The Best Email Client for Freelancers
Client emails are your business lifeline. Inboxed helps you respond faster, stay organized, and maintain professionalism — all for free.
The Problem
Multiple client accounts
Juggling emails across different client accounts and projects is chaotic.
Response time pressure
Slow responses lose clients. But crafting thoughtful replies takes time.
Tool costs add up
Email clients that charge monthly subscriptions eat into your margins.
How Inboxed Solves This
Unified inbox
Connect all your IMAP accounts. See everything in one place without switching contexts.
AI draft generation
Get intelligent reply drafts in seconds. Review, edit, and send — maintaining your voice while saving time.
Genuinely free
Inboxed is free. The Pro upgrade is a one-time $1 payment. No monthly drain on your income.
Key Features for Freelancers
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should freelancers keep client emails for tax and legal purposes?
The IRS recommends keeping business records — including email correspondence related to contracts, invoices, and payments — for at least three to four years from the tax filing date, and up to seven years if income was underreported or a claim was filed. Email records that document project scope, change requests, and payment disputes are particularly important: they establish the evidentiary basis for deductions and protect you in contractor disputes. Inboxed stores email locally on your Mac, giving you direct control over archival without depending on a cloud provider's retention policies or account status.
How does Inboxed help freelancers manage communications across multiple clients?
Freelancers often juggle several clients simultaneously, each with different communication norms, project stages, and urgency levels. Inboxed's local AI can summarize active threads by client, draft status-update replies, and help you triage a mixed inbox without reading every message in full. You can label and organize by client name or project without a complex folder hierarchy. For freelancers who bill by the hour, reducing email processing time directly improves hourly rate efficiency. Inboxed works with whatever email provider you already use — no migration required — and the AI runs on your Mac without sending client information to third-party servers.
How does Inboxed compare to using Gmail or Hey for freelancers?
Gmail is free and ubiquitous, but it processes email content through Google's servers for features like Smart Compose, and its interface is not optimized for fast triage. Hey offers an opinionated email workflow with strong spam filtering but costs $99 per year and requires using Hey's own domain. Inboxed works with your existing email address, costs nothing for the base tier (or $1 once for Pro), and runs AI locally. The real trade-off: Gmail and Hey have richer ecosystems and work on any device. Inboxed is macOS-only, so freelancers who need cross-device access will want to evaluate that limitation honestly.
How do I set up Inboxed to manage multiple client email accounts?
Download Inboxed from inboxed.email and add each IMAP account during setup — your primary business email, any client-specific addresses, and a personal account if needed. The app consolidates them into a unified inbox or lets you switch between accounts. Most major providers (Gmail, Fastmail, iCloud, Proton via Bridge) work with a few clicks. The app is about 10 MB and runs entirely on macOS — there is no browser version. Once configured, all emails sync locally so you can work offline. The free tier covers core functionality; Pro adds advanced AI features for a one-time $1 payment.