Bottle Mailby Waffle Whale

Know when it was read. And how sure we are.

Bottle Mail is a calm, fast email app that turns read receipts, a tracking image and tracked links into one honest answer per person. When the evidence is weak, it says so. It never shows a false “Not read”.

Download for Windows Open in browser

Free · Windows 10 and 11 · On your phone too

Why Bottle Mail

  • Honest ticks

    Read, Opened, Possibly auto-opened or Delivered, with the reason one tap away. Never a guess dressed up as a fact.

  • Every inbox in one place

    Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud or any IMAP mailbox, in one unified inbox with tabs for Primary, Promotions and Updates.

  • Your mail stays yours

    On Windows your mail lives only on your PC, encrypted. The web app keeps nothing after you sign out.

  • Calm and quick

    Actions apply at once and sync in the background. Snooze, rules, scheduled send and undo send when you need them.

Honest read tracking

Ticks that say how sure we are

No single signal can prove that a person read an email. Image proxies open mail on their own, many apps ignore receipts, and people read with images blocked. So Bottle Mail shows the strongest signal it received for each recipient as ticks: one grey tick when the message is delivered, two ticks when a signal comes back, and the colour says how much that signal is worth.

Read

Two green ticks · high confidence

The recipient’s mail app sent back a read receipt, or a person clicked a tracked link (not a security scanner).

Opened

Two blue ticks · medium confidence

The tracking image loaded on a normal device, or through a webmail image proxy such as Gmail’s, more than 30 seconds after delivery.

Possibly auto-opened

Two faded grey ticks · low confidence

The image loaded through Apple Mail Privacy Protection or a known security scanner, or within 30 seconds of delivery. A machine may have opened it, so these opens are not counted.

Delivered

One grey tick · no signal yet

Sent, and nothing has come back. That does not mean unread: many people read with images off and decline receipts.

Where you see it

  • In Sent, and wherever a message you sent appears, each tracked message shows the ticks from the strongest signal of anyone you sent it to, plus the number of opens when it was opened more than once.
  • Point at the ticks for the words, for example “Read · opened 3 times · last 10:42 AM”. Click them to keep the details open: every open, link click and read receipt, newest first. Automatic opens are grouped in one line you can show.
  • The open message has a line for each person, and the Read tracking page counts how many people are at each level.
  • Colour is never the only cue: the words are always one point or one tab away. How read tracking works.

Read receipts

A standard request (MDN, RFC 8098) that the recipient’s app may answer. Strong when it arrives; Outlook and corporate mail often do, personal Gmail and Apple Mail do not.

Tracking image

A unique, unguessable 1×1 image per recipient. Blocked when images are off, and pre-fetched by some providers, which is why scanners and proxies are labelled separately.

Link clicks

Links go through a short redirect with a per-recipient token. Pre-fetchers load images but rarely follow links, so a click is the best evidence of a person.

You stay in control, and so do your recipients’ expectations. The tracking image, tracked links and read receipts are on by default for a new account. Turn each one off per account in Settings, or for one message with the Pixel, Links and Receipt boxes in the composer. Add an optional line to your signature saying the message is tracked. Replies and forwards from Bottle Mail strip the tracking out again, and your own opens are never counted. The tracking service stores no IP addresses.
Everything else you need

A complete mail app, not just a tracker

Built local-first: your actions apply instantly and sync in the background, even after you were offline.

Many accounts, one inbox

Add any IMAP/SMTP mailbox, such as Gmail, Yahoo or iCloud with an app password, and read them in one unified inbox or one at a time. Microsoft is phasing out app passwords, so many Outlook.com and Microsoft 365 accounts need one-click Microsoft sign-in, which is coming together with Google sign-in.

Snooze

Hide a conversation until later today, tomorrow or a date you pick. It comes back to the top of your inbox when it wakes.

Rules

“Subject contains invoice: star it and archive it.” Rules run on new mail as it arrives, and the result syncs back to your server.

Templates and quick replies

Save the emails you write again and again, and insert them from the composer in two clicks. Signatures per address, with your logo.

Scheduled send and undo send

Write now, deliver tomorrow at nine. Changed your mind? Undo a send for 10 seconds, or choose 5 to 30 seconds in Settings.

Encrypted on your device

The local mail database is encrypted at rest (SQLCipher) and so are cached attachments, with the key protected by Windows. Optional app lock with Windows Hello or a PIN.

S/MIME and PGP

Sign and encrypt with S/MIME certificates or OpenPGP keys, and verify and decrypt what you receive. Private keys never leave the Windows key store.

AI, your way Desktop

Thread summaries, draft a reply, rewrite, translate, priority sorting and “ask your inbox”. Run it on your PC (nothing leaves it), on Waffle Whale Cloud (free, with a daily limit), or with your own Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini or OpenAI-compatible key. Every result is a preview you approve.

Plugins Coming soon

Sandboxed plugins that ask for explicit permissions, such as a missing-attachment check or one-click unsubscribe, from a catalogue signed by Waffle Whale. They are not switched on in the app yet.

A tidy inbox

Tabs like Primary, Promotions and Updates, sorted on your PC. Block a sender in one click, select all to act on a whole folder, and use Trash and Spam like in Gmail, with an optional clean-up after 30 days.

Contacts Desktop

Address suggestions from the people you write to, your CardDAV address book, or a vCard or CSV file you import.

Quiet updates Desktop

New versions download quietly in the background and install the next time you restart. Turn on early updates to try new things first.

Instant search

Full-text search across all accounts on your device answers in milliseconds, even with 50,000 messages, and falls back to the server when needed.

Meeting invites

Calendar invitations show as a card you can accept, mark tentative or decline, and the organiser gets a proper reply.

Safe by default

HTML mail renders in a locked-down frame with remote images blocked until you allow them, plus SPF, DKIM and DMARC results and warnings for links that are not what they say.

Privacy

Your mail stays yours

  • The desktop app talks directly to your mail servers. Your messages are stored only on your PC, encrypted.
  • The tracking service only learns that a tracked message was opened or a link was clicked: time, signal type, a coarse device class and country. No IP addresses are stored.
  • The web app runs as a guest session: sign in with your own mailbox, and nothing is kept after you sign out.

Read the details in the privacy policy.

Wherever you are

On Windows, your phone or any browser

The Windows app is the full experience, with every feature on this page. The web app at mail.brandcode10.com is a lighter guest version for when you are away from your PC: one mailbox at a time, with read tracking and the essentials.

On your phone, open the web app in your browser and choose Add to Home Screen. It opens like an app.

Download for Windows Open in browser
Roadmap

What should Bottle Mail do next?

See what is coming now, next and later, upvote what you want, or request a feature of your own.

See the roadmap

Send with confidence, not guesswork.

Free to download. No account to create: your mailbox is your sign-in.

Get Bottle Mail