I’m excited to introduce Paperweight, a local-first open-source desktop app I’ve been building to help people understand and reduce their digital footprint.
Your inbox is a paper trail of every company that has ever had your data. Every account you created, every service you tried, every online purchase. It’s all connected to your email. Most people have 100+ accounts they’ve forgotten about, each a potential security, or privacy risk. For me the final push was the Odido data breach in the Netherlands. I hadn’t been a customer for more than 8 years, but all my data was still in their systems.
What it does:
- Account inventory — Maps every company that has ever emailed you, with risks classifications and recommendations for action.
- Bulk unsubscribe — Find and unsubscribe from any marketing and mailing lists (auto RFC 8058 where supported).
- Breach alerts — Alerts when any company you’ve been in contact with has been breached (via HaveIBeenPwned).
- GDPR requests — Generates pre-filled GDPR requests in multiple languages.
Supports Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, Proton (via Bridge) and any other email provider via IMAP.
Privacy approach:
Everything runs on your machine. Email content, credentials, and connection details never leave your device. No telemetry, no cloud sync, no analytics. The code is fully open source and auditable on GitHub.
Most alternatives in this space all require your to share your data through their services. Some of them have actually been caught selling your data. Paperweight is the only tool I’m aware of that does this entirely local and is open-source.
Website
Feedback welcome! Thanks
Great project. Thanks for sharing, and cool you chose to open source some / all of it. That said…
Paperweight, a local-first open-source desktop app
Are the paid features open source too? If so, then it’s really open source.
If the paid features are not open source, then the project does not grant the 4 freedoms the FSF requires to recognize the project as open source.
This is commonly known as open core (or open washing?).
I’m not giving advice on what you should do, I’m only pointing out a possible incoherence between what you say and what you made.
Thanks for the reply! And good question. Yes, all code, including all paid features are open source too. Not just open core. There’s nothing proprietary. Some of the paid features are gated behind a license check, but it’s all part of the same repo and MIT licensed. It’s all there to inspect or fork if you want. The perpetual license however helps support development and gives the convenience of a ready-made build.
We actually moved recently from GPLv3 to MIT to be fully permissive.
This is great, you got yourself a new customer!
Local-only and fully FOSS, I truly appreciate it!
I’ll subscribe as soon as I get on my rig!
Thank you! Appreciate that. Would love to hear your thoughts when you get to spin it up!
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Looking at the project, the paid features are paywalled even if you spin it up yourself
Correct. But all code is there, so you can fork them out yourself if you want.
Hol’up. “All code is there” after one pays to access it, you mean?
edit: Ah, it feels like that other place, where downvotes are kbarbarians’ impotent ire. The perfect environment for valid questions. Love to see it.
No, he means you can remove the paywall by modifying the code. This is app is both paid and fully FOSS. Please support him if you can. We need more apps and devs like this.
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Thanks for the clarification. The comment thread at the time read a little wonky. My bad. 🤌🏼
Exactly. Thank you!
Can you talk to what contributions AI/llms have made to this project?
Sure, like most projects I use AI assistance a lot for most of my work these days, ngl. Its helps me plan, research and code new ideas/features and makes a lot of my work easier. Having said that, I fully understand and share people’s feelings about yolo, vibe-coded slop. I’ve been a software engineer for 20+ years. AI helps with a lot, but also feels like the honeymoon phase is wearing off actually. It doesn’t give me the joy of building stuff. I still test, review and ship everything myself. You can check my Github history that I’ve been doing this way before recent AI hype.
Either way, the idea and execution is 100% me. I’m building something I want, use, and care about myself. Whether I’ve used AI is not too relevant, imo. It’s that all alternatives have been caught selling your data (Unroll), heavily rely their centralized services or require you to give up your data in order to remove it. Which is ironic. Paperweight is the only tool I’m aware of that does this entirely local and is open-source.
P.S if its quality you’re worried about, Paperweight has been audited through Google’s CASA assessment and Apple’s developer verification (admittedly, not a super high bar).
Ai is just the next iteration of tool advancement. Woodworking by hand into power tools making the same thing but shunning it because you didn’t put the requisite sweat into it; Photoshop vs hand painting/real pictures; assembly coding vs compilers/high level code… it’s all the same tune.
We tie greater emotional/perceived value to ‘hard work’ put into something without discussing the time saving, the RSI benefits and so on.
Any scope for a version of this that installs via docker compose and runs a webui for us home server users? Edit: oh huh I missed that it’s
not FOSSpaid. 69 bucks for a “perpetual” license that only gets updates to v1 is a bit direNo plans on a Docker compose for now, but feel free to submit an issue. RE licensing, there’s some discussion on it below. FOSS describes software licensing, which is all MIT. There are 2 features “gated” behind a license check, which supports development and gives the convenience of a ready-made build (which have costs involved). But all code is open, and you’re welcome to modify/fork out if you prefer to run your own.
I wanna be clear I’m more than happy to pay for a perpetual license to good software. Its the cessation of support past v1 that concerns me. Thanks for making a cool tool, either way, whether I end up using it or no
That’s fair. I’m still experimenting with pricing/licensing models, so appreciate the feedback. To be clear, the license grants you permanent use and at least all updates, including V1 which is documented on Github. Not making any promises what’s after yet, because in all honesty. I don’t know yet what a V2 or other features would look like. Just trying to be transparent on what you’re getting right now + upcoming updates. We’ll see what’s after, and open to ideas
I use one email for maybe 3 services. I have a database of each email address and what services I use them for. None tied to my phone number. Prevention before cure
Very nice project!
Thanks!
Installed :)
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Hi, nice to see you here! Would love to hear your thoughts. And thanks for standing up in the comments. Much appreciated :)
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Quick correction point:
any other email provider via IMAP
Not all email providers use IMAP
Fair, thank you!
5 contributors, 2 of which are “Ai”’s.
I suspect a -
– Infected repo.
Definitely a cool project if it’s not though!
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The post text is dripping with it but I haven’t looked at the code. A lot of my complaining about slop is how people for whom English is not a strong language over-depend on it, kind of never developing a voice over time. Instead sounding like the Burger King support bot.
I wouldn’t even know if the code was machine generated. I never tried that so I don’t recognize it if it’s not glaring.
Code is out there though so maybe someone can port it into a Thunderbird addon or something. I think this is a very cool project
Yeah, I’m getting that vibe here too. OP is not replying to either your comment or the other comment asking what contributions AI have to this project. If there’s no AI in this, then surely OP can at least bother to reply affirming there’s not, especially when they replied to almost every other comment on the post.
