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Show HN: Talanoa – The email client I always dreamed of (people-first, Kanban)
by bettercalljohn
Hi HN,
I’m a fullstack developer, and honestly, I’ve lost count of how many side projects I’ve worked on over the years. But one idea kept coming back to me: a different kind of email client. It first came to me in 2014: “What if we could handle emails more like conversations?”
Every year, I’d revisit this concept in my “Build Notes.” Ten years later, no one had built exactly what I had in mind — so I finally decided to do it myself. That’s how Talanoa was born.
I wanted something focused on people, not timelines. I was tired of marking messages as unread just to remember to reply later, or using labels as makeshift to-do lists. I wanted to see — at a glance — if I had important emails from my team or others needing a response, without wasting hours digging through my inbox.
I’m also pretty anti-Inbox Zero. After all, no one expects you to be “Slack Zero” or “WhatsApp Zero.” It doesn’t make sense to apply that stress to email either. But to change the relationship with email, you have to change the underlying logic: shift from a “task list” mindset to a conversation mindset. That’s what Talanoa does.
It took me several months to build it, but the result ended up exceeding even my own expectations. It’s now genuinely a joy to use every day.
Marketing Hack: Since February, I’ve been slowly building a waiting list. Every week, I personally onboarded 3 to 10 new users — gathering feedback, watching how they understood (or misunderstood) the new inbox experience, and improving the product before inviting the next wave. This “micro-launch” approach helped me refine Talanoa massively without burning through my early user base. If you’re launching something, I highly recommend doing it this way.
Stack: Talanoa is built with Electron (TypeScript + VueJS). There’s no backend, no servers — everything runs locally. It means it can scale massively without infrastructure costs. :)
Disclaimer: No, there’s no AI inside yet. I’m convinced you can still build great tools without AI — and in my case, user data privacy matters too much to just throw everything into an external LLM. Of course, I plan to integrate some features like email summarization and smart replies — but only when I can embed a custom model directly into the app, without third-party dependencies.
Thanks for reading, happy to answer any questions, and I’d love to hear your feedback! John
Excellent work!
We're building something similar at Marco:
If you're up for a chat sometime I'd be keen! Very impressed with your work.
We've taken longer to get to market, but will be launching with full IMAP support and web/desktop/mobile apps.
I like your pricing – hit the nail on the head.
Hi Isaac, thanks for your message
Let's go for a chat, I'll send you a DM on X
Very cool work. This hits the nail on what I've always kind of needed. Or, really, what I've kludged from an assortment of ever changing tools and glues.
My issue: what about the other tasks? With this tool I'd have my task list and my email-task list, in two separate places. Not ideal.
I know it's probably way out of your scope to also build a good general purpose task manager. But I feel like another kanban to manage is one kanban too many.
To be honest that's what I hoped Notion Mail would be. I've landed back to Notion as for task management and something that would autosync my emails so I can "see" them (as in, move them around in a kanban and add notes to) in Notion itself, essentially making them tasks would be the perfect system.
Anyway, I do love the people focus. Makes much more sense than any other label-based attempt.
Best of luck!
Really appreciate your feedback, thank you!
I totally get your point about ending up with a second to-do list. Depending on feedback and demand, I’ll probably implement a connector to sync with third-party task tools (Trello, Notion, whatever…) maybe through Zapier, for example.
That would be amazing!
Nice work!
If you want to appeal to power users and developers, consider adding these features:
* Support for development mailing lists * Good patch/diff syntax highlighting for code reviews via email * Plain text compose and reading experience (many devs prefer this over HTML)
These additions would open your app to a whole different segment of mailbox users who rely heavily on email for technical collaboration.
That is, if these features aren't already included.
Thank you for these precise inputs. Indeed, I hadn’t considered these features to also target developers; I’ll think about it. Thanks again.
Thanks John! Looks like a smooth product and I've signed up for the waiting list. Quick points of feedback already:
* I couldn't find on the site for which OS I can use it. Only here the clarification of electron made it obvious - but might be helpful for others if you clarify it. * I use Migadu and basically create myself infinite emails to handle different contacts. I don't see any clarification if sending is by default only on the 'main email' (foo@bar.com) or I can also use custom emails for each response (ideally the same as the one on which the email was received (footala@bar.com, foospotify@bar.com, foocarquote@bar.com, etc). I'm not expecting custom filtering for this as a standard of course, just hoping for the ability to send. * Any calendar integration? Can I create/manage events e.g. using my Google calendar? If not, how do you envisage this being done? * Sweet and simple presentation overall - good luck!
Thanks so much for your message I really appreciate it!
A few quick answers: - For now, it's only available on macOS. Windows & Linux versions are coming next month. - Yes, you can choose the sender address if you have multiple aliases available. - I haven't planned to implement a calendar for now. I see it as a separate project. But that might change depending on user feedback ;-)
I've been following the dev of Talanoa and used it as an early beta tester for almost a month now.
Although it's not perfect yet, I am really enjoying getting used to this way of handling my emails and turning them to tasks. I also like the way new emails are organized and popping up, feeling less polluted by the mass of "daily notifications spam".
I'm looking forward to use this with my non gmail accounts and be able to setup multiple accounts.
When I see the improvements from a month ago to now, it gives me high hopes for the future of this.
Good luck!
PS: kudos on your non-AI disclaimer. We need more apps that just work these days.
Thanks mate. Outlook and custom IMAP/SMTP are on the roadmap
> Do I need a Google account to use Talanoa?
> Yes
No.
If what you mean is that Google-only is a non-starter for yourself personally, check out what we're working on at Marco. It's IMAP-primitive:
For now, it only works with a Gmail account. I'm working on Outlook & custom SMTP/Imap, it will be ready in the next few weeks
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Crafted by Rajat
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