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[ARTICLE · art-131822] src=tabmail.ai ↗ pub= topic=ai-products verified=true sentiment=↑ positive

Show HN: TabMail. Open-source AI email for Thunderbird and iPhone

Solo developer TabMail released open-source AI email clients for Thunderbird and iPhone under the MPL 2.0 license, with code hosted on GitHub at TabMail/tabmail-thunderbird and TabMail/tabmail-ios. The AI backend remains closed because it requires compute from LLM providers, though email and calendar processing uses zero data retention and search stays on-device. The Thunderbird add-on relies on the Experiments API for features unsupported in MV3 and is hosted on the developer's website.

read1 min views1 publishedSep 16, 2026

Hi all,

I'm the sole developer of TabMail. I wanted my email client to have AI features, and ended up making a Thunderbird add-on and an iPhone app. I've now open-sourced both under MPL 2.0, and I wanted to share them here to get some community feedback, if possible.

I made a short video of both, since it's easier to show what they do than explain everything in a post. Hopefully you like it: https://tabmail.ai/demos/tabmail-promo.mp4

You can review a prepared reply, tell it what to change, or ask questions about your inbox and calendar. On TB, I wanted to do most of this with the keyboard. On the phone, I wanted to just talk to it :)

Code:

Thunderbird: [https://github.com/TabMail/tabmail-thunderbird](https://github.com/TabMail/tabmail-thunderbird)
iOS: [https://github.com/TabMail/tabmail-ios](https://github.com/TabMail/tabmail-ios)

Note: I have the AI backend closed for now, since it does need me to fish compute from LLM providers, etc. Still, I made the email/calendar processing ZDR (zero data retention) since, as a solo dev, I didn't want to go through the headache of storing anyone's email or calendar data. The content can be sent for AI processing, but isn't kept on TabMail's servers. Search stays on-device.

Anyhow, please try it out! Just trying to share how I wanted email to be with AI features :) Happy to answer questions.

Downloads: https://tabmail.ai PS. The Thunderbird add-on uses the Experiments API for things that aren't supported in MV3, so I'm hosting it on my website for now.

Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49730649](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49730649)

Points: 1

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