Open an email in its own window and pin a note to it. The note returns every time you open that exact thread — and stays out of the way when you don't.
A note about "what to reply to the client" ends up on the desktop, disconnected from the actual email it's about. New mail pushes the thread down, your inbox keeps moving, and by the time you reopen the email you've lost the note — or you've lost the thread the note was for. The reminder and the message it belongs to are never together.
Open a Gmail message on its own — double-click it so it gets its own window, where the URL carries the thread id — then tack a note. The note scopes to that exact email, not your whole inbox.
Reopen that email and the note returns on its own. Leave the thread — read other mail, go back to the inbox — and the note hides. It only shows up when the email it belongs to is open.
Open TackBoard, see a note, click Reveal — TackNote opens the exact Gmail thread in your browser. The note is the shortcut straight back to the email it's about.
Gmail is scoped by the thread id in the URL hash. Open an email on its own and TackNote reads that id from the address, ties the note to that one thread, and shows or hides it as you move around.
A note binds to a single email through the thread id in the URL. Open that thread on its own and the note is there; it doesn't bleed onto every other message in your inbox.
Open the email and the note appears; switch to another thread or back to the inbox and it hides. No clicking, no managing — it follows the address bar.
Web notes sync across your Macs through your own iCloud, encrypted. Tack a note on a Gmail thread at the desk, see it on the laptop.
Notes, voice memos, and transcripts live encrypted on your Mac. No account, no reading your mail — TackNote only sees the thread id in the URL.
Gmail is the hardest of these to scope, and the reason is simple: while you read in the split pane, Gmail puts no thread identifier in the URL at all. The address bar looks the same for every email you click. So the URL cannot tell TackNote which message you are looking at.
The open message's container carries a DOM class, something like msg6124950406017182959, and that class is visible through macOS Accessibility. It is stable per message, which makes it a usable key even though Gmail never puts it in the URL.
Finding it means one deep walk of a window that runs to roughly seven thousand nodes. TackNote does that once, then remembers the conversation container Gmail keeps while it swaps messages inside it, and rechecks only that small subtree afterwards.
Open a conversation so its id appears in the URL and TackNote keys on that instead, which behaves identically in the reading pane and in a popped-out message.
One honest limitation. A note scoped by the reading-pane key cannot be revealed back to that exact email, because the DOM class is not something a browser can navigate to. Reveal opens Gmail and stops there. If being taken back to the precise message matters, open it in its own view before tacking the note, and the URL-based key handles it properly.
"My reply note waits on the exact email it's about. I open the thread, it's right there — not buried on the desktop."
Open the email on its own — double-click it so it gets its own URL with the thread id — then tack a note. From then on, opening that exact thread brings the note back.
For per-email, open the message on its own. In the reading pane Gmail doesn't expose the message in the URL — it stays at #inbox — so a note there scopes to all of Gmail instead of one email.
Yes — reopen that thread and it returns. Leave the thread and it hides on its own.
Yes — through your own iCloud, encrypted. A Gmail note made on one Mac shows up on the other.
Yes — a 7-day free trial, no credit card required. After that, a one-time $24.99 license unlocks TackNote on up to 3 computers.
7-day free trial · No card required · Direct download · No App Store
Every note is sealed with AES-256 encryption the moment you write it — the key lives in your Mac’s Keychain, never on a server. Switch on iCloud sync and your notes are encrypted on your Mac before they travel through your own iCloud. Apple holds the keys to that sync unless you turn on Apple’s Advanced Data Protection, which makes it end-to-end encrypted and readable only on your devices. No accounts, no trackers, no servers we control. Not even we can read your notes.