Frequently Asked Questions
This page was written before anyone had actually started asking questions. These are the questions we think people may ask. Once real questions arrive, they will be allowed to compete with our guesses.
What is Spillway?
Spillway is a privacy-first email and work organizer for Mac and iPhone. It helps people sort messages, find requests and dates, and keep important work from disappearing into an overflowing inbox.
Why build another email client?
Because the problem is not only reading and sending email. Email has become a place where tasks, documents, schedules, decisions, and personal logistics all arrive mixed together.
Spillway is being built to help people work through those different kinds of information without constantly changing mental gears.
Is Spillway ready to use?
Spillway is private pre-alpha software. It is being tested with invited users and is not yet ready to replace an established email client as the only way to access important mail.
See current progress or learn about the private beta.
Does Spillway send my email to its own servers?
No. Spillway does not operate a server that receives and stores users' Gmail content.
Local AI can run on the user's own Mac. When a user chooses a cloud AI provider, selected content is sent directly to that provider under its terms.
Can I use Spillway without cloud AI?
Yes. Spillway can use local AI through Ollama, and accounts may also be configured without AI.
Can I choose different privacy rules for different accounts?
That is an important part of the design. A person may want local AI for a work account, cloud AI for a personal account, and no AI for another account.
Combining accounts in one workspace should not erase those boundaries.
Why does Spillway ask me to review AI suggestions?
Because AI can be useful without being the final authority.
Spillway treats AI output as a proposal. A person can confirm it, correct it, or dismiss it. Human decisions should not be silently replaced by a later guess.
Will Spillway learn how I organize email?
That is the goal. Human decisions can become evidence that helps Spillway make better suggestions later, while remaining correctable.
Spillway also keeps track of where its evidence came from, how old it is, and whether newer information supports or contradicts it.
Read about the ideas behind Spillway.
Why is a communication researcher and political scientist building an email client?
Because email is not only a software problem. It is a changing social system made up of people, institutions, relationships, incomplete information, attention, memory, and decisions.
Communication research, political science, psychology, and data science all offer useful ways to think about those problems. That background is not the reason Josh wanted Spillway, but it strongly shapes how the product is designed.
Why is Spillway being built in public?
Trust is easier when people can see how important choices are made.
The project aims to explain its design, privacy boundaries, limitations, and development process in plain language rather than asking users to accept a polished claim without evidence.
Read the development philosophy.
Will all my emails turn into AI slop?
No. The goal is to reduce clutter and recover useful information, not replace every message with a longer, more enthusiastic version of itself.
Spillway is also not designed to send AI-written email automatically without human review.
Don't all professors hate AI?
Professors are unusually skilled at disagreeing with one another.
Some are enthusiastic, some are skeptical, and many manage to be both before lunch. Spillway takes a simpler position: AI is useful when it helps people think and work more clearly, and less useful when it tries to replace their judgment.
Is this app going to speed up the AI takeover?
That would be an unfortunate product-market fit.
Spillway is built around the idea that AI should propose rather than decide. If the machines eventually take over anyway, we hope they at least respect the category hierarchy.
Does Spillway know what I am thinking?
No. It sometimes has enough trouble determining whether a newsletter is actually a newsletter.
Can Spillway finally make me answer my email?
We admire your confidence in software.
Will this get me to Inbox Zero?
Spillway is aiming for something more durable: an inbox that is understandable and under control.
Zero remains a private matter between you and your unread count.
Why are there so many words on this website?
Because the project is trying to explain how the software works before asking people to trust it.
Also, the person building it is a professor.
Is this secretly an elaborate productivity experiment?
At this point, most software projects are.
Can I blame Spillway for missing a deadline?
You can try, but your colleagues may ask follow-up questions.
Did we miss your question?
Almost certainly. Questions, feedback, and beta inquiries may be sent to software@joshpasek.com.
As real questions arrive, this page will become less hypothetical—though not necessarily less strange.