Here is a bug report I received more than once this year: “I archived an email and it came back.”
It sounds small. It isn’t. The moment your email client does something you didn’t ask for, you start checking it. You archive something, then scroll back up to make sure it stayed archived. You open the app on your phone to confirm the thing you read on your laptop is still read. You’ve gone from using a tool to supervising one, and that’s exhausting in a way no feature can fix.
1.0 shipped earlier this month with a tour, a local AI and a calendar in the sidebar. Plenty to look at. Then I spent this release on the part nobody can see.
Talanoa talks to three very different things: Gmail, Outlook, and whatever IMAP server you’ve been keeping since 2011. They disagree about almost everything — how folders nest, how long a connection may sit idle, what happens when you move a message.
Each of them had grown its own path through the app. Which meant a fix for one rarely reached the other two, and the bugs I could never fully close all lived in the same place: an account that paused for a moment, a folder that never finished syncing, an archive that didn’t stick, an email that moved on your phone and came back on your desktop ringing as new mail.
You can keep patching that forever. I chose to rebuild it instead. In 1.1, how your mail arrives, how your actions reach your provider and how your emails are kept on your computer are one foundation, shared by every kind of account. Your phone runs on the very same code.
Scrolling stays smooth during a big sync. Opening an email or switching sections no longer stutters while Talanoa is bringing in a lot of mail in the background.
Your actions stick. Archive, delete, mark as read — they reach your mailbox even when your connection drops halfway through. No silent reversal the next time you look.
Mail keeps flowing. No accounts stuck in limbo, no folders that never finish, no archived emails coming back from the dead.
The AI can’t take the app down. If the private AI runs into trouble, Talanoa keeps working. Your inbox should never depend on a summary.
And because every account now shares the same engine, the next improvement reaches all of them at once. That’s the part I actually built this for.
Two of them.
The first is yours: the first time you open 1.1, Talanoa shows Updating your mailbox, then Catching up on your mail. It happens once, it can take a few minutes on a large mailbox, and your inbox opens by itself when it’s done. I’d rather tell you that up front than have you wonder what the app is doing with your morning.
The second is mine. This is a release with no screenshot. Nothing to point at, no new panel to show off. For an app that lives on word of mouth, spending that time on invisible work is a real cost. I did it anyway, because “it just works” isn’t something you ship once — it’s the thing everything else sits on.
A handful of things did make it to the surface.
Choose the name people see. Settings → Accounts has a new Sender name field, also asked when you connect an account. Gmail used to send with the bare address, so recipients only saw whatever sat before the @. Outlook accounts keep the name on your Microsoft account.
See when older mail is syncing. While an account pulls in its history, its tile in the sidebar shows a small turning badge. Hover it to see how many messages have arrived so far.
Ask AI finds people’s mail. A question that names someone — “what does Paul want?” — now finds the emails they sent, not only their contact card. No reindex needed.
Undo an archive from the row. Archiving with the check mark on a row’s hover toolbar can now be undone with Cmd+Z (Ctrl+Z on Windows and Linux), in every view, Smart Inbox included.
Tasks open from any device. A task linked to an email that isn’t on this computer — an old one, or one you made on your phone — downloads the email before opening it, instead of showing you an empty thread.
Newsletters get their logo. Mail sent from a subdomain like emailing.monoprix.fr now shows the brand’s logo instead of initials.
Outlook syncs every folder now, nested ones included, and picks up new, renamed or deleted folders on its own. On IMAP, a message with heavy attachments shows up right away while its files download behind it. And new accounts are usable a few seconds after you connect them, with older mail filling in afterwards.
The fix list is long and specific: emptying the trash on iCloud really empties it (thanks to the person who reported that one), moving an email from your phone no longer duplicates it, mailboxes with more than about twenty folders finish syncing, servers that drop idle connections stay connected, blocked images no longer leave broken boxes in newsletters, signatures are readable in the composer in dark mode, and pressing space after clicking an attachment types a space. The whole list is in the 1.1.0 changelog.
Mobile gets the same speed and reliability as the desktop, plus a redesigned Home, Todos and a new Search screen — from TestFlight or the Play Store beta.
Update, let it catch up once, and then tell me whether you still catch yourself double-checking it. That’s the only metric I care about for this release.
— John
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