Introducing Alrighty
Why I built Alrighty, a desktop email app for Mac, Windows and Linux that keeps junk out, finds the email you mean, and lets your AI read your mail.
By Emmett Miller
Alrighty is a desktop email app for Mac, Windows and Linux. It works with your iCloud, Gmail and Outlook accounts.
It stops the mail you never wanted. It has search that finds the email. And your AI can read your mail when you ask it to.
I'm Emmett, and I built it. Here is why.
Why I built it
I use email and AI every day. Over time, the apps I use for both started to get in my way.
Here is what I kept running into:
- Scams showed up as important mail.
- Search never found the email I could see.
- AI was pushed at me whether I wanted it or not.
- My real AI workflow was copy and paste.
The scams
On October 12, 2026, the AI Priority section in Apple Mail put a phishing email at the top of my inbox. It pretended to be Robinhood and said my 2FA phone number had changed. It gave a number to call if I did not make the change.
The app's AI took a scam and told me it mattered most.
It was not the first time. PayPal scams got through to my dad's iCloud inbox. He would have fallen for them if I had not been there.
I don't think one app is to blame. Email lets everything in, and that is the problem.
Most of your email is not for you
For every 10 emails I get, maybe 1 matters. That is a feeling, not a study.
The rest is cold outreach, newsletters I never asked for, verification links, scams and notices from sites I signed up to years ago. Unsubscribe links, blocking and junk folders do not keep up. Clearing it out by hand is close to impossible.
So I stopped trying to clear it out by hand.
The junk stops
Alrighty has one button for this. It is called Stop mail.
Press it on a message and that sender's mail ends. Alrighty unsubscribes every way the message offers. It archives what they already sent. Their new mail goes to Archive as it arrives.
Alrighty only unsubscribes from senders that passed the sender checks. A scammer never learns your address is live.
You don't have to find the junk yourself. Clean up lists the senders you likely don't want, like scams, cold outreach and newsletters you never open. Then you stop them all at once.
Some junk comes from a new sender every time, like cold sales mail. Filters catch that kind of mail by what it is. I wrote about how that works in how to stop cold emails.
Stop mail does not screen a new sender before they reach you. A first message lands in your Inbox. You stop the senders you don't want, and they don't come back.
Search finds the email
Search has never worked well for me in any mail app. That is a low bar, so I made it a rule.
Searching your email should just work.
Type what you remember, in your own words. "When is my flight" finds the airline's confirmation. You can also ask a question and get an answer, with the emails it came from.
Search runs on your computer. Answering a question is different. The emails it reads go through our server to OpenAI. The search guide explains what happens.
Your AI can read your mail
I used to copy a message into ChatGPT or Claude, work out a reply there, and paste it back. I did this all day. I could not take it anymore.
In Alrighty, your AI can read your mail. Claude, ChatGPT's desktop app, Codex and Cursor can all do it. You turn it on first. Then you can ask what is still open with your landlord, or whether you ever replied to that email.
It can also write a reply. Nothing sends until you click Send. An email can carry instructions meant for an AI, so I won't let it send on its own. The setup guide shows how to turn it on.
AI stays quiet in Alrighty. It does not show up with banners or popups. It helps when you want it and stays out of the way when you don't.
Why now
Small, fast AI models recently became good enough, and cheap enough, to sort every email a person gets. Sorting mail at that scale did not make sense before.
Now it does. That is why I could build this, and why I wanted to build it now.
Get Alrighty
Alrighty is not a new mail server or a new address. It works with the accounts you already have. Start with the guide to adding your first account.
Download Alrighty for Mac, Windows or Linux. There is a generous free plan.
I would like to hear what you think.
Emmett