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You need a Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or later) and macOS 12 or later.

1. Download Hato from this site and open the file.
2. Drag Hato to your Applications folder and open it from there.
3. Hato is signed and notarized by Apple, so macOS opens it without warnings.
4. That’s it: Hato will ask you to connect your Google account.

1. Click “Connect with Google”. Your browser opens on Google’s page: choose your account and give permission there. Hato never sees your password.
2. While Hato completes Google’s verification, you’ll see “Google hasn’t verified this app”. Click “Advanced” and then “Go to Hato”.
3. Hato asks for two permissions: to read, organize and send your Gmail, and its own hidden folder in your Google Drive (drive.appdata), where it will keep a copy of your settings. It can’t see anything else in your Drive. It only uses them for what you see in the app, and everything happens between your Mac and Google.
4. Back in Hato, it brings in your email from the last 60 days. From then on, new email arrives on its own.

The first time, everyone who wrote to you in the last 60 days goes through the Guardian. Go one by one: “Allow” sends them to Inbox, and with the arrow next to it you choose News (newsletters) or Bills (receipts). “Block” keeps them out.

Once decided, their new emails go to the right place on their own. You can move anyone to another box from their card.

Each Hato beta works for 90 days from its release, so nobody keeps running bugs that are already fixed. Ten days before, you’ll see a notice at the top with the date. Download the new one from this site and replace the old one: nothing is lost.

When there’s a new version, a quiet strip at the bottom tells you, with “Download” and “Skip this version”.

Inbox is for people; News, for newsletters, which you read in full one after another; Bills, for receipts and invoices. To move someone to another box, open their card (click their name) and choose next to “Goes to”.

Reply later, for what you need to answer; Set aside, for what you want close; Following, for deliveries and things you’re waiting on: anything new in those threads notifies you. An email in a pile leaves its box. Add it from the reader, or with the keys L, A and F.

Emails with the same subject and people come together in one row; the stacked avatar tells you there’s more than one. Open it and read it like a chat, newest on top, with yours on the right. Click the header of an email to fold it.

Use ↑ and ↓ to move between emails without going back to the list. R replies, with your Gmail signature already in place, and V forwards, attachments included; ⌘ ↵ sends and ⌘ S saves the draft to Gmail. To write a new one, N.

Press / and type. Hato searches the box you’re in and the rest of your email at once, with or without accents. From three letters, it searches all of Gmail too, with the same syntax (from:, has:attachment…).

Under every email, with a thumbnail for images. Click one and it opens in Quick Look, without leaving Hato; the arrow downloads it. All of them, in Attachments (T) and on each person’s card.

In the Inbox, click “View all” (or O). You’ll see each unread email in turn, with everything you can do with it: read it, reply later, set it aside, follow it, archive it or delete it. Each decision moves on to the next.

Click an avatar (or ⇧ click for a range, ⌘ A for all) and a panel appears at the top: mark as read, send to a pile, move, archive or delete them all. Esc clears the selection.

Every notice of what you do (archive, delete, piles, read or unread, moving to another box) comes with “Undo”, with one email or with many. It puts everything back as it was, in Hato and in Gmail.

Nothing notifies you unless you choose it: turn on Notifications on a person’s card, or put a thread in Following. In Settings → Notifications, add up to four mail hours and Hato reminds you at each one; with “New mail only at my hours”, it keeps what’s new until then. “Disconnect” silences everything once a week.

In Settings → Appearance: the theme (light, dark or your Mac’s), Pure black, Dark emails (every email follows the dark theme) and Custom icon, to choose Hato’s model and color instead of the system one.

One key for almost everything: R reply, V forward, E archive, D delete, U unread, P private. 1–0 take you to each screen, / searches and N composes. Hold ⌘ and every option shows its own; the full list is in Settings.

In Private senders (H), mark senders, or whole domains, as private; P marks the email under the mouse. With ⌘ P (or in Settings → Privacy → Private mode) they disappear from every box, so you can share your screen calmly. While it’s on, you’ll see a lock next to Hato. Agents never see them.

Hato shows the images in your emails but removes tracking pixels: tiny images whose only job is to tell the sender you opened the email. If you’d rather load none, turn on Settings → Privacy → Block remote images.

Just what your email needs: it reads it, organizes it and sends your replies, all between your Mac and Google. We have no servers: we never see, store, sell or share your data. All the details are in the privacy policy.

Once a day, Hato tells gethato.com which version you use, so we know how many people use it. Nothing from your account or your email, and nothing that identifies you. Turn them off in Settings → Privacy → Anonymous statistics.

“Sign out”, in Settings → Account, deletes your access credentials from your Mac right away. To revoke access, remove Hato from Third-party apps & services in your Google account. To delete everything Hato keeps on your Mac, uninstall it and delete the ~/Library/Application Support/Hato folder. Your email stays in Gmail, with the Hato/… labels.

In Settings → AI and agents. Choose what they can do: only read; organize with your permission, asking before each change; or organize on their own, with everything in the log and “undo”. They never send or delete. Open the panel with I.

In Settings → AI and agents: the Claude app connects with one click, and Claude Code with the hato command (claude mcp add -s user hato -- hato mcp). In the beta, Hato’s chat uses the Claude Code on your Mac, with your subscription.

It sees what it needs to help you and knows what you have open. It never sees your private senders; it can only ask you, once per conversation, to read the private email you have open. What it reads reaches the company behind the AI (Anthropic, for Claude).

While Hato completes Google’s verification, Google closes the session of apps still in testing every 7 days. It isn’t a Hato bug. Click “Reconnect” and sign in with the same account; if you were writing, you get it back. Once Hato is verified, this stops happening.

Hato brings in new email on its own; press ⌘ R to ask for it now. If it still doesn’t arrive, check your connection and that your Google session hasn’t expired (Settings → Account). Someone new? People writing for the first time wait in the Guardian.

Each beta works for 90 days. Download the latest version from this site, drag it to Applications and replace the old one. Nothing is lost: your email is in Gmail and your settings stay on your Mac.

Hato is signed and notarized by Apple, so macOS opens it without warnings. If you see one, you probably have a beta from before 0.6.11 (they were not signed): delete Hato from Applications, download the latest from this site and try again.

Hato and Gmail always stay in step: what you read, archive or delete in one reaches the other. Hato’s piles are Gmail labels (Hato/…), so you’ll see the same emails with those labels in Gmail. If something looks off, press ⌘ R.