What makes Ferrymead different from other mail apps?
Most mail apps now exist to keep you inside them — the longer you stay, the more of you there is to measure and resell. Ferrymead was built the other way round: to hand back the hour a day that reading post quietly takes off you. The aim is a clear desk at the end of it, not another feed to work through. All of it lives in one window that stays quiet, keeps its promises about your data, and was drawn with some care.
Put another way, Ferrymead is to your old inbox what a well-run post room is to a heap on the doormat. Or as one of the people who tests it wrote to us: “like moving from a filing cabinet to a desk.” It came from somewhere better — and it just feels better.
Don’t take our word for it. The Quarterly Ledger called Ferrymead “the first mail client I have wanted to leave open,” and Nine Streets Review called it “the best-looking piece of software on my machine” for being quiet where the rest of them shout.
How does Ferrymead plan to make money?
First things first: we will never sell what we learn about you, and we never have. This company exists because we grew tired of watching mail providers treat the people who use them as inventory.
Don’t misread that — we fully intend to make plenty of money, and we would like a business model that runs alongside the people we serve instead of against them. That means charging firms who want their teams to spend rather less of the week in an inbox, and charging anyone who wants the fuller set: shared drafts, retention rules, a domain of your own. The pricing page will fill in as the shape settles.
Until then, take the promise plainly. Your correspondence belongs to you, and it is not leaving this building in any form that could be sold on.
What sort of data does Ferrymead keep?
Our privacy notice, which is written in ordinary words, puts it like this:
- We cannot read the mail you send
- We do not log what you search for
- We do not hand your address book on
You make an account so your rules, filters and signatures follow you from one machine to the next — and there are only a handful of moments where you get to decide whether something is shared at all. Write to our support desk and we will hold on to whatever you chose to paste into that message for as long as it takes to chase the fault down. A couple of the optional features pass a small amount of information to outside providers, and we will always name the provider and the moment it happens, so the choice stays with you. Past that, all we keep are anonymous counts of which features people actually open.
We treat Ferrymead as a private room rather than a public square, and we try to behave accordingly.
Will Ferrymead sell my data?
No. Not now, not later, not quietly.
We know how many times software has burned you on precisely this question — it has burned us too, which is a fair part of why the company exists at all. Come and meet the people who build it if you want to satisfy yourself that we are the plain, stubborn sort we claim to be.
A better inbox is a more private one. Our loyalty is to the person reading, never to whoever is trying to reach them.
Does Ferrymead run on anything besides a desktop?
It does now. There is a tablet build you can pick up here, and as far as we know it is the first mail client of its kind written entirely in that platform’s own toolkit, which was fussy work we are quietly pleased with. We would like it to be the best-behaved mail app on the machine.
There is no watch app, and no plan for one.
Is Ferrymead built on an existing mail engine?
It is, which means it already speaks every protocol your provider speaks and works with the accounts you hold today. That said, we have stripped out the parts of that engine we found objectionable — a long list of what came out is public. In other words, we share a foundation with the older clients but not their habits, which is also why it feels noticeably quicker.
The intention is to swap the rendering layer for something of our own within a couple of years. That is a large claim to make out loud, so please read it as an intention rather than a date.
Sharing a foundation is what makes moving in cost you nothing: every account, rule and folder you rely on comes across in one pass. It simply does not trade you away the way the older clients do.
Does Ferrymead work with my calendar?
Yes, and with about ninety per cent of the calendar formats in ordinary use. Bringing a full year of appointments across takes well under a minute the first time you sign in.