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Campbooks v1 is out

· 3 min read
Campbooks Team

Email is one of those things nobody likes and everybody keeps doing. Most of the tools for it gave up about a decade ago. We built Campbooks because we wanted one that handled more of the boring parts for us. Whether it's the right email client for you, we genuinely don't know. It's free to run, so you can find out without it costing you much.

Campbooks is an email client. The part that's different: it reads what comes in, attachments included, and does the filing. Invoices, receipts, contracts and the rest get sorted and turned into searchable documents, and what's left is a shorter list of mail that actually wants a reply. That's most of the pitch.

What it does​

It sorts your incoming mail and the documents attached to it, and it learns when you correct it. There's a quick review mode called Skim for clearing whatever's left. None of this is magic. It gets things wrong, you fix them, and it gets wrong less often.

Scout is the assistant. It summarizes what arrived, answers questions about your mail and documents, and writes draft replies. It does not send anything for you, and it does not do things quietly in the background. An assistant that "handled the rest" while you weren't looking seemed like a bad idea, so we didn't build that one.

The rest, briefly. Your documents are searchable and export to Google Drive or Notion. There's a calendar that syncs both ways with Google or Zoho. There are workflow automations and a REST API for wiring it into other things. It connects to Gmail, Zoho, and Microsoft 365, and it's translated into English, Portuguese, Spanish, and French.

The catch​

It's a first release and it's beta. Parts of it are rough. The hosted version is invite-only for now, which is a polite way of saying we're not confident enough to open the doors yet.

If you'd rather not wait for an invite, or not hand your mail to a company you've never heard of, you can run the whole thing yourself. It's source-available under the Sustainable Use License, installs with Docker, and needs no AI keys at all until you add your own.

Try it, or don't​

Next on the list: native apps, push notifications, plain IMAP for everything else, and more of the automations people keep asking for. It's source-available, so if something's missing you can file it or write it yourself.