Email did not get worse because people wrote more of it. It got worse because everything else learned to wear its clothes. Receipts, promotions, cold outreach, and notification noise all arrive dressed as mail, and the clients we use treat every one of them with the same urgency as a note from a friend.
Linen starts from a different premise: your inbox should hold mail from people you know, and everything else should wait at the door.
Screening, not filtering
Filters ask you to write rules. Screening asks a simpler question: have you replied to this sender before? First-time senders wait in a screening queue until you let them in, once, with one decision that sticks. Your inbox stays a room of people you have already chosen.
AI you can point at things
There is one assistant surface in Linen, and it only acts when you ask. Select a message and ask about it. Highlight a draft and have it tightened. Run a saved action you wrote yourself. Every action is metered in plain credits, every prompt is bounded, and nothing sends itself. If you would rather keep it entirely on your own machine, point Linen at a local model and no mail leaves your desk.
Plain accounting
AI features draw from a monthly credit balance you can read like a bank statement: what ran, when, and what it cost. No surprise metering, no quiet upsells.
Where it runs
Linen is a native client for desktop and mobile with your mail stored locally, plus a small control plane for accounts and billing. IMAP and standard protocols underneath, so your mail remains yours and leaving is as easy as arriving.
We are opening the first accounts soon. If quiet mail sounds like your kind of mail, we would be glad to have you.