Skim is a free, open-source (MIT) email client for Windows. ✂️ Minimal on purpose: no calendar, no rules engine, no bloat. Fewer buttons, less cognitive load. ⚡ Native Rust core (Tauri 2): ~5 MB installer, sub-second cold start, instant full-text search. 🔒 Local-first, offline-ready, zero telemetry. ✦ AI on your terms: bring your own Anthropic or OpenRouter key and Skim drafts replies in your voice and answers questions across your whole mailbox.
I built Skim because I wanted a Windows email client that doesn't suck that hard and couldn't find one. Now I wanna share it with you.
Skim is open source and MIT-licensed, free forever. No subscription, no telemetry. Join as a contributor plz! 🙏 https://github.com/nikserg/skim
Skim is small: a native Rust core (Tauri 2, no Electron), a ~5 MB installer, offline-first IMAP sync into local SQLite, instant full-text search, and a keyboard-first UI with a Ctrl+K palette.
✦ The AI part works on your terms: paste your own Anthropic or OpenRouter key to enable AI features:
✍️ it drafts replies in your voice (and can learn from your sent emails)
📥 summarizes your unread mail
🔍 answers questions across your whole mailbox, with cited sources
Pretty basic, huh? Right. That's all I need, and I believe there are people who need the same. Requests go straight from your machine to the provider: no middleman, no markup, no subscription.
Let me share a bit of the philosophy I try to follow while building Skim:
✂️ Minimalism. It's an email client and that's it. No integrations -> no bloat. Cognitive load matters!
🎯 Contextual actions. Skim tries to be the kind of software that thinks FOR you to save your cognitive resources. Buttons show up only when needed, the app always does the most obvious thing, and the defaults should be the best ones.
⚡ Resource efficiency. Skim is built to run in the background 24/7, so it stays as humble as possible and eats as few resources as it can. That's why the installer is under 5 MB 😄
So, with all that said: please, have fun with Skim! I'd love your feedback, especially from folks tired of heavy clients. What would make you switch? What's missing? How could I trick you into contributing? 🤘
No rules, no filter, no snooze… sounds like you cut away a bit too many features…
love that it's local-first and tiny, but honestly a unified inbox view would be a game changer for me. like, one screen where i can see all my accounts side by side instead of toggling between them. would make it feel even more minimal and way faster to triage.
Honestly the 5 MB installer is kind of wild for an email client, opened it up and was reading mail before my coffee was ready. The bring your own AI key approach feels right too, no weird data stuff happening behind the scenes.
Love that you kept it under 5 MB while still shipping full-text search and AI drafting. The local-first approach with bring-your-own-key feels rare these days.
Love how lightweight this feels, especially coming from bloated desktop clients. One thing that would make it a daily driver for me: add support for PGP or at least S/MIME signing and encryption. Local-first is great, but most of the work I get requires signed replies, so I keep having to fall back to Thunderbird for that.
5mb installer and sub-second cold start on windows is honestly kind of wild, my current client takes forever to open. love that ai is opt-in too.
been using it for a few days and honestly the instant full-text search is kind of wild, way faster than outlook. the minimal vibe is actually refreshing, feels like it respects my time
Sub-second cold start from a 5 MB installer is genuinely impressive craft, especially with native search baked in. Really respect the discipline of cutting the calendar and rules engine instead of bolting them on.
Tried it on my old laptop and yeah, the cold start is genuinely instant which is wild for an email client. Love that the AI stuff is opt-in instead of shoved in my face.
Love that you kept the scope tight enough to ship a 5MB native Rust client that still feels full-featured. Bringing your own AI key is a smart move, treats the model layer like infrastructure instead of locking people in.
The 5MB Rust install is genuinely impressive, and it actually opens faster than Outlook does. Curious to see how the BYOK AI drafting holds up on longer threads.
finally a windows email client that doesn't try to be a whole operating system, love that the rust core keeps it to like 5mb
Love the minimal take, especially the Rust core keeping things snappy. One thing that would make it stickier for me: a quick "snooze until later today" or "remind me tomorrow" option right in the inbox. Most of my email backlog isn't urgent, it just needs to come back at the right moment, and that small loop would make Skim feel genuinely complete without adding much weight.
love how lean this is, the rust footprint is wild. one thing that would sell me even more is proper vim keybindings for the inbox and reading panes, j/k navigation feels like a natural fit for something this minimal.
Honestly the local-first angle is super appealing, and a tiny Rust installer sounds great. One thing that would seal the deal for me though, kind of a small ask, is per-account send aliases so I can manage work and personal replies without juggling separate logins. Would fit nicely with the minimal vibe too.
finally an email client that respects my storage and my sanity, the 5mb install is unreal on windows. love that i can just plug in my own api key and skip the data-sucking defaults.
love that this is BYOK instead of yet another subscription tier, that's rare for an email client. since the AI can answer questions across the whole mailbox, does it send full email bodies to the API per query or is there some local pre-filtering first so you're not shipping your entire inbox history every time you ask something?
Do you have plans for Mac or Linux, or is Windows the main focus? The ~5MB installer and sub-second startup would be a pretty strong selling point for anyone tired of bloated Electron apps, so I'm wondering if expanding makes sense or if you want to keep it tight and focused.
About Skim on Product Hunt
“Free, open-source AI email client for Windows”
Skim launched on Product Hunt on July 21st, 2026 and earned 161 upvotes and 48 comments, placing #9 on the daily leaderboard. Skim is a free, open-source (MIT) email client for Windows. ✂️ Minimal on purpose: no calendar, no rules engine, no bloat. Fewer buttons, less cognitive load. ⚡ Native Rust core (Tauri 2): ~5 MB installer, sub-second cold start, instant full-text search. 🔒 Local-first, offline-ready, zero telemetry. ✦ AI on your terms: bring your own Anthropic or OpenRouter key and Skim drafts replies in your voice and answers questions across your whole mailbox.
Skim was featured in Windows (12.7k followers), Email (36.7k followers), Open Source (68.6k followers) and GitHub (41.3k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 50.3k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Skim?
Skim was hunted by Nikita Zarubin. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Nikita Zarubin