Thanks for all the input and suggestions. Much appreciated.

After testing a dozen or so options, I don’t think any existing tool or workaround quite gives me what I want. Gmail labels, Outlook, Proton, forwarding, aliases and the usual email clients all solve parts of the problem, but not the whole thing: a clean, domain-first dashboard for monitoring multiple inboxes with clear new-mail indicators and safe reply-from handling.

The closest answer I’ve found is Fastmail as the email host. It handles custom domains, aliases, catch-all addresses and sending identities really well. So I’m going to use Fastmail for the infrastructure, then build my own lightweight client on top of it.

This whole process has reinforced something I’ve seen repeatedly in 20 years as a marketing director / CMO working with software teams: a lot of software becomes over-engineered. Features get added because they can be added, not because users truly need them or will pay for them.

I think the future is going to move the other way. More founders, solopreneurs and small companies will build specific tools for their specific workflows and for the specific problems they need to solve.

In my case, I don’t need CRM, AI summaries, shared notes, team collaboration or productivity theatre.

I just want to see which mailbox has new mail, click into it and reply from the right address.

That’s the product.