Performant & modern
Built in Rust with GTK4 & libadwaita. We made Hylki to fly on modern hardware with a rich set of features and a polished UI.
Vireo is now Hylki — new name, new icon, same app. What's a hylki and why the change →
A modern email client for the Linux desktop
Available for 64-bit Intel/AMD and ARM as a Flatpak, AppImage or native DEB/RPM package.
- Open source · AGPLv3
- Zero telemetry
- Flatpak, AppImage, DEB/RPM
GNOME Online Accounts & OAuth
Imports accounts you already have setup in GNOME Settings. Sign in once, and Hylki is ready to go. OAuth is natively supported for Microsoft accounts with Gmail supported through GNOME GOA.
Unified boxes
Inboxes, Starred, Sent, Drafts, Archive, filtered folders, tags and snoozed each combine every account into a single list.
Message threading
Conversations can be grouped into threads for better readability. Threads display in the message list and/or reading pane as collapsible cards
GNOME Contacts & smart compose
Integrates with GNOME Contacts and autocompletes recipients as you type with full keyboard navigation support
Attachments gallery
Browse every attachment across all your inboxes and folders in one visual grid with full-size previews.
Mail filters
Apply sorting rules to incoming mail by sender, subject or recipient with live unread counts.
OpenPGP, end to end
Send and receive encrypted mail with built-in support for OpenPGP. Requires GnuPG installed on your system to function. Nothing decrypted is ever written to disk.
Cloud attachments
Send big files as links. Connect Nextcloud, ownCloud, OpenCloud, OneDrive, Dropbox or Seafile and the composer automatically uploads to your storage service and places a public link in the body.
Send later
Pick tomorrow morning, Monday, or any date and time from the Send button's dropdown. The message waits in the Outbox where you can still edit it before the send time arrives.
GNOME Files integration
Easily start a new message by attaching files straight from GNOME Files. Install the Files extension in Settings > System to set this integration up.
Multi-language support
Hylki has been translated by humans into English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Russian and Spanish. It defaults to your desktop's language or you may pick one in Settings. The translations come from the community; to add yours, see issue #155.
Privacy-first
Email privacy baked in.
Hylki is built to respect you. No accounts to create with us, no data harvested, nothing phoning home. What happens in your inbox stays on your machine.
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Zero telemetry
No analytics, no tracking, no “anonymous usage data.” None.
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Remote content blocking
Tracking pixels and remote images are blocked by default, with a per-message “load” banner and a per-sender allowlist.
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Credentials in the system keyring
Passwords and tokens live in the OS secret service — never in plaintext on disk.
0trackers, pixels & telemetry pings
Vireo is now Hylki
Same app, same code, new name and icon. Here is what a hylki is, why the name changed, and what it means for you.
What's a hylki?
Hylki (pronounced HIL-kee) is Icelandic for a case or capsule: the shell that holds and protects what is inside. For an email client with an envelope icon, that metaphor feels just right.
Why the change?
Another project, an email app for macOS, chose the name Vireo about a month before this one did. Its maintainer got in touch, and while the clash was a complete coincidence, the fair thing to do was to pick a new name. The candidates were discussed in the open with the project's contributors, and Hylki won out: unique, not used by any other software, and true to the icon. Read the discussion on GitHub.
What it means for you
- Vireo 1.34.0 is the last release under the old name. Updates continue as Hylki, from version 1.35.0 on.
- Install Hylki once; nothing to set up again. Hylki is a separate install that sits alongside Vireo. Its first start carries your accounts, settings and cached mail across, and leaves Vireo untouched until you remove it.
- Then remove Vireo. Once Hylki is running with your accounts,
flatpak uninstall co.hyprlab.Vireotakes the old app away. If Vireo was your default email app, choose Hylki under Default Apps in Settings. - Same project, same people, same licence. The code, the AGPLv3, the GitHub repository (now hyprlab/hylki, old links redirect) and the Flatpak repository are all the same; only the name on the door has changed.
Free & open source, forever
Hylki is released under the GNU AGPLv3.
The Hylki Manifesto
Hylki exists to fill a need in the Linux desktop community for a modern, GNOME-native email client that doesn't sacrifice aesthetics for features.
The project has the following foundational values that guide its development:
- Hylki is committed to free and open source software. Hylki will never be for sale and is committed to remaining that way through our AGPLv3 license adherence.
- This project is community-driven and committed to putting humans at the center of everything we do. Our aim is to improve the lives of our users and the Linux desktop as a whole.
- We are committed to GNOME-first development ensuring 100% compatibility with the latest GNOME release. This app was conceived for GNOME and it will remain the desktop environment we target primarily.
- Aesthetics matter as much as features. Hylki should make using email on the Linux desktop both visually pleasing and enjoyable through consistent and familiar UI/UX paradigms. New users to GNOME should be able to intuit how to use the app without needing to refer to documentation.
- Feature-rich and choice-forward philosophy. Providing means for the user to maximally customize the app's feature set is a high priority. We maintain that Hylki is both beautiful and highly functional to tackle every email edge case.
Built with AI, shipped by a human
Hylki is built by a human maintainer who uses generative AI as a development tool. The maintainer decides what gets built, reviews the results, tests every release and signs off on everything that ships. The artwork is human-made: the app icon was drawn by Yiannis Ioannides. The app itself contains no AI: no AI features, no requests to AI services, and your mail never leaves your machine. Read the full AI notice →
With thanks to Hylki's contributors
- Alexander Lubovenko — Gmail conversations, pictures dropped or pasted from a file manager, and a thorough security review
- Alfonso Lizárraga — sending to punctuated recipient names, the startup message list, and the unread dot
- Anton Palgunov — sender avatars from your GNOME Contacts, and GNOME Online Accounts refinements
- Artur Heinze — Reply and New Message opening while the contact service hangs
- Chris Pouliot — Proton Bridge connections
- Christian Dandachi — Reply All fixes, and conversations that open at their new mail
- Christian Lauinger — the German translation, New Message in the launcher's menu, and the Debian package build the official package grew from
- Comodino — waiting for a keyring that asks first, such as a security key that wants a tap
- Daniel Miguel — the Spanish translation, and room in the layouts for longer translated labels
- Elliot — the fix for a startup crash on folder names with non-ASCII characters
- Fabio Rotondo — the Hylki address book with vCard import, the per-message Light / Dark Mode switch, and tag-colored rows
- Felix Günther — contacts and LDAP directories in the Flatpak, and the address book picker
- frenchy82 — the French translation, Hylki's first
- Ilya Semenkovich — the Russian translation
- Isaac — PDF thumbnails, the attachment-opening fix, the reader's To line, right-click menus, and swipe to archive or delete
- Isak Samsten — recipient lookups in LDAP directories
- Jimmy — the Italian translation
- jolupa — the Catalan translation
- Konstantin Adamov — message bodies that show before their remote images have loaded
- Laszlo Lang — the Hungarian translation, and a long run of requests from Send Later to cloud attachments
- Paulo Fino — the Portuguese (Portugal) and Brazilian Portuguese translations, and the language chooser request
- Salem Sayed Abdel Gawad — IMAP connections that recover when a server stops answering, and syncing that steps aside for the message being opened
- Samuel Edlmeier — the German translation brought up to date
- Tomasz Bojanowski — the Polish translation
- Yiannis Ioannides — the app icon, its symbolic twin and the wordmark; the Greek translation; the Flatpak install fix; and the requests and design feedback behind tags, split replies and the reader's own font and colors
- Yo'av Moshe — a test suite that no longer depends on the tester's own settings
And not every contribution is code — thanks to aia832003, EmmanuelP, p-mitana, Peter Weiss, Romain Ferrali and taprobane99 for the design feedback, requests and bug reports that shaped Hylki, and to everyone who files issues and ideas.
Pull requests are welcome — see how contributions are credited →
Install Hylki
Available in Flatpak, AppImage and DEB/RPM packages
What you’ll need
- 64-bit Linux, Intel/AMD or ARM.
- A Secret Service keyring (GNOME Keyring or KWallet)
- For Flatpak installs: Flatpak dependecies with Flathub enabled. Hylki runs on the shared GNOME runtime from Flathub so installing Hylki pulls that runtime as well.
Recommended: working GPU drivers (OpenGL / Mesa), ~4 GB RAM, and a GNOME-style desktop — though it runs fine on KDE and others.
Flatpak installs use ~1.1 GB for the shared GNOME runtime (reused across your Flatpak apps) plus ~30 MB for Hylki.
Find a bug or have a feature idea? The best way to reach the project is to open an issue on GitHub. Please search existing issues first, then include your Hylki version, your GNOME version and distro, and the steps to reproduce.
Hylki is free and open source. If it makes your inbox a little better, consider supporting its development at the link below. Thank you!
