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Marco
Company blog · marcoapp.io/blog · on HN as isaachinmanproductivitybusiness
Marco is the company blog at marcoapp.io, writing about productivity and business. Since 2025, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 48 times, most often “Marco – All your emails, one place”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
No feed foundVisit the blog
48mentions?
3HN people?
2025–2026first – last linked?
Marco is a private, offline-first email client for all your accounts, with no AI-written drafts, summaries, or replies. Available on iOS, Mac, and web.
Most-linked posts?
- Marco – All your emails, one place2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2025-04-03
- Offline-First Landscape – 20252 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-01-16
What Hacker News says?
One of many reasons that drove me to create what Apple Mail _should_ have been ten years ago: https://marcoapp.io
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on “Apple M5 chip”Submitted Offline-First Landscape – 2025 as a story · 125 points
HN discussionFor anyone fed up with AI-email-slop, we're building something new: https://marcoapp.io At the moment, there's no AI stuff at all, it's just a rock-solid cross-platform IMAP client. Maybe in the future we'll tack on AI stuff like everyone else, but as opt-in-only. Gmail itself seems untrustworthy now, with all the forced Gemini creep.
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on “AI Horseless Carriages”Submitted Building an offline-first, cross-platform IMAP client as a story · 17 points
HN discussionStrong agree. Wrote a blog post about it here: https://marcoapp.io/blog/marco-an-introduction We're building an IMAP-primitive, cross-platform, multi-account email client that is single-digit-ms fast in terms of search.
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on “Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup”Submitted Marco – All your emails, one place as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWrote a very-related blog post here: https://marcoapp.io/blog/offline-first-landscape
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on “Stop syncing everything”Submitted Show HN: Marco, a privacy-first, offline-first email client (IMAP-native, no AI) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAlso ran into serious issues with Apple Mail, and started building a new product: https://marcoapp.io
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on “macOS Tahoe”We fixed this at Marco, FYI. https://marcoapp.io
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on “Why haven't local-first apps become popular?”Have you seen this thing? https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge I'm not too familiar with it, but we're building Marco ( https://marcoapp.io ) and a customer just showed it to me recently.
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on “Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law”For those seeking a non-profit alternative that syncs between iOS and Mac OS, give Marco a try. We support proper offline-first behaviour and instant push notifications, among many other features. I built this for myself out of frustration with Apple Mail and cover all operational costs. Privacy and speed are two of our most important pillars. https://marcoapp.io
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on “Thunderbird for iOS”> The only thing I'm missing is on iOS. Email on my phone is a literal joke. I hear you on that. I'd even go a step further and say Apple Mail on desktop is a joke too. That led me to build Marco, an IMAP‑primitive, offline‑first, cross‑platform email client for web, iOS, and macOS: https://marcoapp.io
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on “Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support”Yes, we've started from scratch. A detailed explanation for our reasoning can be found here: https://marcoapp.io/blog/marco-an-introduction TLDR: There are _no_ IMAP-primitive truly cross-platform email clients in existence, except for Missive, which is built for team collaboration. We are building something net new. The content on the website is indeed a minimal representation and the actual alpha product has matur…
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on “Mozilla launching “Thundermail” email service to take on Gmail, Microsoft 365”Apple Mail was actually the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I wrote a blog post about our reasoning here: https://marcoapp.io/blog/marco-an-introduction
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on “Mozilla launching “Thundermail” email service to take on Gmail, Microsoft 365”We're building what you want. https://marcoapp.io
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on “Mozilla launching “Thundermail” email service to take on Gmail, Microsoft 365”Well Jobs is long gone. Apple Mail seems like it hasn't been touched much since his days. I've written about my experience and motivations here: https://marcoapp.io/blog/marco-an-introduction Gmail does indeed _intentionally_ provide poor IMAP service. But the long and short of it is that Apple Mail simply isn't a first-class product. It's an afterthought.
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on “JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart”Gilded tower? Are we living in separate universes? Shameless plug for a client with true offline-first IMAP support: https://marcoapp.io
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on “JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart”We're using app passwords for Marco ( https://marcoapp.io ), until we get through the unnecessarily-rigorous process of gaining privileged OAuth access for email scopes. Here's the support article we link our users to: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833 Workspace is a bit different, however. You need an admin to enable app passwords.
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on “Gmail to SQLite”Agreed! One of the reasons we started working on Marco. https://marcoapp.io
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on “Gmail to SQLite”Check out what we're building: https://marcoapp.io Basically a cross-platform Thunderbird replacement whose sole goal is to "not suck". Full-text search is entirely client side (not via IMAP) and returns results in single-digit ms.
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on “Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse””A cross-platform, cross-provider, IMAP client. Started building this with a friend, as I was personally frustrated at the lack of good options when it comes to "true IMAP" email clients. https://marcoapp.io
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on “Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)”For anyone looking for a cross-platform, local-first IMAP email client that "just works" and doesn't jam AI down your throat, check us out: https://marcoapp.io
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on “Gmail AI gets more intrusive”We're building what you're looking for! Had the same problems myself so decided to build a product I actually needed. https://marcoapp.io
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on “Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)”We're building what you want: https://marcoapp.io
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on “Grammarly acquires Superhuman”It seems Forward Email has come to the exact same conclusion I did in a blog post awhile back: https://marcoapp.io/blog/marco-an-introduction I agree that "reinventing" email, or building a business based on "AI features" are both terrible ideas. We began building Marco not to do either of these things, but simply because _there wasn't_ any actual cross-platform IMAP client. Apple Mail exists (but is terrible) if yo…
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on “Why email startups fail”Yeah, Gmail's "implementation" of IMAP is essentially unusable. They basically force consumers to use their proprietary API. We're building a cross-provider, cross-platform email client, and literally had to build special cases for all Gmail actions: https://marcoapp.io The upside is that it's fast... The downside is that it's NOT IMAP!
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on “Bugs Apple Loves”Check us out, we support Outlook and any other possible IMAP/OAuth provider. Cross platform, offline-first, and instant syncing: https://marcoapp.io
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on “Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e”Good questions! > But is this one of those "let's build everything in rust since it's super-fast"? (I HOPE so actually). No. It's not written in Rust. Language choice would have literally nothing to do with making IMAP/the email experience any faster. I don't want to make any firm claims as we've yet to do serious benchmarking, but what we've built is _much_ faster than Mail.app, let alone Gmail. The tech we've chos…
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on “Notion Mail is out”https://marcoapp.io
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on “Notion Mail is out”