{"slug": "show-hn-tabmail-open-source-ai-email-for-thunderbird-and-iphone", "title": "Show HN: TabMail. Open-source AI email for Thunderbird and iPhone", "summary": "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.", "body_md": "Hi all,\n\nI'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.\n\nI 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](https://tabmail.ai/demos/tabmail-promo.mp4)\n\nYou 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 :)\n\nCode:\nThunderbird: [https://github.com/TabMail/tabmail-thunderbird](https://github.com/TabMail/tabmail-thunderbird)\niOS: [https://github.com/TabMail/tabmail-ios](https://github.com/TabMail/tabmail-ios)\n\nNote: 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.\n\nAnyhow, please try it out! Just trying to share how I wanted email to be with AI features :) Happy to answer questions.\n\nDownloads: [https://tabmail.ai](https://tabmail.ai)\n\nPS. 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.\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49730649](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49730649)\n\nPoints: 1\n\n# Comments: 0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-tabmail-open-source-ai-email-for-thunderbird-and-iphone", "canonical_source": "https://tabmail.ai/", "published_at": "2026-09-16 17:59:03+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-16 18:15:31.029465+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-products", "ai-tools", "generative-ai", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["TabMail", "Thunderbird", "iPhone", "MPL 2.0", "GitHub", "Experiments API", "MV3"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-tabmail-open-source-ai-email-for-thunderbird-and-iphone", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-tabmail-open-source-ai-email-for-thunderbird-and-iphone.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-tabmail-open-source-ai-email-for-thunderbird-and-iphone.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-tabmail-open-source-ai-email-for-thunderbird-and-iphone.jsonld"}}