Email is a list of decisions and promises. Sovelma shows you only those, and turns every decision into Gmail's own machinery so it never comes back.
You never file a message. You decide about a sender once, and Sovelma compiles that into a real nested label, one Gmail filter, and a backfill of the old mail.
Gmail then runs your decision forever, on every device, with Sovelma closed.
from is validated as an address or a domain, with a subdomain-aware overlap check and a budget against the 1,000-filter cap. The backfill count is shown before you confirm. Work grows with new senders, not with messages.
The metadata, index and thread graph for the whole mailbox live in memory. Bodies are one compressed read away. There is no spinner widget in the codebase.
Press P and, while you read one row, the next three are prepared: a one-line summary and a reply draft, or a filing. Triage becomes review, at about three seconds per email.
Every conversation is Owed (you owe a reply), Waiting (they owe you) or Done. The state is computed from the conversation itself, never tagged by hand.
Type two letters and land on the person: what you owe them, what they owe you, recent threads and files, and the filter that decides them.
IMAP carries the bytes. REST carries the truth about changes, and every write. The two are joined by one 64-bit id, which Google documents as the same number in decimal and in hex.
EXAMINE) and does a partial fetch of headers and text, capped at 64 KiB per message, never attachment bytes. The whole history arrives in 30–90 minutes (a planning estimate), instead of 12 hours through the API quota. IMAP IDLE is the doorbell for new mail, and history.list is the ledger.
Every key, palette command or agent request becomes an Op. It applies locally at once, waits 5 seconds while Z can undo it for free, then flushes to Gmail through a durable queue.
Sovelma is an MCP server with a write gate built into its structure. Any agent can read, search, draft and propose. Its writes land in Review, which you clear with Y.
readOnlyHint and destructiveHint annotations. The transport is MCP 2026-07-28 over stdio, with a fallback to 2025-11-25.
No badge, no toast, no sound. Mail is released at times you pick, like Linear's cycles. Only replies you're Waiting on, and people you owe, break through between sessions.
internalDate < session start, plus the break-through set. There's no Gmail write and no delayed delivery. Close the window and Gmail is exactly as it was.
The numbers Sovelma shows off are the ones that should shrink: decisions per week, the age of what you owe, and seconds per decision.
You can leave at any time. Labels, filters and drafts are all native Gmail objects, so uninstalling loses nothing but local seen state. No lock-in is the feature.
