NeatMail was built to solve a problem every professional faces: email overload. The average knowledge worker spends 28% of their workweek on email (McKinsey Global Institute, 2012) — that's over two hours every day reading, sorting, replying, and managing an inbox that never stops growing.
We believe you shouldn't have to remember what you promised. NeatMail tracks every commitment in your inbox and drafts the follow-up automatically — plus smart labeling, AI-powered draft replies, and inbox automation for Gmail and Outlook, so the rest of your inbox stays clear too.
What NeatMail Does
- Promise Tracking — Every commitment you make or receive gets filed into one Follow up label, with a draft ready when it's due.
- Smart Labels — Automatically categorize incoming emails by priority, sender type, and action needed. No manual folder rules.
- AI Draft Replies — Generate context-aware reply drafts that match your tone and pull in relevant context from your tools (GitHub, Notion, HubSpot).
- Bulk Unsubscribe — One-click unsubscribe from newsletters and promotional emails you never read.
- Auto-Archive Rules — Automatically archive low-priority emails after a set time so your inbox stays clean.
- Daily Triage Loop — A structured routine to process your inbox in 15 minutes a day.
Who Builds NeatMail
NeatMail is built by Lakshay Gupta, a software engineer who got tired of paying $30/month for email tools and decided to build a source-available alternative. He posted it to Hacker News as a Show HN in March 2026. NeatMail is used by professionals, freelancers, and solopreneurs who want a calmer inbox.
Lakshay also writes the pricing and comparison pages on this site. Building NeatMail meant working directly with the Gmail API and Microsoft Graph: push notifications, OAuth scopes, labels, folders and drafts. Every tool on those pages runs on the same plumbing, so he can see what a feature needs from your mailbox and where Gmail and Outlook behave differently. The code is public, so you can check his work.
How NeatMail Was Built
The first version shipped on 1 February 2026. These are the main steps since then; every release is listed in the changelog.
| Date | Version | What shipped |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Feb 2026 | 0.1 | First release: Gmail sorting driven by Gmail push notifications, under the Elastic License 2.0 from day one. |
| 2 Mar 2026 | — | Posted to Hacker News as a Show HN. |
| 5 Mar 2026 | 0.3 | Outlook support, through Microsoft Graph webhooks. |
| 15 Mar 2026 | 0.4 | Draft replies that check your Google or Outlook calendar. |
| 28 Mar 2026 | 0.5 | Telegram: important mail and draft approvals in a chat. |
| 10 Apr 2026 | 0.6 | Bulk unsubscribe and inbox statistics. |
| 1 May 2026 | 0.8 | Auto-archive rules. |
| 15 May 2026 | 1.0 | Slack integration and watched folders for Outlook. |
| 11 Oct 2026 | 1.28 | Promise tracking: commitments made and received, overdue nudges, and a Follow up folder in Outlook. |
How We Research Comparisons
NeatMail competes with every tool we compare it to, so each comparison follows the same rules.
- Disclosure first. The first line of every comparison says that we sell a competing product and whether we tested the other tool ourselves. We haven't tested any of them hands-on yet, and each page says so.
- Prices from the source, with a date. Current prices come from the vendor's own pricing page and help center, on the date stated on the page. Older prices come from Internet Archive captures, linked next to each figure. Some pricing pages change prices by country or keep monthly prices in the page's code rather than on screen, as Boomerang's does, so we read the plan data itself and quote US prices.
- Real costs, not list prices. The pricing teardowns for Fyxer, Superhuman and SaneBox work out the cost for 1, 5, 10 and 25 people and list the costs that aren't on the plan table.
- We say when the other tool wins. If a competitor is cheaper or does something better, the page says so.
- Corrections go everywhere. When a vendor changes something, we fix every page that repeats the old claim. In October 2026 SaneBox added AI reply drafts to its Dinner plan, which made our line “SaneBox never writes email” wrong. We corrected it on the SaneBox page, the follow-up tools roundup, the pricing page and two other comparisons. Every page shows when it was last updated.
Source-Available & Self-Hostable
NeatMail is source-available under the Elastic License 2.0. You can explore the code, audit exactly how your data flows, report issues, and self-host on GitHub. Self-hosting is free for personal and commercial use; reselling hosted versions and building competing SaaS products are restricted. We believe transparency builds trust.
Contact
Have questions, feedback, or ideas? Spotted a wrong price on a comparison? Reach out at [email protected]. We read every message and respond within 1-2 business days.