Questions & Answers

Oasis is a local-first AI email client for Mac. It reads your incoming mail, sorts it into a curated daily brief, and keeps everything on your device by default. There's no cloud inbox, no folder management, no inbox zero anxiety — just a calm summary of what actually matters, written by AI that runs entirely on your Mac.

Think of it as an executive assistant that reads your mail first, distils it, and presents you only with what needs your attention.

Oasis is designed for people who receive a lot of email and want to spend less time in their inbox. Founders, freelancers, designers, researchers, and anyone with high email volume who's tired of managing a list of tasks written by everyone else.

If you also care about privacy and prefer to keep AI on your device rather than routing everything through cloud servers, Oasis is built specifically for you.

During the private beta, Oasis is free. The long-term pricing plan is not locked in yet, and the product is still being shaped around real beta feedback.

Beta users will be grandfathered into favourable terms — one of the perks of getting in early.

macOS only, for now. Oasis is built with Tauri and runs as a native Mac app. Apple Silicon is recommended for best local AI performance, though Intel Macs are supported.

macOS 13 Ventura or later is required. Windows and Linux versions are on the long-term roadmap but are not imminent.

Any email provider that supports standard IMAP and SMTP — which is almost all of them. This includes Gmail (via app-specific password), iCloud Mail, Outlook, Fastmail, Hey, ProtonMail (via ProtonMail Bridge), and self-hosted servers.

Oasis does not use provider-specific APIs. If your provider supports IMAP, it works.

No. By default, all AI processing happens entirely on your Mac using Ollama, a local model server. Your email content never leaves your device during standard operation.

In the current beta build, there is no cloud AI routing path to enable. Oasis uses local AI through Ollama when available, or an on-device heuristic fallback when it is not.

Local AI means the machine-learning model that reads and classifies your email runs on your Mac, not on a remote server. Oasis uses Ollama to run open-weight models like Llama 3.2 directly on your device.

This matters because your email is among the most sensitive data you have — it contains financial records, personal conversations, passwords, and health information. Sending it to cloud AI providers means it passes through their servers, potentially training future models or being subpoenaed. With local AI, none of that is possible. The model lives on your Mac and never calls home.

A small amount of anonymous, aggregated telemetry is collected by default to help improve AI classification. Every event is stripped of personal information before it leaves your device. What's sent: sender domain (the part after @), email category, AI confidence score, whether you corrected the classification, body word count, model name, and app version.

There are no user identifiers, no device fingerprints, and no way to link telemetry back to you. You can turn it off entirely in Settings → Data & Privacy. See the full breakdown on the Privacy page.

Oasis never collects or transmits: email subject lines, email body content, full sender or recipient addresses, display names, dollar amounts, one-time passwords, attachment contents, AI-generated summaries, your IMAP credentials, device identifiers, IP addresses, or location data.

This list is explicit and exhaustive — not a vague "we respect your privacy" statement.

All email data, AI metadata, attachments, and settings are stored in a SQLite database on your Mac at ~/Library/Application Support/com.oasis.app/oasis.db. Nothing is synced to Oasis's servers.

You can inspect or back up this database at any time using any SQLite tool. Deleting the app and its Application Support folder removes all data permanently.

Yes. Go to Settings → Data & Privacy → Share Anonymous Usage Data and toggle it off. The change takes effect immediately — no restart required, no queued events sent.

You don't need it to run Oasis, but you do need it to get meaningful AI features. Without Ollama, Oasis falls back to a heuristic "mock" mode — it classifies email using simple rules and generates basic summaries without a language model.

For real AI summaries and accurate classification, install Ollama from ollama.com and pull the Llama 3.2 model. Oasis handles the rest automatically once Ollama is running.

Oasis detects whether Ollama is available at startup and during each sync. If it's not running, classification and summarisation fall back to the mock heuristic engine. Your email still syncs and appears in all views — you just won't get LLM-quality summaries until Ollama is back online.

Every incoming email is routed through a three-stage pipeline. First, Oasis checks your personal routing rules — sender-specific overrides you've taught it explicitly. If a rule matches, classification is instant with high confidence. If not, the email is passed to Ollama (Llama 3.2) with a structured prompt that analyses the sender, subject, and body. If Ollama is unavailable, a heuristic fallback classifies based on headers and patterns.

Categories are: Correspondence (personal human email), Newsletter, Promotional, Receipt, OTP, Notification, and Unprocessed. Only Correspondence lands in your Daily Briefing.

Yes — this is one of Oasis's core features. Any email card has a reclassify gesture that lets you correct the AI's category. When you do, Oasis writes a sender-specific routing rule so that future emails from that sender are classified correctly without calling the AI again.

You can also bulk-reclassify all emails from a sender at once. Your learned rules are visible and deletable in Settings → Routing Rules.

Not in the current beta. Oasis is shipping with local Ollama-based AI plus an on-device heuristic fallback when Ollama is unavailable.

Optional cloud AI modes may be explored later, but they are not presented as an available beta feature today.

The Daily Briefing is the main view in Oasis. It shows only emails classified as Correspondence — personal, human-to-human messages that actually require your attention — presented as a stack of cards, each with an AI-written summary.

The idea is that instead of opening your inbox and scrolling through 80 emails, you read 5 card-sized briefs and only open the ones that truly need a reply. You stop managing email and start reviewing it.

The Kiosk is where everything that isn't personal correspondence lives — newsletters, promotionals, receipts, OTPs, and notifications. Think of it as a read-at-leisure reading room: important enough to keep, not important enough to interrupt your day.

You can filter by category, unsubscribe from senders directly, and reclassify anything that ended up in the wrong place.

The Ledger is a full searchable archive of every email Oasis has synced. Use it to find anything with keyword or semantic (meaning-based) search. It's not a primary workflow — it's the "I know I got an email about X six months ago" tool.

Yes. You can reply directly from any email card or full email view. The compose window pre-fills the recipient, subject line, and quoted original body. Sending is handled via your IMAP account's SMTP server — the same server your email provider uses.

You can also compose new emails from scratch using the compose button or the Command Palette.

Yes. You can add multiple IMAP accounts in Settings → Connected Inboxes. Each account syncs independently, and you can work from a unified view or scope Briefing, Kiosk, Ledger, search, and compose to a specific inbox.

Oasis generates vector embeddings for each email using the nomic-embed-text model via Ollama. These embeddings are stored locally and searched using cosine similarity — so you can search by meaning, not just keywords.

For example, searching "flights to Japan" will find emails about Tokyo travel plans even if those exact words don't appear. Embeddings require Ollama to be installed. The Command Palette (⌘K) falls back to keyword search if embeddings aren't available.

Yes. Oasis is in private beta. It is functional and usable as a daily driver, but some rough edges remain. You should keep a backup mail client around just in case.

We're prioritising quality over growth — the beta is small by design so we can respond to feedback quickly. If something is broken, we want to know.

Join the waitlist at oasismail.app/waitlist. We review applications manually and let in users in batches. Once accepted, you'll receive a download link and access code via email.

If you've already been accepted, head to oasismail.app/download and enter your access code.

For a specific email, use Report issue in the email detail view. Oasis previews the safe diagnostic context before opening a beta support email, and never includes rendered message text unless you opt in.

You can also use the Feedback link inside Oasis or email beta@oasis.app for anything urgent, including unexpected network activity or data behaviour you didn't expect. We take those reports very seriously.

Drag Oasis from your Applications folder to the Trash. To remove all locally synced email data, also delete the Application Support folder at ~/Library/Application Support/com.oasis.app/.

To revoke IMAP access, remove your account from Settings before uninstalling, or delete the Keychain entry for Oasis manually via Keychain Access. If you created an app-specific password for Oasis, revoke it from your email provider's security settings.

Send it to hello@oasis.app and we'll get back to you. If it's a question we hear often, we'll add it here.