Monday, 9:30. The inbox is full. Most of it doesn't need a reply — newsletters, notifications, service updates, more emails from a client you've been talking with all week. You don't need to read these carefully, you don't need to answer them — they just need to land in the right folder so your inbox doesn't turn into a junk drawer.
The cleanest setup is an empty inbox: everything that arrived is sorted, and every email sits where it belongs. When you want to find a thread with a client — it's in the client folder. When you want last year's invoices — they're in "Invoices". No pile of unread, no scrolling forever.
Most emails don't even need to be opened — the sender and the subject already tell you where they go. But each one still has to be dragged with the mouse into the right folder. A few seconds per email, dozens of emails — every day.
Apple Mail is great at showing mail. It's bad at one thing: getting through it quickly. There's no shortcut for "move every email from this sender here." There's no "delete this entire thread in one click." Drag-and-drop across a folder tree is your top speed.
What Sortail does
Sortail is a floating panel that sits beside Apple Mail. It appears when Mail is active and hides when you switch away. It doesn't replace Mail or open its own client — it's just a fast-access remote.
Three actions — Move, Delete, Archive — each at three levels: one message, the whole thread, or every message from the sender at once.
A typical scenario: one client has sent 15 emails this week — task discussion, file attachments, agreements. Before: shift-click to select them, drag to the client folder, hope you didn't miss any. Now: one tap of "Move Sender" and all 15 land in the right folder in a single step. A long thread where everything was already decided — "Delete Thread", and it's gone, top to bottom.
When you move an email to a folder, Sortail remembers: this sender → that folder. The next email from the same sender already has that folder pre-filled in the combo box — you hit Move, and the email is where it belongs. No guessing, no hunting through the folder tree with the mouse.
Mark as Read on move is an optional toggle, so the inbox cleans itself of read items automatically.
This isn't AI, and it's not a categorizer. Sortail doesn't try to read your email and decide what to do with it. It just speeds up the decisions you're already making yourself.
Every account, one place
In Mail.app everything is fragmented. You've got Gmail for work, iCloud for family, an IMAP account for newsletters, plus one more — an old university mailbox you somehow can't throw away. Each one has its own folder hierarchy, and the hierarchies don't intersect. When you want to file something in "Travel", try remembering which of the four accounts that folder is in.
Sortail works across every account at once. The folder combo lists them side by side — [work] Travel, [icloud] Travel, [old-imap] Travel — you pick the right one. When you run "Move Sender", Sortail walks through every account, finds messages from that sender wherever they are, and moves them to the folder you chose — even if the sender wrote to both your Gmail and your iCloud.
For Gmail accounts, Sortail also talks to Google through the Gmail API directly. That means "Archive" archives the way Gmail expects — removes the INBOX label, leaves the message in All Mail — not the usual IMAP-client trick of dropping a copy into a local "Archive" folder.
A standalone app, not a plugin
The biggest architectural decision I made at the start: Sortail is not a Mail plugin. Not an extension, not a Mail Extension, not a bundle that loads inside Mail.
Mail plugins die, historically. Apple owns the Mail process and changes its internals — or closes APIs — every so often. MailHub, the one many people still google "MailHub alternative" for, was a plugin. It stopped working for all of its users at once after a macOS update.
Sortail is built differently. It's a separate application that talks to Mail through public interfaces: AppleScript for commands, Mail's local database (the Envelope Index) for metadata, the Gmail API for Gmail accounts. These interfaces have been stable for decades. Apple officially supports third-party integrations on top of them and doesn't break them between macOS releases.
What that means in practice: when Apple ships the next macOS, Sortail keeps working. No emergency patch, no "give us a few days to fix compatibility."
Who it's for
Sortail is for people who sort their mail themselves, and want to do it faster.
It's not for people who want a fully automated inbox or a new mail client. And it's only for Apple Mail — Spark, Mimestream, and Airmail aren't supported.
