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, you can enable copy mode so dragging copies the label instead of moving it, letting one email appear in several columns at once (see Gmail setup).

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.

Next steps