Updated May 1, 2026

Use your Gmail in a better client. Without leaving Gmail

Gmail is a fine email service. Two billion people use it for good reasons, and we’re not asking you to leave. This page is for the smaller question underneath: what is the best way to use your Gmail, particularly if some of the mail in your life arrives at a Microsoft 365, a Fastmail, a ProtonMail, or an old IMAP address as well. We think the answer is Epistles.

Gmail is the service. Epistles is a client

What people call “Gmail” is two things stitched together: a mail service that runs at Google, and a web app at mail.google.com that lets you read it. The service is where your messages live, where filters run, where labels are stored. The web app is one window onto it. Google also ships an iOS app and an Android app: two more windows onto the same service.

Epistles does not replace the service. Your mail still lives at Google, your filters still run there. Epistles is another window, with one property the official windows do not share: it can also show you, in the same pane, the mail in your Microsoft 365 mailbox, your Fastmail, your ProtonMail, and any IMAP host you point it at.

The native Gmail API, not IMAP

Many third-party mail apps speak to Gmail through IMAP, the lowest-common-denominator protocol every mail server understands. IMAP works, but it flattens the parts of Gmail that make Gmail Gmail. Apple Mail does this. Most older desktop clients do this. Labels arrive as folders pretending to be labels, the Promotions and Updates categories disappear, server-side filters become invisible, aliases get confused, and threading sometimes splits where Google would have kept it together.

Epistles uses Google's official Gmail API, the same third-party interface that Mimestream uses on the Mac. A label is a label. A category is a category. Your filters at mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/filters keep working and stay editable. Aliases on a Workspace domain behave the way Gmail expects. Threads stay glued together by Google's own conversation identifier rather than by header heuristics. Push notifications come in sub-second through Cloud Pub/Sub, the same channel Google's own apps use.

None of this is a feature you should have to think about. It’s the minimum a non-Google client owes you for the privilege of connecting.

Gmail is the start, not the end

Almost nobody we have talked to has only one address. The personal Gmail you opened in 2006. The Workspace mailbox at the company you joined four jobs ago, still active, still receiving the occasional invoice. The Microsoft 365 account at the current job. The Fastmail you set up when you wanted control over your domain. The ProtonMail you keep for the correspondence you care about most. Gmail is one of those, often the biggest, rarely the only one.

The official Gmail apps cannot help with the rest. The web UI shows you Gmail. The iOS and Android apps will let you add an Outlook or Yahoo account through a generic add-account flow, but that flow falls back to IMAP and loses the same things IMAP always loses. Apple Mail will hold all of them, at the cost of speaking IMAP to all of them.

Epistles speaks each provider in its own native protocol. Gmail through the Gmail API. Microsoft 365 through OWA. Fastmail through JMAP. ProtonMail through Proton's API with OpenPGP decryption on your device. Apple Mail / iCloud through one app-specific-password wizard that provisions IMAP mail plus iCloud calendar and contacts together. Anything else through IMAP and SMTP. Each adapter is loaded separately, so a Gmail-only mailbox never downloads ProtonMail's crypto code, and a Fastmail-only mailbox never downloads Gmail's. The accounts share a keyboard, a composer, a command palette at ⌘K, and a single search index, while each remains, on the wire, exactly what its provider intended.

The Gmail web UI cannot do this. The Gmail mobile apps cannot do this. Mimestream by design will not. Apple Mail does it poorly because of the protocol it picked. It is the reason Epistles exists.

How Epistles compares to other ways of using Gmail

Gmail web (mail.google.com): Google's own client. Every Gmail feature, including the ones that ship this week. Browser-based, so live in a tab among other tabs. Tracking pixels in incoming mail load by default unless you turn off external images. Gmail-only.
Gmail iOS / Android app: Google's mobile client. Polished, fast, full Gmail feature set. Mobile only. Adding non-Gmail accounts forces IMAP and the limitations that come with it.
Apple Mail (Mac, iOS) with a Gmail account: Built into the OS, free, native. Connects to Gmail via IMAP, not the Gmail API: labels become folders, categories disappear, server-side filters are invisible, threading is approximate. Works fine if Gmail's label model is not something you rely on.
Mimestream (Mac only): Native AppKit, Gmail API, excellent on its own terms. macOS only; Gmail only. If both of those constraints fit your life, it is a careful, considered application and we recommend it without reservation.
Mailbird, Spark, and other multi-account clients: Multi-account, but typically through IMAP for non-Gmail providers, with varying privacy postures and varying degrees of telemetry.
Epistles: Native Gmail API for Gmail. Native OWA for Microsoft 365. Native JMAP for Fastmail and compatible servers. Native Proton API plus OpenPGP for ProtonMail. Apple Mail / iCloud through a single ASP wizard that adds IMAP mail and iCloud calendar and contacts in one step. IMAP and SMTP for the rest. macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, and a web app at app.epistles.com all shipping today, with Apple Watch and Wear OS apps for triage on the wrist. Local SQLite cache, encrypted at rest. Zero telemetry by policy.

What you give up by using Epistles for Gmail

Honest list, because the alternative is to find these out after you have moved.

Confidential Mode (the Gmail feature that gates forwarding and applies an expiry) is not yet implemented in our composer. You can still receive Confidential Mode messages; they appear with a link back to Gmail's web UI to view them, the same way every non-Gmail client handles them.
Gemini integrations, the “summarise this thread” and “help me write” buttons inside the Gmail web UI, are not in Epistles. They are not on the roadmap either; we ship zero AI features today and have no plans to send your mail to a model.
Gmail-side add-ons and extensions (Boomerang, Streak, the Workspace Marketplace) live inside the Gmail web UI and do not surface in any third-party client, ours included.

Privacy and what we see

Even though Epistles uses the Gmail API, the mail itself moves directly between your device and Google. Our servers never see the body, the subject, or the recipients of the mail in your Gmail account. The Cloud Vault holds your Google OAuth refresh token wrapped on your device with a key derived from your Epistles password and stored on our servers as opaque ciphertext bytes we cannot decrypt. We are a courier for that ciphertext, not a reader. The long version, with the cryptography spelled out, is on the security page.

If this sounds like your inbox

Epistles is on a waitlist today, shipping on macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, and the web. Fifteen-day trial, no card up front. Three accounts on Free afterwards; $35 a year for unlimited. Connect your Gmail through Google's normal OAuth screen, watch the labels and categories arrive intact, then connect the rest of your accounts in the same window. If we got something wrong about Gmail, tell us and we will fix it. The front door is here.