Aether Email

Aether Email is an AI-powered desktop app that summarizes emails, drafts smart replies, and automates tasks—all locally on your device. Fast, private, and intelligent—email, reimagined.

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Aether Email: AI-Powered Email Assistant

Inspiration

Email overload is a major productivity drain—an average worker spends 2.5 to 3 hours daily managing their inbox. We wanted to create a smarter, AI-powered assistant that summarizes, prioritizes, and automates emails effortlessly. Unlike cloud-based AI tools, Aether runs locally on your desktop, ensuring speed, privacy, and full control over your data. Our goal was to build an AI assistant that transforms email management into an efficient, seamless experience.

What We Learned

Building Aether taught us the intricacies of integrating AI with real-world applications. We learned to optimize local AI inference using Ollama (Llama models) and implement secure OAuth2 authentication for Gmail. Managing state persistence in an Electron app was another key learning, ensuring users could resume sessions seamlessly without re-authentication.

How We Built It

Aether Email is built as a cross-platform desktop app using Electron.js, React, and TypeScript for a smooth UI experience. The backend runs on Python + Flask, handling AI-powered email summarization and smart replies via Ollama's Llama models. We integrated Google OAuth2 and the Gmail API for secure access to emails.

Tech Stack: Frontend: Electron.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Vite Backend: Flask, Python, Gmail API, OAuth2 AI Processing: Ollama (Llama models), Local AI Inference

Challenges We Faced

  1. OAuth2 Complexity – Implementing secure authentication and persistent session storage.
  2. Local AI Processing – Running Llama models efficiently without high memory usage.
  3. Email Parsing & Summarization – Extracting meaningful content while handling HTML-heavy emails.
  4. Electron Performance – Optimizing a desktop app to be lightweight and responsive while running AI models.

Despite these challenges, we built Aether as a fast, private, and AI-powered email assistant, proving that AI email management can be efficient and privacy-friendly without cloud dependency.

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