Installation

System requirements

Running the AI locally is the part that needs more powerful hardware, and it is optional. You can decline it in the first-run wizard and run EmailOps as a plain email client, or keep every AI feature and route it to a remote provider instead. The two modes have very different requirements.

With local AI

One of the most important requirements for running local AI is the memory available to load the model and its context. Depending on your machine, that means one type of memory or another:

Sizing rule: the model has to fit, whole, in whatever memory it runs in. The default Qwen 3.5 4B needs about 8 GB; the largest model in the catalog wants 32 GB. Every model’s figure is in the model catalog.

• Apple Silicon has unified memory — the GPU addresses the same pool as the CPU, so the number to compare against is your total system memory. A 16 GB Mac runs models up to the 16 GB row comfortably, minus what macOS and your other apps are already using.
• A GPU on Windows or Linux has its own separate VRAM, and that is the number that counts — 32 GB of system RAM does not help if the card only has 8 GB. A model that does not fit spills to the CPU, which works but is several times slower.
• No GPU at all is supported and needs no different download. The app falls back to the CPU and system RAM; budget the model’s figure in RAM and expect answers to take noticeably longer.

Intel Macs are the exception: that build ships without the embedded AI runtime altogether — see the note below.

Without local AI

These are the requirements in two cases: AI switched off entirely, and AI switched on but routed to OpenRouter. Remote inference happens on someone else’s hardware, so an old laptop is enough — at the cost of an API key, a per-use fee, and your email content leaving the device. See choosing a backend.

Operating system

Both modes need one of:

• macOS Monterey (12) or later — Apple Silicon or Intel.
• Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit.
• Linux 64-bit, with WebKitGTK and a Secret Service keyring — see Linux below.

macOS

Homebrew

brew install --cask emailops/tap/emailops

Upgrade later with brew upgrade --cask emailops.

Direct download

1. Download EmailOps-macos.dmg from the latest release.
2. Open the DMG and drag EmailOps.app into your Applications folder.
3. Launch it from Applications.

Intel Macs: use the EmailOps-macos-intel.dmg build. It does not include the embedded AI runtime, so if you want AI features on an Intel Mac, point EmailOps at Ollama or OpenRouter instead.

Windows

1. Download EmailOps-windows.exe from the latest release.
2. Run the installer and follow the prompts.
3. Launch EmailOps from the Start menu.

GPU acceleration

There is nothing extra to install. The Windows version carries a Vulkan backend that loads at runtime whenever a working graphics driver is present, and falls back to the CPU when it is not — one download either way.

Vulkan was chosen over CUDA precisely so this stays simple: it covers AMD, Intel and NVIDIA through the graphics driver you already have, with no vendor toolkit to install. Keep your GPU driver reasonably current and it works.

Linux

1. Download EmailOps-linux.AppImage from the latest release.
2. Make it executable and run it:

chmod +x EmailOps-linux.AppImage
./EmailOps-linux.AppImage

GPU acceleration

Same as on Windows: the AppImage carries a Vulkan backend that is used automatically when a graphics driver is present and falls back to the CPU when it is not. No CUDA toolkit, no vendor SDK, no separate build to pick.

What you need is the ordinary Vulkan driver stack for your card — mesa-vulkan-drivers on AMD and Intel, the proprietary NVIDIA driver on NVIDIA — which most desktop distributions already install. If vulkaninfo reports a device, EmailOps will use it.

A keyring is required

EmailOps never writes account credentials to a file — OAuth tokens and IMAP passwords go to the system credential store. macOS and Windows ship one (Keychain and Credential Manager); on Linux you have to provide one yourself.

You need a Secret Service provider installed and unlocked. Any of these work:

• GNOME Keyring (gnome-keyring) — the default on GNOME, Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation.
• KWallet (kwalletmanager with the Secret Service interface) — the KDE equivalent.
• KeePassXC with Settings → Secret Service Integration enabled.

On a minimal window manager or a headless session there is often no keyring running. Install one of the above and make sure it is unlocked when EmailOps starts — otherwise adding an account fails, because there is nowhere safe to put the credentials.

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install gnome-keyring

# Fedora
sudo dnf install gnome-keyring

# Arch
sudo pacman -S gnome-keyring

Where your data lives

Everything EmailOps stores is on your machine, in your OS application data directory:

• Mail, contacts, calendar events, embeddings — a local SQLite database.
• Downloaded AI models — a models/ folder next to the database.
• OAuth tokens and passwords — your OS keychain, never a plain file.

To move or share a data directory (for testing, or a second profile), set the EMAILOPS_DATA_DIR environment variable before launching. The exact paths per platform, and what is written where, are in Privacy & security.

Uninstalling

Removing the app leaves your mail database and downloaded models behind on purpose, so a reinstall picks up where you left off. Delete the data directory too for a clean slate.

Nothing is removed from your mail provider either way — uninstalling EmailOps never touches the mail on Gmail, Outlook or your IMAP server.

macOS

With Homebrew, one command removes both the app and its data:

brew uninstall --zap --cask emailops

Without --zap, only the app goes. To do it by hand: drag EmailOps.app from Applications to the Trash, then delete:

~/Library/Application Support/com.emailops.app
~/Library/Caches/com.emailops.app
~/Library/HTTPStorages/com.emailops.app
~/Library/Preferences/com.emailops.app.plist
~/Library/Saved Application State/com.emailops.app.savedState
~/Library/WebKit/com.emailops.app

Windows

Uninstall from Settings → Apps → Installed apps → EmailOps, or run the uninstaller from the Start menu entry. Then delete the data directory:

%APPDATA%\com.emailops.app

Linux

Delete the AppImage file. Then delete the data and config directories:

rm -rf ~/.local/share/com.emailops.app
rm -rf ~/.config/com.emailops.app

Stored credentials

On every platform, OAuth tokens and IMAP passwords live in the system keyring rather than in the data directory, so they survive all of the above. Remove the com.emailops.app entries from Keychain Access (macOS), Credential Manager (Windows) or your keyring manager (Linux) if you want them gone as well.

Building from source

If you would rather build it yourself, the repository README covers the Rust + Node toolchain, the Tauri prerequisites and the make dev workflow. Note that source builds need your own Gmail / Microsoft OAuth credentials in .env.local; the released binaries ship with credentials already configured.

Two build notes on the AI runtime:

• Windows and Linux releases are built with DYNAMIC_BACKENDS=1 and CARGO_FEATURES=vulkan, which is what produces a single artifact that picks up a GPU at runtime. Building the Vulkan backend needs the Vulkan SDK — a build-time dependency only; users never install it.
• A cuda Cargo feature also exists for anyone who wants to compile an NVIDIA-specific build by hand. It is not used by the release pipeline, so the binaries you download are the Vulkan ones.