Unreleased

• Syncs ~10× cheaper: a sync with nothing new went from 23 Google calls (12.6 s) to 2 (1.1 s) on a real account. Lookups that fail (a DM's title, a person's name) are remembered and retried every 6 hours instead of on every sync; changed spaces are fetched four at a time; cached spaces are read in one query. The background service has a soft 128 MB memory cap.
• Chat read state follows the browser: a space read on the web or phone turns read here too, without waiting for a new message. M on a space is Chat's own "mark as unread" (it stays unread after a sync, and marks the latest message from someone else, even when you wrote last).
• Forwarding keeps attachments: they're listed as Attach: original: … in the editor (delete to drop) and fetched from Gmail when sent.
• File picker (+, U) starts in the folder you're in; the review screen shows each file's name, size and folder, and says when one is missing.
• Fixes: W no longer glues the name onto the search (an empty name keeps the search); mail archive and friends say what they did; the outbox names files; sandesh mcp exits quietly when its client closes it; the setup screen's border no longer shifts on the title line.
• SANDESH_DEBUG_HTTP=1 logs every Google request with its time.

• Compose works without $EDITOR: with no editor set, sandesh used vi, which many systems don't have, so c, r and friends failed at once. It now picks the first installed of nvim, vim, vi, helix, micro, nano, kak and emacs, and says which editor failed and how to set one.

• Chat sends instantly: chat messages skip the 10-second undo window (chat_undo_seconds, default 0; mail keeps undo_seconds), appear in the conversation as soon as Chat accepts them, and sending always jumps to the end of the chat.

• The tmux popup runs the current sandesh: tmux's environment often lacks ~/.local/bin, so the plugin fell back to a copy built once in its own folder and kept running it after updates. It now looks in ~/.local/bin and ~/go/bin too, and rebuilds its own copy whenever the code is newer.
• New chat messages show up: a conversation scrolled to the bottom stays at the bottom when messages arrive, like a chat app; before, they landed below the visible part. The space list says "You:" for your own last message.

• Files, both ways: v saves a mail's attachments or a chat's files to ~/Downloads/sandesh (an fzf picker when there are several), V saves and opens them. Send files with Attach: in the mail editor, + on the review screen, or U in a chat space; --attach on mail send and chat send; mail save / chat save download from the shell. Big mails (over 4 MB) go through Gmail's upload endpoint. Files are copied privately when queued, so what you reviewed is what is sent.
• Agents and files: mail_send, mail_draft and chat_send take attachments; such sends always ask for approval, which lists each file. New attachment_save tool, confined to the downloads folder.
• Other people's chat messages get a solid bar in their colour.

• Follows the desktop theme live: colours come from varna's palette.json (sandesh's own pick under tools.sandesh if the theme has one) and change on the running screen when the theme changes; [colors] in the config still win. SANDESH_NO_VARNA=1 turns it off.
• Cleaner borders: panels and frames use the border colour instead of one almost the same as the background; the selected card is a heavy accent frame instead of a background fill, which looked muddy on translucent terminals.
• No red error when Chat has no app configured: marking a space read works on this machine, and a quiet line says what to set up; messages that were cached empty are fetched again.

• Syncs in the background, not when you open it: the screen shows the local copy at once and leaves syncing to the background service (setup now installs it); it syncs by itself only when the service isn't running. After a send, an archive or another change it syncs again shortly so the copy matches Google. Only one process syncs an account at a time.
• Never hits Gmail's rate limit: requests are paced (40 quota units a second), Google's "slow down" answers are retried with backoff, and a first sync cut short resumes instead of starting over. The first sync takes the newest 150 threads (max_threads); older mail comes through search.
• Real names in chat: names come from Chat's own messages, sandesh finds which member is you from your DMs (no People API needed), DMs are named after the other person and groups "Naeem, Rahul, Rugved +2"; placeholder "user 1234" names are no longer stored.
• Chat is compact: one name line per group, a coloured bar per message, no boxes; messages that are only an attachment or a card say so.
• Errors get their own line (Esc hides it) instead of covering the keys, and the common Google errors say what to do. Card borders are brighter (new border colour).

• A new look: the mail list is one bordered card per thread with gaps between them; the thread view puts each message in its own card with a From / To / Date header and renders HTML mail as terminal formatting (headings, bold, lists, tables, buttons, numbered links), folding older messages and quoted replies (E, Q, o opens a link). Chat reads like a conversation: grouped by sender, yours on the right, day separators, thread replies and mentions marked; i types a message in place.
• m marks read and M marks unread (no more toggle), for the thread or every selected one, in mail and chat.
• Setup asks for the client file's path (with completion) instead of looking in Downloads, copies it into its config, and shows the three steps with a progress bar for the first sync.
• Chat works without the People API: names fall back to "user 1234" instead of the whole chat sync failing.
• The local copy keeps each message's HTML; existing copies refetch once.

• Setup screen: opening sandesh (or prefix e) with no credentials no longer stops with an error. It says what's missing and takes it right there: the client file found in ~/Downloads, a path or pasted JSON, or a typed client ID and secret; then the Google sign-in in your browser (work account or personal Gmail) and the first sync, straight into the inbox. d tries the demo instead.

v0.1.02026-10-26release ↗

First release.

• The screen: Gmail and Google Chat in one keyboard-driven terminal UI, laid out like sangam: sections on top (Inbox, Today, Unread, Starred, saved Gmail searches; All, Unread, DMs, Spaces for chat), the list on the left, the thread or space on the right. Vim keys, ? for all of them.
• Write in your editor: compose, reply, reply all, forward and chat messages open $EDITOR; a review step shows exactly what goes out, then y sends, d saves a Gmail draft.
• Undo: z undoes archive, trash, read and star, and cancels a send in its 10-second undo window.
• Background sync (sandesh service install): Gmail's change feed and Chat's active spaces into a local SQLite copy with full-text search; desktop notifications for new inbox mail, DMs and mentions.
• MCP server (sandesh mcp) with 11 tools for Claude Code and other agents. Agents' sends wait for your approval in a tmux popup, A in the screen or sandesh approve; mail content reaches them marked untrusted; send_policy sets how much they may send alone.
• Claude keys in the screen: @ ask, S summarise, D draft a reply, T today's digest, through claude -p.
• Command line for everything, with --json: mail, chat, status, sync, outbox, approve, auth, doctor, demo.
• tmux plugin: prefix e popup and #{sandesh_status} for the status line.