this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

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I’m excited to introduce Paperweight, a local-first open-source desktop app I’ve been building to help people understand and reduce their digital footprint.

Your inbox is a paper trail of every company that has ever had your data. Every account you created, every service you tried, every online purchase. It’s all connected to your email. Most people have 100+ accounts they’ve forgotten about, each a potential security, or privacy risk. For me the final push was the Odido data breach in the Netherlands. I hadn’t been a customer for more than 8 years, but all my data was still in their systems.

What it does:

  • Account inventory — Maps every company that has ever emailed you, with risks classifications and recommendations for action.
  • Bulk unsubscribe — Find and unsubscribe from any marketing and mailing lists (auto RFC 8058 where supported).
  • Breach alerts — Alerts when any company you’ve been in contact with has been breached (via HaveIBeenPwned).
  • GDPR requests — Generates pre-filled GDPR requests in multiple languages.

Supports Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, Proton (via Bridge) and any other email provider via IMAP.

Privacy approach:

Everything runs on your machine. Email content, credentials, and connection details never leave your device. No telemetry, no cloud sync, no analytics. The code is fully open source and auditable on GitHub.

Most alternatives in this space all require your to share your data through their services. Some of them have actually been caught selling your data. Paperweight is the only tool I’m aware of that does this entirely local and is open-source.

Website

Feedback welcome! Thanks

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[–] Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it 5 points 6 hours ago

Will you ever switch to other git forges? Honestly i think github right now is a bad place, it's being enshittified very fast by microslop, i switched to Codeberg and i think it's great, they also make switching to codeberg easy

[–] apotheotic@beehaw.org 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (2 children)

Any scope for a version of this that installs via docker compose and runs a webui for us home server users? Edit: oh huh I missed that it's ~~not FOSS~~ paid. 69 bucks for a "perpetual" license that only gets updates to v1 is a bit DIRE

[–] wslyvh@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

No plans on a Docker compose for now, but feel free to submit an issue. RE licensing, there's some discussion on it below. FOSS describes software licensing, which is all MIT. There are 2 features "gated" behind a license check, which supports development and gives the convenience of a ready-made build (which have costs involved). But all code is open, and you're welcome to modify/fork out if you prefer to run your own.

[–] apotheotic@beehaw.org 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I wanna be clear I'm more than happy to pay for a perpetual license to good software. Its the cessation of support past v1 that concerns me. Thanks for making a cool tool, either way, whether I end up using it or no

[–] wslyvh@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 hours ago

That's fair. I'm still experimenting with pricing/licensing models, so appreciate the feedback. To be clear, the license grants you permanent use and at least all updates, including V1 which is documented on Github. Not making any promises what's after yet, because in all honesty. I don't know yet what a V2 or other features would look like. Just trying to be transparent on what you're getting right now + upcoming updates. We'll see what's after, and open to ideas

[–] jjlinux@lemmy.zip 1 points 6 hours ago

That would be amazing.

[–] exist@sopuli.xyz 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Looks cool, I haven't hit an issue with old accounts like that but there are certainly some that could fuck me over. Will try it out later.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

You should try your address in haveibeenpwned. My old one was in a few leaks from when i was a teen.

[–] moopet@sh.itjust.works 0 points 4 hours ago

Quick correction point:

any other email provider via IMAP

Not all email providers use IMAP

[–] dave@feddit.uk 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I have a question—I suspect the answer is yes even if indirectly, but thought I’d ask in case you already thought of this. I have many email addresses, and one in particular is the source of lots of spam. Unfortunately it’s also one I’ve used to login to many services I actually use so I can’t easily delete it. Can I use Paperweight to make a list of services I need to go change my email on before consigning my 20+ year old address to the bin?

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

before consigning my 20+ year old address to the bin?

Either way, you should reduce the active subscribtions and reuse it as a spamhole (because it 100% was in some leaks already). Never "delete" an old E-Mail address, they can be used to hijack your accounts.

And maybe forward the phishing mails to your countries @antiphishing address.

[–] dave@feddit.uk 2 points 4 hours ago

This was on a custom domain, and I started off with xyz-1@domain.com, and when it became saturated I moved to -2, -3, etc. But then got lazy and used my current ‘version’ to sign up for things I’d want to keep, not just any old random stuff. So now it’s a mix, and much better ways of doing that exist, like +tagging and hide-my-email services.

I even wondered about setting up a catch-all account on the domain so I can just invent them on the fly, and then when one becomes spammy, create an ‘actual’ account as a spamhole.

[–] LemmyFeed@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Can you talk to what contributions AI/llms have made to this project?

[–] wslyvh@lemmy.ml 6 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Sure, like most projects I use AI assistance a lot for most of my work these days, ngl. Its helps me plan, research and code new ideas/features and makes a lot of my work easier. Having said that, I fully understand and share people's feelings about yolo, vibe-coded slop. I've been a software engineer for 20+ years. AI helps with a lot, but also feels like the honeymoon phase is wearing off actually. It doesn't give me the joy of building stuff. I still test, review and ship everything myself. You can check my Github history that I've been doing this way before recent AI hype.

Either way, the idea and execution is 100% me. I'm building something I want, use, and care about myself. Whether I've used AI is not too relevant, imo. It's that all alternatives have been caught selling your data (Unroll), heavily rely their centralized services or require you to give up your data in order to remove it. Which is ironic. Paperweight is the only tool I’m aware of that does this entirely local and is open-source.

P.S if its quality you're worried about, Paperweight has been audited through Google's CASA assessment and Apple's developer verification (admittedly, not a super high bar).

[–] pathos@lemmy.ml 3 points 12 hours ago (1 children)
[–] wslyvh@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 hours ago
[–] AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

Hey man!!! This is awesome, I deeply hate spam, so I will definitely be giving this a go.

[–] wslyvh@lemmy.ml 3 points 7 hours ago

Hi, nice to see you here! Would love to hear your thoughts. And thanks for standing up in the comments. Much appreciated :)

[–] warmaster@lemmy.world 34 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Great project. Thanks for sharing, and cool you chose to open source some / all of it. That said...

Paperweight, a local-first open-source desktop app

Are the paid features open source too? If so, then it's really open source.

If the paid features are not open source, then the project does not grant the 4 freedoms the FSF requires to recognize the project as open source.

This is commonly known as open core (or open washing?).

I'm not giving advice on what you should do, I'm only pointing out a possible incoherence between what you say and what you made.

[–] wslyvh@lemmy.ml 36 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (3 children)

Thanks for the reply! And good question. Yes, all code, including all paid features are open source too. Not just open core. There's nothing proprietary. Some of the paid features are gated behind a license check, but it's all part of the same repo and MIT licensed. It's all there to inspect or fork if you want. The perpetual license however helps support development and gives the convenience of a ready-made build.

We actually moved recently from GPLv3 to MIT to be fully permissive.

[–] pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

We actually moved recently from GPLv3 to MIT to be fully permissive.

Can you explain how this is a good thing for users ? From my own (admittedly limited) understanding of licenses, the main difference between GPL and MIT is that MIT allows freeriding off open source project by making closed-source forks.

[–] wslyvh@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 hours ago

Sure, my original thought was that GPLv3 would ensure that contributions/forks would at least remain open. Which seems novel, but 1) Realistically I probably wouldn't have any way to enforce it, and 2) GPL is terrible for businesses, and might block genuine contributors. E.g. a company who wants to write an internal plugin/extension, would be forced to open-source it under GPL, which might not be feasible. So they either don't use/contribute at all, or might build it themselves from scratch. Especially with AI these days, code is cheap and its easy to "reproduce" entire codebases in a fraction of the time. MIT just simplifies, and makes it fully permissive instead.

[–] AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.world 8 points 13 hours ago

Honorable for real

[–] warmaster@lemmy.world 11 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

This is great, you got yourself a new customer!

Local-only and fully FOSS, I truly appreciate it!

I'll subscribe as soon as I get on my rig!

[–] wslyvh@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 hours ago

Thank you! Appreciate that. Would love to hear your thoughts when you get to spin it up!

[–] Encom@lemmy.world 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Looking at the project, the paid features are paywalled even if you spin it up yourself

[–] wslyvh@lemmy.ml 4 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Correct. But all code is there, so you can fork them out yourself if you want.

[–] ohshit604@sh.itjust.works -5 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (2 children)

5 contributors, 2 of which are “Ai”’s.

I suspect a -

-- Infected repo.

Definitely a cool project if it’s not though!

[–] AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.world 14 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

I've followed his work before, he's done a fair bit of open source, he knows what he's doing. I'd put money on it not being slop. Just stamping "slop" on something after you spent 8 seconds looking at something is ignorant and rude.

[–] ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

The post text is dripping with it but I haven’t looked at the code. A lot of my complaining about slop is how people for whom English is not a strong language over-depend on it, kind of never developing a voice over time. Instead sounding like the Burger King support bot.

I wouldn’t even know if the code was machine generated. I never tried that so I don’t recognize it if it’s not glaring.

Code is out there though so maybe someone can port it into a Thunderbird addon or something. I think this is a very cool project

[–] Nitrate55@lemmy.ml 0 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, I'm getting that vibe here too. OP is not replying to either your comment or the other comment asking what contributions AI have to this project. If there's no AI in this, then surely OP can at least bother to reply affirming there's not, especially when they replied to almost every other comment on the post.

[–] Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it 3 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

They finally replied https://lemmy.ml/comment/25776478 Also, i can see why they wouldn't answer to such a comment, opening the comments and seeing a big ass image od a "SLOP" sign does not feel good at all, especially after you spent time making the thing