Sticky Mail

Add notes and highlights to your Gmail messages. Scoped per account, synced across devices.

Sticky Mail adds two things to Gmail: a note you can write on any message, and a highlighter for the message body. Nothing else. NOTES Open a message and a round button appears under the sender's photo — amber when that message already has something, grey when it doesn't. The note card opens in the top-right corner, always in the same place, so it never covers what you are reading. Notes take markdown: headings, bold, code, lists, quotes, links, and checkboxes you can tick straight from the card. Typing saves itself. HIGHLIGHTER Select text in the message body and a five-color palette appears. Each highlight can carry its own comment. Highlights are remembered by their content rather than their position, so they survive Gmail re-drawing the message. If a passage really is gone, the highlight is marked "not found in this message" instead of being thrown away. FINDING THINGS AGAIN Click the toolbar icon for a searchable list of recent notes — subject, sender, note text and highlights are all searched. Click a result to jump back to that message in Gmail. Pin the ones you keep returning to. Deleted notes wait in the trash for 30 days. WHERE YOUR NOTES LIVE Notes are always saved on this computer, in the browser's own extension storage. Turn sync on and they are mirrored to your other computers running the same browser. Sync is a 100 KB window — roughly 30 to 150 notes depending on how many highlights they carry — and when it fills, the notes you touched longest ago drop out of sync while staying on this computer. Chrome and Edge sync separately; they cannot see each other's storage. KEEP IN GMAIL For storage without a limit, Sticky Mail can write a summary of your notes — plus a restorable JSON backup — into a Gmail compose window addressed to yourself. The extension fills the window in; you read it and press Send. It never sends mail for you, and it does not use the Gmail API. BACKUP Export everything as JSON (a full backup that merges when restored), CSV for spreadsheets, or Markdown for Obsidian and Notion. PRIVACY Sticky Mail makes no network requests of its own. No server, no account, no analytics, no tracking. It asks for three things: storage, to keep your notes; alarms, for hourly housekeeping (emptying the 30-day trash, merging sync, checking the weekly reminder badge); and access to mail.google.com, the only site it runs on. Several Gmail accounts stay separate from each other, and storage keys hold a hash rather than your address. SHORTCUTS Alt+M opens or closes the note for the message you are reading. Esc or Ctrl+Enter saves and closes. Korean and English, following your Chrome display language.