A mail client built like a tool.
Telex is for people who get a lot of mail and want to get through it fast: a compact, keyboard-driven client for Windows in the spirit of The Bat!, with your mail kept on your own disk.
What it should feel like
- 01
Dense
20-pixel rows by default, a condensed face in the list, mono for dates and sizes. No spacious padding; a Comfortable setting for people who want air.
- 02
Keyboard-first
Every common action has a single key. The mouse is optional.
- 03
Fast and light
Starts quickly, installs small, and needs no account or cloud service.
- 04
Local mail base
Mail is stored on your disk in full and searchable offline.
- 05
Powerful filters
Rules that sort, flag, move and auto-reply, with the reason shown on every message they touch.
- 06
Private by default
Remote images blocked until you allow them. Links in spam not clickable. Nothing phones home.
- 07
Fluent in Polish
Old charsets like Windows-1250 and ISO-8859-2 decode correctly; replies quote the Polish way.
- 08
Plain text first
Compose is plain text in a mono face. Mail between people reads best that way.
What it will never be
- Electron
- AI features switched on by default
- A web-app look
- Anything that phones home
Where it comes from
For years The Bat! showed what a mail client can be when it is built for speed: dense lists, a key for everything, and a Sorting Office of rules that does the filing for you. Telex aims for that feel, rebuilt from scratch for today’s Windows. It isn’t affiliated with Ritlabs.
The name comes from telex, the network of teleprinters that carried typed messages around the world before email. The dot-matrix T in the logo is printed the way a teleprinter prints, and the paper tape above the footer is punched in ITA2, the code real telex machines used. It spells out what you read under it.
Built with
- Mail core
- Rust: IMAP (async-imap), SMTP (lettre), MIME (mail-parser), TLS (rustls)
- Mail base
- SQLite with FTS5 full-text search, one file on your disk
- Window
- Tauri 2 and WebView2, which Windows already has
- Interface
- Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, set in IBM Plex
- This site
- Next.js on Vercel, with no cookies and cookieless page counts
Curious where it’s going? See the roadmap.