Updated May 1, 2026

An email client in Newton’s tradition

A page for the people who keep typing “Newton Mail alternative” into a search box and quietly hoping the right answer has finally shown up. This is what Epistles ships, what it doesn’t, and where it agrees with Newton on what an email client is for.

A note on Newton

Newton Mail launched in 2014, passed through CloudMagic and Essential, went away in 2018, came back briefly, and went quiet again. For a while it was the email client a generation of multi-account people loved without qualification, software you didn’t notice you were using because nothing about it was in the way. The unified surface, the sender profiles, the keyboard, the snooze that actually felt like snooze. It cost $50 a year and felt fair.

Epistles is not Newton. We won’t pretend the years between can be papered over with a colour palette. But we built Epistles partly because the hole Newton left was still there.

What Newton got right

It treated the inbox as one surface across providers, smoothing the differences between Gmail, Exchange, and IMAP into a single grammar. Everything people remember about it, the chip per identity, the unified search, the cross-account move, came downstream of that one decision.

Tap a name and it showed you the person: their company, your last few exchanges. Most clients still treat the sender as a header line. Newton treated them as someone you actually knew.

Send-later, snooze, and read receipts lived in the keyboard map next to archive and reply, not tucked behind a settings toggle and not gated behind a Pro nag.

It was kind to keyboard users without making everyone else feel like they were holding it wrong. And it cost $50 a year flat: no per-seat creep, no three-tier matrix. The product was the product.

Why Newton went away

The product was good. The business that carried it was not built to last: three owners in five years, subscription revenue from a small audience supporting an iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows team, two shutdowns when the cheque didn’t clear. None of that is a knock on the people who made it.

What Epistles ships today

The parts of Newton’s ethic that translate into shipping code today:

One client, every account.: Gmail, Microsoft 365, Fastmail, ProtonMail, Apple Mail / iCloud (one app-specific-password wizard provisions IMAP mail plus iCloud calendar and contacts), and any IMAP host in one application, one settings panel, one keyboard map.
Native protocols, not the IMAP lowest-common-denominator.: Gmail through the Gmail API, Microsoft 365 through OWA, Fastmail through JMAP, ProtonMail through a reverse-engineered Proton API with OpenPGP decryption on-device, IMAP for the rest. Labels stay labels, threads stay threads.
Cross-platform, including the platforms most clients skip.: macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, and a web app at app.epistles.com all shipping today. Newton had Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android; Linux was never on their list. It is on ours, with native .deb and APT, DNF, and Flatpak repos at repo.epistles.com, all from the same codebase as the Mac app.
Local-first storage.: Every message is cached in a local SQLite database, encrypted at rest by your operating system. Search runs against that local index in milliseconds, on a plane, with the wifi off.
Calendar and contacts in the same client.: CalDAV, CardDAV, JMAP, Google, Microsoft, and Apple iCloud, alongside the mail. An invite is a thread you can also see on a calendar.
Apple Watch and Wear OS.: Newton famously had an Apple Watch app, and a generation of users remembers what it felt like to triage from a wrist. Epistles ships that, archive, snooze, voice or template reply, “Reply & Done,” pin, forward to contact, agenda with RSVP, WidgetKit complications, and ships the same client on Wear OS for Galaxy Watch, Pixel Watch, and any Wear OS 3+ device, including an inbox tile. Newton was Apple Watch only; we covered the ecosystem Newton’s Android users never had on the wrist.
Keyboard-everywhere, without the tax.: A command palette at ⌘K, remappable bindings, the verbs you expect on the letters you expect.

What’s not yet there

Matching Newton fully is a year-long arc, not a launch. Here is what Epistles still owes its old users:

A merged unified-inbox list. Epistles unifies the app today; the single merged list of every account’s mail, side by side, ships later in 2026.
Sender profiles like Newton’s. Epistles shows address and thread history now; the company, photo, and public footprint that made Newton’s card feel like it knew the person are still on the list.

Where the gap is widest

If you came to Newton for snooze and send-later above all else, Epistles is not yet the right home. We’d rather you know that today than discover it after you’ve moved your accounts. The work is funded, scoped, and on the calendar; it isn’t shipping this week.

Where Epistles already goes further

Newton kept a server-side index of your mail. Epistles does not. Mail moves directly between your device and your provider over native protocols, and our infrastructure never sees the body, subject, or recipients of anything you receive. The security page has the long version.

Newton stored your account tokens on its servers. Epistles syncs the same credentials through a Cloud Vault that is encrypted on your device with a key derived from your password, so what we hold is ciphertext we cannot read. The bytes ferry between your devices; we are the courier, not a reader.

Newton never had a Linux build. Epistles ships APT, DNF, and Flatpak repos from the same Tauri 2 codebase as the Mac app, with system-browser OAuth and a Rust TCP transport for IMAP. Both apps are closed source; what separates them here is shipping platforms, multi-provider depth, and a privacy posture the security page documents in full.

The parity table

Unified multi-account surface: Both yes. Merged-list view ships later in 2026 in Epistles.
Native provider protocols: Newton: Gmail API, EWS, IMAP. Epistles: Gmail API, OWA, JMAP, Proton+OpenPGP, Apple Mail / iCloud (single ASP wizard for IMAP mail + iCloud calendar + iCloud contacts), IMAP.
Watch apps: Newton: Apple Watch only. Epistles: Apple Watch and Wear OS, both with full triage and watch-native composition.
Snooze, send-later, read receipts: Both: yes. Epistles' send-later is client-driven (the device with the open vault schedules and sends), so OAuth tokens never wait on a relay; receipts are opt-in per message and rewritten through our relay so the recipient never hits your IP, off forever for ProtonMail.
Local-first storage and cross-device sync: Newton: server-indexed mail, server-stored tokens. Epistles: SQLite on device, zero-knowledge Cloud Vault.
Platforms shipping: Newton: Mac, Windows, iOS, Android. Epistles: Mac, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, web.
Pricing and source: Newton: $50/yr, closed. Epistles: $35/yr Pro (14-day free trial, no card; 2 accounts on Free), closed-source.

If you’re still looking

We can’t bring Newton back. What we can do is ship a client in the same key, on the platforms its users still use, on a business model that doesn’t evaporate when the funding runs out. The pieces that aren’t there yet are the ones we miss most.

Epistles is out now, shipping on macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, and the web. 14-day free trial, no card up front, two accounts on Free afterwards. If you were a Newton subscriber, try it and tell us where it falls short. Download Epistles, or read the rest of the site.

And to the people who built Newton: thank you. The bar you set is the one we’re still working towards.