Stow

Your email history, on your Mac. Encrypted, searchable, and yours.

Stow keeps a private copy of your Gmail and Microsoft 365 or Outlook.com mail on your Mac, so you can keep your mailbox lean without losing years of history.

Download: coming soon How it works

$30, once, with a 14-day free trial. Read our privacy policy.

The Stow window. A sidebar lists two accounts, a Gmail account and a Microsoft 365 account, each with an overview and its folders, then Tidy up and Removed. The middle column lists emails from all accounts, newest first. The reader on the right shows an email from an accountant with a PDF attached, and a note that images from the internet are blocked so the sender cannot tell it was opened.
Design preview. The app is in development and may look different.

What Stow does

  • Downloads your mail, including attachments

    From each account you add, and keeps it on your Mac.

  • Searches everything in one place

    Across all your accounts, even offline, including text inside PDFs and documents.

  • Helps you tidy up

    It shows you which mail looks like newsletters and other bulk mail, with the reasons, and you decide what to keep.

  • Tells you what is safe to delete from your mailbox

    Once it is archived, and how to do it. You do the deleting; Stow never does.

What Stow never does

  • Never sends, changes or deletes anything in your mailbox

    It only reads. Its code can send only read-only commands to the mail server, and it does not even mark messages as read.

  • Never sends your mail to us

    There is no Stow server. Your mail goes from Google or Microsoft straight to your Mac.

  • Never puts your archive in the cloud

    It refuses iCloud Drive, Dropbox and similar folders.

Private by design

  • Everything Stow saves is encrypted. The keys stay in your Mac's Keychain.
  • You get a recovery key at setup, so you can open your archive on a new Mac. We never see it, and we cannot recover your mail for you.
  • No ads, no tracking, no analytics on your mail.

How Stow protects your archive

About the Google permission screen

When you add a Gmail account, Google asks you to allow Stow to "read, compose, send and permanently delete" your email. That is Google's standard wording for the only permission that lets apps like Stow (and Apple Mail) download your mail over IMAP. Stow only reads. It has no code that sends, changes or deletes anything in your mailbox.

Microsoft accounts work the same way. For a work or school account, your organisation's administrator may need to approve Stow first.

Good to know

  • Stow is for Macs with Apple silicon. Mail you delete from Gmail after archiving stays in Stow, on your Mac; it will not be on your phone.
  • Stow is for your personal and own-business mail.
  • A first download of a large mailbox can take a few days, because Gmail limits how fast apps can download. Your personal mail comes first.

Open core

The Stow engine, which does the syncing, encryption and search, will be free and open source under the Apache 2.0 licence. The Stow app for Mac is $30, once, with every 1.x update included and a 14-day free trial. Stow is in development and not yet available to download.

About the open-source engine · Pricing

Privacy and contact