Hunch

Find any email by describing it in your own words. A conversation, not a keyword search — no need to remember the exact words that are in the message.

View on GitHub → Want the details? How it's built · Run it yourself

See it in action

Vague in, the right email out — the conversation, live-ranked matches, and the email itself, side by side.

Finding a half-remembered kernel bug in an LKML archive: narrowing from a vague 'use-after-free in the net stack' to the specific r8169 driver report, in dark mode
“an LKML thread about a use-after-free in the net stack — some driver?” → narrow to the r8169 driver, find the merged fix, open the original KASAN report. (Dark mode.)
Hunch resolving a vague search for a signed office lease: a conversation pane, live-ranked results with match scores, and the opened email side by side
“the thing we signed for the new office, last spring?” → Hunch asks which document you meant, answers a follow-up, and opens the countersigned lease.
The Mailboxes screen showing two connected IMAP accounts with sync status and indexed counts, plus the add-mailbox form
Connect any IMAP account — Proton, Gmail, Fastmail — and Hunch indexes it locally, on your own machine.

Search your inbox by a hunch

You rarely remember the words in an email — you remember the gist. Hunch is built for the gist.

1

Connect a mailbox

Any IMAP account — Proton, Gmail, Outlook. Your credentials are encrypted.

2

Indexed privately

Hunch indexes your mail on your own machine. Nothing is shipped off to an embedding service to be read.

3

Ask in plain language

"The document the bank sent about my mortgage." An AI agent searches, and asks a short question if it's unsure which one you mean.

4

Read it in place

Matches stream in and re-rank as it searches; click one to read it right beside the conversation. Read-only, always.

What it is — and isn't

It is

  • Conversational search over your own mail — by meaning, not keywords
  • Private: your emails and their index stay on your machine
  • Bring your own model — Anthropic, OpenAI, or Ollama to run it locally with no key
  • A read-only viewer for the emails it finds

It isn't

  • An email client
  • Sending or replying to mail
  • Folder management or inbox triage
  • A hosted service that reads your mail in the cloud

Dig deeper

Hunch is open source and self-hosted. Here's how it works under the hood and how to run your own.

Architecture

The stack, how sync and search work, and the design decisions behind local-first indexing, background workers, and real-time results.

Read the architecture →

Run it yourself

A Docker quick start, console commands, configuration, and how to deploy it on Symfony Cloud.

Get set up →