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

> Source: <https://tabmail.ai/>
> Published: 2026-09-16 17:59:03+00:00

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](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](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

# Comments: 0