Local-first email triage
Tenku
A gateway to the empty sky.
A personal desktop app that triages your Gmail with Claude — sorting mail by what actually matters and clearing to zero from the keyboard. Your inbox stays on your machine.
What Tenku is
Tenku is a calm, keyboard-driven desktop app that reads a personal Gmail inbox and sorts it by importance, with a one-line reason for every message. It learns from your corrections as it goes.
It is built for one person at a time. There is no server, no account, and no sign-up here — you run the app on your own machine and bring your own Google OAuth client and Anthropic API key. This website exists only to explain what Tenku does and how it treats your data.
The name
A torii is the gateway that marks the threshold to the heavens — 天 (ten), 空 (kū): the open sky.
The mark stands on its baseline and rises into the space above it, never sinking below. That is the whole idea of the app: openness, vastness, and calm. An inbox cleared to zero is not an empty list — it is clear sky.
What you get
- AI triage
Every message gets an importance tier, a confidence, and a one-line reason. Your reclassifications feed back into later calls.
- Keyboard-first
Done, star, snooze, reply, forward — all without the mouse. Undo walks back mistakes. Clear to zero in minutes.
- Local-first
Metadata and short snippets live in a SQLCipher-encrypted cache on your machine. Gmail stays the source of truth.
- Write-back outbox
Local actions mirror to Gmail with retry, backoff, and a reconcile pass — so nothing lands silently.
- Kill switches
Pause AI and pause Gmail writes independently, enforced in the backend. You are never not in control.
- Additive by design
Tenku surfaces what matters. It never hides mail and never takes bulk destructive actions.
