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…
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.
Can you explain how this is a good thing for users ? From my own (admittedly limited) understanding of licenses, the main difference between GPL and MIT is that MIT allows freeriding off open source project by making closed-source forks.
Sure, my original thought was that GPLv3 would ensure that contributions/forks would at least remain open. Which seems novel, but 1) Realistically I probably wouldn’t have any way to enforce it, and 2) GPL is terrible for businesses, and might block genuine contributors. E.g. a company who wants to write an internal plugin/extension, would be forced to open-source it under GPL, which might not be feasible. So they either don’t use/contribute at all, or might build it themselves from scratch. Especially with AI these days, code is cheap and its easy to “reproduce” entire codebases in a fraction of the time. MIT just simplifies, and makes it fully permissive instead.
Honorable for real
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!
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.
Exactly. Thank you!
Thanks for the clarification. The comment thread at the time read a little wonky. My bad. 🤌🏼
hell ya we do