Boards & Columns: How Kanmail Works

Kanmail lays your email out as a kanban board. This page explains the core concepts: columns, boards, dragging, and colour-coding.

Columns are your folders

A column in Kanmail is one of your email folders (or, for Gmail, a label), shown as a vertical list of cards. Each card is an email. You decide which folders appear as columns, so your board reflects how you work. A common starting layout is:

You can have unlimited columns. Add or remove them at any time.

Moving email = dragging cards

Drag a card from one column to another to move that email between folders. Dragging from To Do to Waiting literally re-files the message; the board is your mailbox, not a layer on top of it.

For Gmail and other label-based accounts there’s also copy mode: dragging a card out of the Inbox into one of your columns adds that column’s label instead of moving the email, so it keeps its Inbox label too. Copy mode is on by default for @gmail.com addresses; see Gmail setup for how it behaves and when to change it.

Workflows: a layout for each part of your life

A workflow is a saved arrangement of columns. You can keep several and switch between them instantly, each remembers its own layout. For example:

Switching workflows is instant and keyboard-accessible, so you can move between contexts deliberately instead of scrolling one giant inbox.

All accounts, one board

Add as many accounts as you like — Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, IMAP — and Kanmail shows them together. Each account gets its own colour accent so you always know which inbox a card belongs to, and replies go out from the correct address automatically.

Colour-coding senders

Highlight important senders with a colour so their email stands out within any column. Useful for making sure messages from your boss, a key client, or a specific project never get lost in a busy column.

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