, see each one with its size, remove one you added by mistake,
and paste a screenshot straight in.
Checks before it sends — a mistyped address, a
missing subject, or a message that mentions an attachment when nothing
is attached, caught before the mail goes out.
Address completion for every recipient, not just the
first, as you type into To, Cc or Bcc.
Spell checking as you type, with a real dictionary.
Attachments — every one has a
Save… link, and Save all… when a message
carries more than one.
Keyboard first. Single-key navigation, the standard
Windows shortcuts (Ctrl+N, Ctrl+R, Ctrl+F,
F5, Ctrl+Enter to send), and a
Ctrl + K command palette for everything else.
New-mail notifications on the desktop, for every
account — click one to go straight to that inbox. They can be
switched off in Settings.
3. Getting the inbox under control
Filing rules you write yourself. Match on sender,
subject, recipient or body — exactly, by substring, or by regular
expression — then label, move, mark or delete. They run
automatically as mail arrives, or on demand over a folder you already
have.
Unsubscribe, properly. Mail carrying a real unsubscribe
header shows a card above the message with one button that unsubscribes,
files it as junk and blocks the sender's domain. It only sends the
request itself when the sender supports the one-click standard, and it
tells you which is happening — because firing a link on a genuine
spammer just confirms your address is real.
Awaiting Reply. A view of threads where somebody in
your contacts wrote and nothing has gone back yet. Bulk mail, spam,
trash and blocked senders are all kept out of it.
Newsletter tagging applied as mail arrives, so bulk
mail is separable from correspondence without writing a rule for every
sender.
Folder management — create, nest, rename, hide,
colour, reorder, and delete. Deleting tells you exactly what will happen
first, because that differs between Gmail and everyone else.
Empty Spam and Empty Trash as one deliberate action.
4. Calendar
Meeting invitations show a card with real
Accept / Tentative / Decline buttons, and the reply
goes back to the organiser properly.
A month and day calendar built from the invitations in
your mail, with events you add yourself alongside them.
Dates found in ordinary prose. When a message says
“picture day is Friday the 3rd”, a quiet suggestion card
offers to add it. A trained model decides what counts as a real
commitment, tuned so that roughly nineteen in twenty suggestions are
right — it stays quiet rather than guessing. It is still marked as
a suggestion, and nothing reaches a calendar unless you press the button.
5. Finding things
Full-text search across subject, sender and message
body, over everything stored locally — so it works at aeroplane
speed rather than network speed.
One address book for every account — name,
email, phone and home address, in a list you can sort and search.
Halyard adds the people you write to by itself; marketing senders and
no-reply addresses stay out. Edit anyone's details in place, and what
you type is never overwritten by anything Halyard learns later.
Clean Up, in one go. One button lists the contacts
you have never written to, grouped into automated addresses, offers,
and everyone else, so a pile of junk goes in a single step rather than
one at a time. You see the list and choose; nothing is deleted without
you, and anyone you delete stays deleted.
Who you correspond with — a card for each
person showing how much you have written to each other, when you last
spoke, and the latest subjects.
Unread counts per folder, the Inbox count on the
taskbar, and a mark-as-read delay you can set or switch off entirely.
6. Your mail stays yours
Everything is stored on your machine, encrypted. The
local mail database is SQLCipher-encrypted with a key held in Windows
Credential Manager, not a file beside it.
No account, no telemetry, and your mail never passes through
us. Halyard talks to your mail provider directly. The one thing
that touches a server of ours is described next.
Pictures just show up — privately.
Like Mail Privacy Protection on an iPhone, Halyard fetches a message's
pictures when it arrives, through a private relay, so the
sender sees the relay's address rather than yours, and the fetch
happens whether you read the message in a minute, a week or never.
Older mail that arrived before Halyard was running loads its pictures
the moment you open it, through the same relay — there is no
Show images button to press. Spam, junk and trash are the
exception: their pictures stay off unless you ask, because loading
them tells a spammer your address is real.
Tracking pixels are never loaded. Many messages carry an
invisible one-pixel image whose only job is to report back that you read
it, and when. Halyard never fetches those at all, and says so above the
message — naming who the pixel would have reported to.
Links open in your browser, checked first, rather than
inside the mail window — and only ordinary web links and email
addresses open at all. A link in an email cannot start a program,
reach into a network share, or hand your Windows sign-in to someone
else's computer.
Dangerous attachments do not open with a click.
Programs, scripts, shortcuts and disk images — including tricks
like invoice.pdf.exe — have to be saved first and opened
deliberately, where Windows checks them. Documents and pictures open
normally.
Permanent delete is a separate, deliberate action, never
something a stray click can reach.
7. Optional AI assistant
Improve Tone rewrites what you are writing to be
clear and polite, keeping every fact, name and date. It is off unless
you add your own Anthropic or Google API key in Settings, it only ever
sends your own draft (or the part you selected), and one
Ctrl+Z puts your original back.
Still being built
Listed so you know the difference between “not finished” and
“broken”. None of these is in the build you can download today.
Writing events back to Google Calendar. Halyard reads
calendars today; it does not yet add to them.
Replies that join the original conversation elsewhere.
A reply sent from Halyard currently starts a new thread in the other
person's mail program, and in Gmail itself.
Draft Reply and Summarize Thread for the AI assistant.
Halyard Mail is a private beta and is still changing. If something here does
not match what you see, that is worth telling us —
send feedback.