Frequently asked

Yes, free while in beta, and open source under the MIT License — the full source is on GitHub, and there is no account to create.

Yes. Sift is MIT licensed, so you can read, build, modify and redistribute it, including in a closed-source build, as long as the copyright notice and license text travel with it. The app, the release pipeline and the website are all in the same public repository.

Gmail and Google Workspace. Sift speaks IMAP and SMTP with an app password, and the Gmail REST API for OAuth accounts. Other providers are not supported yet.

No. There is no Sift server. The app talks directly to Google over TLS and keeps a local mirror of your mailbox on your Mac.

An app password means you can connect with no Google Cloud project and no review process. If you prefer the sign in button, developers can bake in an OAuth client as described in the docs.

In the macOS Keychain. The local database never contains tokens, and nothing is sent anywhere except Google.

Search and triage use your local mailbox, and messages you have already opened can be read offline. Uncached message bodies need a connection. Actions queue and sync when you are back online.

Yes. Every account syncs independently, and the unified inbox interleaves them with a subtle account-color marker. Switch with Command and the account number.

Messages are sanitized once when they arrive, then rendered in a sandboxed frame with the sender CSS, tables, and layout preserved. Scripts and event handlers are stripped. Remote images are not loaded by default: an image a sender hosts on their own server is fetched only when the account's remote-content policy allows it.

macOS first. The Rust core is portable, but there is no release for other platforms yet.

Open an issue on GitHub — the tracker is linked in the footer of every page. Include the app version from Settings and, if it helps, the diagnostics export, which stays on your machine until you choose to share it.