Talanoa is your first email messenger. It turns messy email threads into clean, chat-like conversations, removing quotes, signatures and clutter along the way. Turn emails into actionable todos, manage your calendar without leaving your inbox, and use private, on-device AI to search, summarize and write. Connect Gmail, Outlook, iCloud or any IMAP account in one unified inbox. Everything stays on your computer: no cloud sync, no tracking, no one reading your emails.
Hey Product Hunt 👋
I’m John, the solo maker behind Talanoa.
Funny enough, Talanoa was never supposed to become a product.
I originally built it just for myself.
I spend a huge part of my day in email, but I never really liked using traditional email clients. So instead of looking for yet another one, I started building the inbox I wanted for myself.
Then I showed it to a few friends.
They loved it. They started using it. And eventually, they put enough pressure on me to turn my little personal project into a real product.
So… here we are.
Along the way, one idea became increasingly obvious to me:
Email is a conversation that forgot it was one.
A thread between two people is basically a chat. A message, a reply, a reply to the reply. Yet email clients still show repeated quotes, signatures, headers, footers and years of clutter.
So I rebuilt Talanoa around a different idea: what if email felt more like a messenger?
Today, Talanoa turns your inbox into clean, chat-like conversations, while keeping everything that makes email, email.
But it goes further:
💬 Emails become actual conversations
✅ Any email can become a todo with a next step and due date
📅 Your calendar lives alongside your conversations
✨ AI helps you search, summarize and write, entirely on-device
📥 Gmail, Outlook, iCloud and IMAP accounts can live in one inbox
🔒 No cloud sync, no tracking. Your emails stay on your computer.
I’ve been building Talanoa independently, talking to users, breaking things, rebuilding them, and questioning quite a few assumptions we’ve had about email for the last 30 years.
What started as a tool I built for myself has slowly become something much bigger, and this version finally feels like the Talanoa I always wanted to use.
I’d genuinely love your feedback, especially on one thing:
Does the “email as a conversation” approach change the way you feel about your inbox?
And if there’s one thing your current email client does that you couldn’t live without, tell me. I’m listening 👇
Thanks for checking out Talanoa ❤️
John
Hey John, I use a team inbox with a few other team members - maybe this is outside the scope, but are there any plans for supporting that kind of group inbox situation? I could see Talanoa bridging that gap nicely, given how it completely rewrites the UX of an inbox anyway. Great looking product, btw.
Congrats on the launch, John. Stripping quotes and signatures is what makes the chat view work, but it is also where email gets tricky. When someone answers inline, typing their replies between lines of the quoted message, does Talanoa detect and keep those interleaved answers, or can they get hidden as quoted text? That case comes up a lot in long threads with lawyers and engineers.
The chat like layout sounds simple but could make a real difference when following long back and forth conversations. Nice approach.
I like the privacy angle of it: on-device, no cloud sync. The clean chat view is a nice bonus too. Does the on-device AI work offline?
@bettercallj0hn Congrats and happy launch! I like the idea and support the local & offline approach. Maybe mcp would be a great feature for those who have their own agents running for managing mail.
Congrats on the launch @bettercallj0hn!. Re-framing email as pure chat while keeping everything local and on-device without cloud sync is a huge win for privacy.
Question: How does on-device AI perform with massive, multi-gigabyte mailboxes when indexing or searching past threads for the first time?
I like the idea of turning long mail threads into something that feels more like a normal chat. That clutter gets annoying fast.
Hello @bettercallj0hn , glad to see you launching the app on PH !
I'm following Talanoa since the beginning and it's awesome how the app is growing fast. So many killer features that help me to keep my emails clean.
Since I'm using it, impossible to get back to the original Gmail inbox !
Oh and I really appreciate receiving the "new in talanoa" email and I'm always excited to see what's new.
Excited for the future ! Keep going ! :)
i've known talanoa since the very beginning, i was one of the early beta testers
and it's been crazy to watch it grow from that first version to what's launching today
honestly this kind of tool is an absolute banger
there's nothing more boring than an inbox, and john somehow made it fun
that changes your day to day more than you'd think
it's just a pleasure to use, and i really think it has huge potential
congrats on the launch john
@bettercallj0hn Congrats on the launch! Love your approach and fresh take on emails / conversations! Do you have a mobile app?
About Talanoa on Product Hunt
“Email that feels like chat”
Talanoa launched on Product Hunt on October 15th, 2026 and earned 266 upvotes and 22 comments, earning #1 Product of the Day. Talanoa is your first email messenger. It turns messy email threads into clean, chat-like conversations, removing quotes, signatures and clutter along the way. Turn emails into actionable todos, manage your calendar without leaving your inbox, and use private, on-device AI to search, summarize and write. Connect Gmail, Outlook, iCloud or any IMAP account in one unified inbox. Everything stays on your computer: no cloud sync, no tracking, no one reading your emails.
Talanoa was featured in Email (36.8k followers), Productivity (663.1k followers) and Task Management (84.3k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 188.4k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Talanoa?
Talanoa was hunted by Kevin William David. 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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Kevin William David