mail/docs/features.md

Flectar Mail features

A closer look at what the README summarizes.

• Conversation threads
• Tabs
• New-mail notifications
• Profiles and account colors
• Appearance
• Frameless window
• Calendar, contacts, and files
• Signatures and OpenPGP
• Spell check
• Storage and backups
• Importing accounts and mail
• HTML rendering
• Smaller screens

Conversation threads

Replies stay grouped in chronological order, with the active message expanded inside the reading pane. To list, open and act on every message on its own, turn off Conversation view in Settings → General.

Keys	Action
Up/Down	Move between messages
Home/End	Jump to the first or last loaded message
Page Up/Page Down	Move a page at a time
Enter	Open the current message and focus its content
Space	Check or uncheck the message for bulk actions
Tab/Shift+Tab	Move between controls
F6	In the full workspace, move focus between the message list and reader

In the minimal layout, arrow keys highlight messages and Enter opens them; Escape or F6 returns to the list.

Tabs

Keep several places open at once with browser-style tabs. Each tab remembers its own place: a mailbox, search, or open conversation, the calendar, contacts, files, or Settings, along with how far you scrolled the list and the message you were reading. Pick up where you left off the next time you open Flectar Mail.

Action	How
Open a message in a background tab	Middle-click or Ctrl/⌘-click it, or choose Open in new tab from its menu
Open it and switch to it	Add Shift to the click
New tab	Ctrl/⌘+T
Close the current tab	Ctrl/⌘+W, or middle-click the tab
Reopen the last closed tab	Ctrl/⌘+Shift+T
Cycle through tabs	Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab
Jump to a tab	Ctrl/⌘+1–8; Ctrl/⌘+9 jumps to the last
Reorder tabs	Drag them
Close other tabs, or those to the right	Right-click a tab

On phones and in narrow windows, the button at the end of the toolbar shows how many tabs are open and lays them out as cards. Tap a card to switch to it, tap × or swipe it aside to close it, and use + for a new tab. Select messages and choose Open in new tabs from the selection menu to open them in the background. If you'd rather work without tabs, turn off Tabs in Settings → General.

New-mail notifications

Flectar Mail lets you know when new mail reaches your Inbox while it's running, and on Android and iOS when it checks in the background: one notification per message, with its sender and subject. When more than three messages reach one account at once, a single notification sums them up. Choose which mail notifies with Desktop notifications in Settings → Notifications (New mail notifications on Android and iOS): Important mail, the default, leaves out newsletters and other automated mail, All new mail includes it, and Off turns notifications off. On a computer, mail that came in while Flectar Mail wasn't running waits quietly in the Inbox, and mail that reaches the inbox you're looking at simply appears in the list.

Click a notification to open its conversation, or use its buttons to mark the message as read or move it to the archive, or to the trash for accounts without an archive, without opening the window. A notification goes away by itself once its message is read, leaves the Inbox, is snoozed, or is deleted, here or on another device. Only mail from people plays a sound, once per batch; turn it off with Notification sounds in Settings → Notifications. To keep getting notifications with the window closed, turn on Keep running in system tray in Settings → General, or Keep running in the background in the Flatpak.

macOS asks for permission the first time Flectar Mail has a notification to show. If notifications are turned off for Flectar Mail in the system's settings, Settings → Notifications says so, and on Windows and macOS its Open system settings button goes straight there. On Linux, the desktop's notification server shows them, or the notification portal in the Flatpak, where the desktop also decides whether they play a sound.

On Android, Flectar Mail asks for permission once an account is set up, as Android 13 and later want apps to. It checks for new mail about every 15 minutes in the background, which also tells you about mail that came in while the app was closed, and less often while the phone is idle. Android pauses the checks while Battery Saver is on or while Flectar Mail is restricted in the background, which Settings → Notifications says, with a way to its settings. Mail that may play the sound arrives in the New mail channel and the rest in New mail without sound, which you can each change in Android's settings.

On iOS, Flectar Mail asks for permission once an account is set up. It checks for new mail in the background when iOS lets it, which also tells you about mail that came in while the app was closed. iOS decides how often from how you use the app, so a notification can come well after its mail. It doesn't check while Low Power Mode is on or Background App Refresh is off for Flectar Mail, and it may not until you open the app again after closing it in the app switcher. Settings → Notifications says when iOS isn't checking. Archiving or deleting from a notification asks you to unlock the device first.

The app icon shows how many unread messages are in the Inbox, counting the same mail as notifications: Important mail, or every message with All new mail. The number stays until the mail is read, here or on another device; turn it off with Unread count on the app icon in Settings → Notifications. macOS shows it on the Dock and iOS on the Home Screen icon when badges are allowed for Flectar Mail in its notification settings, Windows on the taskbar button, and Linux on docks that show counts, such as KDE Plasma's, Ubuntu Dock and Dash to Dock, elementary OS's and Plank.

Profiles and account colors

Group related accounts into named profiles such as Work or Personal, then give each profile its own color. Create a profile from the profile menu at the start of the tab bar, or in Settings → Accounts → Profiles, and check the accounts that belong to it. Choose a profile in that menu to focus the mail view on its accounts: the unified inbox, search, counts, and sidebar show only their mail, while your tabs stay the same. All accounts shows everything again.

You can also override an individual account's color and show the effective color along the left edge of every message. The markers make accounts easy to tell apart while working in the unified inbox; the example below uses purple for Work and orange for Support.

Appearance

Choose the workspace that fits the way you handle email. Keep the detailed three-pane layout, switch to a streamlined minimal view, choose a light or dark theme, select a built-in color palette or create a custom one, and show or hide sender avatars. You can also give the app icon a different color: on the taskbar or Dock, in the system tray, in the Linux app launcher, and on Android and iOS home screens.

The full workspace keeps your folders, message list, and selected email visible together. The minimal layout reduces visual noise and gives each part of your inbox more room when you need it.

Message appearance can follow the app theme or stay light or dark independently. It uses your selected color palette for HTML, plain text, and Reader mode. To temporarily show the sender's original colors, use the contrast icon between Find and Reader mode in the desktop message toolbar, or choose Show original colors from the message's three-dot menu on any screen size.

Frameless window

Flectar Mail replaces the system title bar with window controls in the toolbar by default; turn off Frameless window in Settings → General → Interface to bring the system title bar back. Each platform keeps its own behavior: macOS keeps the native traffic lights, Windows keeps Snap Layouts and the system menu, and Linux follows the button order and title-bar actions configured for GNOME or KDE.

Calendar, contacts, and files

Mail, calendars, and contacts sit side by side, synced over Google, Microsoft, CalDAV, and CardDAV. Mailbox and calendar data are stored locally, so synced data stays useful without a connection. The Files view browses JMAP and WebDAV storage, searches mail attachments, keeps files offline, and previews PDFs, images and text. Contacts and CardDAV describes how contacts are stored and synced.

Signatures and OpenPGP

Settings → Accounts → Signatures & OpenPGP provides named signatures, separate new-message and reply defaults, and a composer signature selector. Desktop OpenPGP/MIME signing and encryption use installed GnuPG 2.x with pinentry for private-key passphrases. Required encryption blocks delivery when recipient keys are missing or invalid; protected drafts remain local until Send.

S/MIME and mobile OpenPGP are not currently supported.

Spell check

On Linux, Flectar Mail underlines misspelled words as you write, using the Hunspell dictionaries installed on your system, the ones other apps there use too. Right-click an underlined word for corrections, Add to dictionary, or Ignore, which accepts it in that message. With the keyboard, the menu key or Shift+F10 opens the same menu for the word at the cursor. The menu also cuts, copies and pastes, and its Spelling submenu turns checking on and off and chooses your languages. Flectar Mail starts with the languages your system is set to, and a word passes when any of the chosen languages has it, so mail in two languages needs no switching. A word you're still typing is underlined once you move past it, and quoted text, code and the signature the composer added aren't checked.

Words you add go to the same lists as in GNOME apps, in ~/.config/enchant/<language>.dic, so they're shared with them. The Flatpak keeps its own lists. Turn spell checking off with Check spelling in Settings → General, which also tells you when no dictionary is installed. Most distributions package them as hunspell- and the language. In the Flatpak, English comes with the runtime, and other languages come with the translations Flatpak installs for the languages your system uses.

Checking keeps no dictionary in memory, and nothing is set up until you write. The first time a dictionary is used, a short-lived Flectar Mail process indexes its words into the app's cache. Each check then reads them from that file and lets go when it's done, and closing the last message lets go of the rest. Windows, macOS, Android and iOS don't check spelling yet.

Storage and backups

Settings → Storage shows how much space mail, attachments, offline files, and databases use on the device. From the same page, you can export verified database snapshots or transfer connected-account setup and preferences through a backup. Passwords and OAuth tokens stay in the system keyring, so a restored device asks you to sign in again.

POP3 accounts download mail to this device and leave it on the server unless you choose otherwise: each account can remove mail from the server after 7, 14, or 30 days, once you delete it here, or as soon as it's downloaded, but never before it's stored on this device. Their folders exist only on this device, so snapshots include that mail, and removing a POP3 account or deleting all data offers to export it first as mbox files, one per folder, which other mail apps can import.

Importing accounts and mail

The same import also brings accounts over from Thunderbird (a profile folder, its Tools › Export archive, or prefs.js) and from Thunderbird for Android or K-9 Mail (.k9s settings exports). You review each account before anything is added: settings Flectar Mail can't reproduce, such as an Exchange server, are explained instead of changed silently, and POP3 accounts keep their rule for removing mail from the server. Existing accounts are never modified, and passwords are never imported.

Saved mail comes over the same way: Thunderbird's Local Folders and the mail its POP3 accounts downloaded, mbox files such as a Google Takeout export or Flectar Mail's own, .eml messages, maildir folders, Apple Mail mailboxes, and ZIP archives of them. You pick the files, several at once if you like, then the folders, with Trash and Junk left out unless you check them, and the folder structure and read and starred states come along. Mail that's already there is skipped, so a stopped import can simply run again, and a long one can carry on in the background. Mail that belongs to no account goes to On this device: folders kept only here, which Settings → Storage can export or delete. It can also go into a POP3 account's folders, or up to the server of an IMAP, JMAP or Gmail account, into a folder of its own there.

HTML rendering

To keep the client fully native and its memory use low, Flectar Mail renders email HTML with Blitz, a Rust HTML/CSS renderer from the Dioxus team, instead of embedding a browser or WebView.

As far as we know, Flectar Mail is one of the first projects using Blitz for arbitrary, real-world email HTML. Email markup contains plenty of unusual HTML and CSS, so this pushes the renderer into demanding territory. We currently carry several patches on top of Blitz and hope to upstream as much of that work as possible over time.

If you find an email that renders incorrectly, please report it. This approach is still experimental, but it is also a major reason Flectar Mail can remain so lightweight compared with WebView-based clients built with frameworks such as Tauri or Wails.

Desktop builds offer two renderers under Settings → General → Renderer:

Renderer	Details
CPU — Low Memory	Selected initially. Doesn't initialize WGPU.
GPU — WGPU	Slint and Vello on a shared WGPU 30 device. A failed GPU startup falls back to CPU automatically.

Changing the renderer takes effect after restarting the app.

Smaller screens

The compact interface keeps the important actions within reach while giving messages, events, and contacts the full screen when they need it.