Subscribe
Sign in
Canary Mail — Privacy-friendly email app for macOS, iOS & Android
Canary Mail brings a simple design, powerful feature-set, and easy-to-use email encryption. Now on Android.
42
Replies
Jonas Haefele
Love canary Mail. The privacy focus,the native apps, open source ethos,the gorgeous design.
Only thing missing to get rid of the bad guys (Google's Gmail on this case) is JMAP support. I appreciate that JMAP is still a young standard, but decent push notifications, fast indexing etc really is a huge selling point. JMAP is the alternative to Gmail's proprietary APIs and is love to see support in canary.
In the meantime I ended up settling for canary on my Mac and the Fastmail clients on ios and Android. Best both worlds.
Share
@jonashaefele Thanks for the feedback, Jonas! JMAP holds a lot of promise and we're following its progress with keen interest. Is there anything specific you wish Canary for Android / iOS had, other than JMAP support?
@sohelsanghani thanks ! Love what you do with canary.
It just feels a bit slow, especially on mobile. Loading the inbox even With just 20 messages takes a while. Somehow it feels less obvious on mac. Guess it's because on Mac the app runs all the time and on mobile only when open. The slow update probably isn't Canary's fault, but just the slow imap protocol. Hence the idea/request to support JMAP. It just loads everything so much faster.
I'll keep trying the mobile apps. And loving the Mac one. It's my daily driver now.
On iOS btw, somehow hitting the default "email" icon on the sharing sheet still opens the Apple Mail app despite setting Canary as my default. But that might just be Apple aggressively pushing their own app.
@bcye it's spearheaded by the folks at @Fastmail but an open standard. Developed to be an open alternative to proprietary APIs like the one Gmail uses. Lots of clients implement the Gmail api on top of IMAP but that only works with one provider JMAP could offer the same modern experience for all mail providers.
https://jmap.io/
@bcye yes, totally. I mean taking something that could have been proprietary and helping to turn it into a standard that's collaboratively designed, speced and published by the IETF is pretty straight on open source to me. Quite excited to see a comparatively small company push the open web like that. The ones who have plenty of cash to do so surely still rely on keeping things proprietary.
And btw I guessed that Fastmail username on PH. Turns out that was some random other service.
On Android app, could you let me add gmail account without adding the google accoun globally to the entire phone? For example, I use GoogleID1 as the google ID on my phone, and every Google app uses that. But when I try to add GoogleID2 to Canary mail, it takes me to Chrome browser, which then opens "add account" Android prompt, which will add GoogleID2 to the whole system. I don't want that.
@sohelsanghani Any chance for a chromebook version of Canary mail? Love using it on my iPad and iPhone, and would love to use it on a pixelbook.
Was excited by the "Privacy-friendly email app" headline, and disappointed to discover this isn't open source.
Hey everyone 👋
If the uproar around WhatsApp’s new privacy policy has one bright spot, its that there’s superb privacy-friendly alternatives for chat, such as Signal.
The idea behind Canary is simple - to be Signal for email, ie, a privacy-friendly alternative to your favorite email app, that offers a simple design and powerful feature-set.
Let’s dig a little deeper. First, what exactly do we mean by privacy-friendly?
🔐 Easy-to-use end-to-end encryption (PGP / OpenPGP / GPG compatible)
📱 Local database encryption
👉 Biometric app lock
🔔 Option to choose between instant server-based Push or secure on-device Fetch notifications
📂 Built using open source libraries wherever possible, including for encryption (Bouncy Castle) and email sync (JavaMail + MailCore2)
☁️ Minimal server footprint for opt-in features
🚫 No ads and no data-mining
That’s a top-tier security suite. But don’t worry, this is not some spartan app that’s clunky to use. With Canary you’ll get:
✅ Read receipts
⏰ Snooze
👎 Newsletter management & one-click unsubscribe
💌 Gmail categories
👩❤️👨 Contact profiles
📆 In-app calendar (coming soon)
📄 Reusable mail templates
🧹 Inbox cleaner (just scroll to delete junk)
📲 Familiar, native, intuitive design so there’s no learning curve
And much more. All underpinned by top-notch engineering:
💯 Canary is 100% native - no slow, buggy, cross-platform web tech
👌 Optimized for low-bandwidth and minimal on-device storage use
🚀 Snappy in-app experience - email loading, sending, search, etc
Canary for macOS & iOS is regularly featured by Apple on the App Store and is available for a simple, one-time fee. No subscription.
Canary for Android is now in public beta and is FREE to use for PH users - just hit GET IT!
We’re here in case you have questions and would love to know what you think about Canary 🙌
Useful links:
Review privacy policy: https://canarymail.io/privacy.html
Share feedback, bug reports, and ideas for improvement: https://join.slack.com/t/canarym...
Signup for our upcoming Enterprise beta: https://canarymail.io/enterprise...
Say Hi 👋 on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CanaryMailApp
Download Canary for macOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ca...
Download Canary for iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ca...
Download Canary for Android (beta): https://play.google.com/store/ap...
Love the app and kudos to Sohel/Dev!!
Just a couple of requests:
1- Re Appearance: please add an auto setting for Theme ie light/dark based on day/night...and assume the App Icon should change based on that as well :-)
2- Re Thread Actions: please add a 5th Action :-)
Wishing you continued success!!
Thanks for the feedback Michael! We’re adding both suggestions to our to-do list.
@sohelsanghani awesome i think you should mention this in your product description as it's nowhere mentioned 😉😉✌️🏻
I have this app on my iPhone and iPad. Regarding privacy and encryption Canary is the email app for you. So if you need this go for it!
These fakers took money for my osx canary app, then updated it and demanded more money. I asked for my money back or the older app. They declined. I think it's a robbery and they are cheaters. I do not recommend to use it.
We’re happy to look into this for you. Please share your ticket # if available, or submit a new ticket here: https://canarymail.zendesk.com/h...
This looks lovely and I'm cautiously optimistic about it. However, I'm interested into how you are planning to monetize Android and Windows applications. One-time payments are usually not a (very) sustainable way to build products and leave a high-probability of products ending up as abandon-ware or suddenly switching to subscription model.
Such a big fan of the new Canary for both Mac and iOS! I used Canary a couple years ago on both platforms, but it felt slow and a little tired. After getting frustrated with the Gmail app's ads, and Spark's privacy issues + bloat, I thought I'd give Canary another try - and MAN what an improvement Canary version 3 has brought!! The iOS and Mac apps are both beautiful, clean, and fast. I feel good knowing that my data is mine, and devs have been helpful and responsive on questions and bug fixes. Some smart features here as well. Excited to keep using and see how both platform's apps evolve.
Just waiting for a Windows version, since I'm required to use windows for work!!
Canary is overall quite good (pin, snooze, pgp etc) but are still some things I’m missing:
-manually loading of images on iOS per mail not only on or off
-sending of bigger attachments should be possible (hey it’s 2021!)
- sharing with canary should work everywhere (you can share a picture, but not a note or a garage band project with the share button?)
And the biggest thing - don’t know if is a iOS or a canary problem:
Sending an invite from Zoom on iOS opens iOS mail. Contacting the support from any app (from inside the app) opens iOS mail. I mean when another client is set as default, it should open than and not iOS mail.
Thanks - some great points here! Per-email loading of remote content is coming very soon and we’ll look into the other stuff you’ve mentioned. May I ask which iOS version you’re currently on?