Maze is a local-first email client written in Rust. It renders on the GPU, keeps your whole mailbox encrypted on disk, searches it instantly, runs AI agents in a sandbox next to your mail when you turn them on, and gives your scripts scoped access through the mazemail command line.
Apple Silicon · Intel · macOS 13 or later · updates itself. Pre-alpha: it reads, writes and runs agents; expect rough edges.
The layout you know
Folder pane, message list, message. Cards or a table. Quick Filter and global search. Thunderbird's keyboard shortcuts, plus a command palette for everything else.
Unified folders, favorites and accounts on the left, threads in the middle, the message on the right: a calm reader view, or the original HTML as designed, laid out by a built-in engine that never runs scripts and blocks remote content until you allow it.
Add IMAP, Gmail and Microsoft 365 accounts and sync live with IDLE and QRESYNC, or import a Thunderbird profile (accounts, identities, tags, saved searches, address books). mbox and Maildir files are uploaded into a folder of your account.
Writing mail
New messages, replies and forwards open in tabs, with panes and splits like Zed's: keep the Inbox on one side and a draft on the other. Maze opens your tabs and splits again after a restart.
Write in Markdown; Maze sends it as plain text and HTML. Each draft gets a two-word name like brave-otter and is saved encrypted as you type. Replies pick the identity the message was sent to.
SMTP with your password or Google and Microsoft sign-in. Offline, a message waits in the outbox; Maze records what the server accepted, so even a crash never sends a message twice. A copy lands in your Sent folder.
Mail views, single messages and drafts each get a tab. Drag a tab to the edge of a pane to split it, or press cmd \. cmd bhides the folder pane.
Speed
Maze is built on GPUI, Zed's UI framework: no web view for the UI, virtualized lists, and no work on the UI thread. Opening a folder, scrolling a hundred thousand threads or searching all of them reads from the local store.
Measured on an Apple Silicon Mac with release builds and encryption on. The budgets are hard targets from the design spec; the benchmarks live next to the code in the repository.
Private by design
Maze keeps a full copy of your mail, so it encrypts all of it with a key that never leaves your keychain. A copy of your data directory, a backup or a synced folder is useless without it.
The database (SQLCipher, AES-256), message files and caches (XChaCha20-Poly1305) and the search index, each with its own subkey of one 256-bit master key.
The macOS keychain, or the Secret Service on Linux. Programs that don't go through Maze see only ciphertext.
No analytics, no accounts, no cloud. The updater fetches a signed manifest with a plain GET and sends nothing about you. Tracking pixels stay blocked. Agents are off until you turn them on; then they reach their model provider.
Agents in Maze
The agent column runs Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, pi or your own agent over the Agent Client Protocol, with the selected thread as context. AI is off for every account until you share one with agents.
Maze installs the agent and keeps it up to date. Sign in or paste a key right in the column, then pick the mode, model and thinking effort the agent offers.
Every agent runs in an operating system sandbox (Seatbelt on macOS, bubblewrap on Linux). It can't read Maze's store or your home folder and reaches mail only through the mazemail CLI, with a token for the accounts you shared.
By default, an agent's archive, move, tag and flag requests become proposals at the top of the column. Accept or reject each one with y and n, or all at once.
Built for scripts
The mazemail CLI is the same program as the app. It never opens your store: it asks the running Maze over a private socket, and every request needs a token you approved in Maze.
mazemail --headless runs Maze without a window, for scripts and servers.eval "$(mazemail login --profile triage --label claude --ttl 2h)"
waiting for approval in Maze…
mazemail search 'from:anna has:attachment after:2026-09-01' --limit 2
ID DATE FROM SUBJECT
m_8f3a2c 2026-10-21T09:14:00+02:00 Anna Berger <anna@acme.dev> Q4 planning
m_7d10e4 2026-10-02T16:40:12+02:00 Anna Berger <anna@acme.dev> Offsite agenda
mazemail archive t_19bd --json
{"affected":["m_8f3a2c"],"outcome":"proposed","proposal":"p_2c41"}
# a triage token proposes; you decide in Maze
Open source
Maze is free software under the GPL-3.0-or-later. The design decisions are written down as ADRs, the plan is public, and every change lands as a reviewed pull request.
One binary for the app, the CLI and headless mode. No Electron, no web view for the UI.
IMAP to your servers; mazemail export writes mbox or Maildir whenever you want out.
Status
Maze reads, writes, searches and triages mail and runs agents next to it, but it isn't a daily driver yet. It keeps all mail in your IMAP accounts, so another mail client keeps working alongside.
Free and open source. No account, no sign-up, nothing to opt out of.