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Changelog

What we have built, fixed, and improved in each release of Franz.

6.5.1

A small release, but if one of these three bugs had your name on it, it's a big one. Some of you couldn't use Franz at the office at all: on company networks that route traffic through a proxy, every service timed out while the app itself looked perfectly healthy. Others were locked out of Signal, where one failed linking attempt could quietly poison every attempt after it, even across updates. And on Windows, some antivirus tools raised a false alarm after every single update. Each had a single stubborn root cause, each is fixed properly, and all three came straight from your reports. Keep them coming.

Fixed

  • Franz works on office networks again. On networks that require a proxy, services failed to load with a connection timeout while everything else about the app seemed fine. Franz had quietly stopped honoring your system's proxy settings for services, a bug that goes all the way back to the start of Franz 6. It now respects them again, the way Franz 5 always did.
  • Signal linking can no longer get permanently stuck. If a device-link attempt failed on an older version of Franz, it could leave behind a broken half-finished setup that made every future attempt fail too, no matter how often you retried or updated. Franz now detects that leftover, clears it out, and gives your next attempt a genuinely fresh start.
  • Windows: Signal linking works again after updates. Updating Franz on Windows could quietly leave older copies of Signal's engine behind, and Franz sometimes started one of those instead of the newest — the Signal network then refused to link your device. Franz now always runs exactly the version it ships with, so linking goes through.
  • Windows: your antivirus stops crying wolf on updates. Some antivirus tools, AVG among them, flagged Franz after every update because the update packaging accidentally stripped the original publisher signature from a bundled component. That component now ships untouched with its signature intact, so security software recognizes it for what it is.

6.5.0

This one is about stability. We spent the last weeks hunting down crashes and rough edges across the whole app: Windows machines that crashed on launch, mail that could double-send, an upgrade window that came up blank, Signal threads that made the fans spin. Dozens of fixes later, Franz starts faster, runs lighter, and finally catches the crashes that used to vanish without a trace. Franz Mail got a dedicated hardening pass, Windows got a rebuilt close-and-tray experience, and getting started got some love too: setup is now three quick steps, and the 14-day trial only begins when you actually reach for a Pro feature, so it covers the time where it counts. Downloads, too, learned to respect your preference: keep saving straight to your download folder, or have Franz ask where each file should go.

New

  • A fresh start, in three steps. First-run setup has been rebuilt from the ground up: create or sign in to your account, pick your services, and you're in. The service picker leads with what people actually add first — including Franz Mail — and a "Browse all 70+" view opens the full catalog without losing your selections. The whole flow speaks English, German, and French.
  • Your trial starts when you're ready, not when the installer finishes. Franz no longer burns trial days while you're still looking around. The 14-day Pro trial begins at the moment you reach for a Pro feature — like adding a fourth service — so the trial actually covers the time you're using it.
  • A calm ending to the trial. In the final three days a quiet countdown appears, and when the trial ends you see exactly what you've built — your services, workspaces, and mail — with one button to keep everything exactly as it is. Decide to stay on the free plan instead? Your first three services keep working, no strings attached.
  • Decide where your downloads go. A new choice in Settings → General: keep saving files automatically to your download folder, or have Franz ask you where to put each one. If you never touch the setting, nothing changes — downloads land where they always have.
  • Windows: closing Franz finally behaves the way you expect. A rebuilt window-behavior setting lets you choose exactly what the close button does — quit, minimize, or tuck into the tray — and Franz explains the first time it hides so you're never left wondering where it went. In English, German, and French.
  • Crash reports that catch the invisible crashes. Some crashes used to take Franz down without leaving a trace. Franz can now capture these and send an anonymous diagnostic so we can actually fix them. If you want to help more, there's a new opt-in for detailed crash reports in Settings → Privacy — off by default, encrypted, and deleted after 30 days.

Improved

  • Franz Mail, hardened. A focused reliability pass on mail: undo-send can no longer double-send, reconnecting an account can't mix up identities, mail re-syncs when you come back to the app, and opening a thread recovers gracefully when something goes wrong. The undo-send window is now a snappier 5 seconds.
  • Signal threads, much lighter. Long conversations now render only what's on screen, cutting the work your machine does in big threads to a fraction of what it was — scrolling stays smooth even in your busiest groups.
  • Faster to first message. The mail editor and other heavyweight parts now load only when you need them, trimming startup work and memory.
  • Adding Gmail or Outlook as a service? Franz Mail says hello. When you reach for the Gmail or Outlook web service, Franz points out — once — that these accounts work best connected to Franz Mail, where they get search, notifications, and the assistant.
  • Cloud AI introduces itself the first time you use it. The first time you reach for an AI feature, Franz shows what's included and gets you going without any setup.

Fixed

  • Sidebar tabs stay put. Dragging services around could make tabs vanish from the sidebar until a restart. They stay visible now.
  • Signing in on a fresh install no longer wipes local data. A guard now prevents a first sync from clearing local state when the server copy is emptier than yours.
  • The upgrade window works again. The embedded checkout could come up blank or broken for some people; it opens reliably now. And if the payment form ever does fail to load, Franz notices, closes the sheet, and offers you a retry instead of leaving you hanging.
  • Checkout no longer trips over an almost-finished trial. Upgrading with less than two days left on your trial could fail at the payment step. Fixed.
  • Signing up without a last name works. The form no longer insists on a field some people simply don't use.
  • Open conversations now update as replies arrive. In Franz Mail, a new message in a conversation you had open only showed up in the message list — the conversation itself stayed frozen until you left and came back. It now refreshes within seconds of the mail arriving.
  • Discarding a draft really discards it. Throwing away a draft opened from the Drafts folder could leave its content sitting in the reading pane and the Drafts counter stuck at the old number. Both clear properly now.
  • Blank Signal conversations show their messages again. A duplicated incoming message could blank out an entire Signal thread. Affected threads render again, existing duplicates are cleaned up automatically, and new ones can no longer sneak in.
  • Signal odds and ends. Custom-emoji reactions render properly in the picker, and a rare crash when a message arrived without an envelope is handled gracefully.
  • Popup windows go quiet when you close them. Closing a window Franz opened for an external link — a YouTube video, say — could leave its audio playing until you quit the app. Closing the window now actually stops it.
  • The sound badge lets go. A service could keep its "playing audio" badge after the sound stopped. It clears now.
  • Clearer mailbox errors. When a mail account can't reconnect or be added, Franz now tells you why instead of failing silently.
  • Windows: the taskbar icon lost its white box. On some setups the Franz icon sat on a white square in the taskbar. It renders cleanly again.
  • Windows: a launch crash-loop is gone. A mail-intelligence component could take Franz down right at startup on certain Windows machines. It now runs safely isolated, so a hiccup there can never crash the app again.
  • Windows: smooth scrolling is back. Installed builds had quietly stopped using the graphics card for rendering. Hardware acceleration works again.
  • Newer builds stay put. Running a newer Franz than the latest public release — like a beta — could get silently replaced by the older version on restart. Franz now only ever updates forward.

Under the hood

  • Closed windows hand their memory back. File previews, popup windows, and the checkout sheet quietly kept running in the background after being closed, slowly adding up until the next restart. They're fully released the moment you close them now.
  • No more busywork on unreadable attachments. An attachment Franz could never make sense of — a corrupt PDF, for example — was retried on every mail sync, forever. It's now marked and skipped, which saves background work and battery.

6.4.1

A smaller release this time — one welcome addition, and a good deal of putting things right. The headline: you can now connect a Gmail account to Franz Mail. Because Google no longer allows sign-in inside an app window, Franz hands you off to your usual browser to approve access and brings you straight back, and your Gmail then lives in your inbox like any other account. We also owned a rough edge from 6.4.0 — a change on Signal's side had quietly broken device linking for a lot of you, and that works again. On top of that, the assistant answers again for lifetime owners with a Cloud AI add-on, managing your subscription works no matter how you paid, and the old Facebook Pages service has followed Meta over to Business Suite.

New

  • Connect your Gmail to Franz Mail. You can now add a Gmail account alongside your other mailboxes. Google doesn't allow signing in from inside an app window anymore, so Franz opens the approval step in your normal web browser and then returns you to the app automatically — once you've said yes, your Gmail behaves just like any other account in Franz Mail.

Improved

  • Facebook Pages is now Meta Business Messenger. Meta retired the old Pages inbox and moved page messages into Meta Business Suite. The service has been renamed and now opens straight to the Business Suite inbox, so your page conversations are where Meta keeps them. If you already had it added, it carries over — no need to set it up again.

Fixed

  • Signal links your devices again. A change on Signal's side had started rejecting device linking, which left many of you unable to connect or reconnect Signal after updating to 6.4.0. The bundled Signal component is now updated, and Franz keeps it current going forward, so linking works as expected again.
  • The assistant answers again on a lifetime licence with Cloud AI. If you own a lifetime licence and added the Cloud AI option, the assistant and its usage view had stopped responding. They work again.
  • Managing your subscription works however you paid. Opening the billing portal to update payment details or view invoices failed for some customers — including lifetime buyers and anyone who'd only added Cloud AI. Everyone who's paid can now reach it.
  • Beta testers see the release announcement too. If you'd run a pre-release build, the "what's new" announcement for the matching stable version was being skipped. Each release now shows once, whether or not you'd seen a beta of it first.

Under the hood

  • Lighter background syncing. If you don't use workspaces, Franz had been redoing a full sync every cycle for no reason. It now recognises that as your normal setup and skips the needless work.

6.4.0

The headline this release is a first for Franz: it has a calendar. Your days now sit right beside your messages and email — a tidy agenda to scan, or a full Day view with a time grid when you want to see how the hours fall. Add something on the spot, connect your Apple and Outlook calendars (Google is arriving shortly), and Franz quietly reminds you before a meeting, with a one-tap Join when there's a video link. Franz's assistant grew up around all this, too: it can read your week, find you a free slot, move a meeting, prep you for who's in the room — and, when your own inbox comes up short, research someone on the open web. Alongside the calendar you can finally drop a picture straight into an email, and we worked through a long list of everyday friction across Windows, Linux, Signal, and notifications.

New

  • Franz has a calendar. A calendar now lives in Franz's side panel, right next to your services. See what's ahead as a tidy agenda, or switch to a Day view with a proper time grid to watch how the hours line up. Drop in something new with the quick-add box, colour-code by calendar, and tuck the ones you don't need to see behind a per-account filter. Connect your Apple (macOS) and Outlook calendars and your events show up in their own colours — Google Calendar support is arriving shortly.
  • Meeting reminders that follow your lead. Franz now nudges you before a meeting, using the reminders you already set on each event — no fixed, naggy default. Click a reminder to jump straight to the video link, or open the location in Maps when it's somewhere you need to be. Mute reminders for any single calendar, or turn them all off in Settings.
  • Your assistant works with your calendar. Ask Franz's assistant what's on today, when you're next free, or to pencil something in — it reads your agenda, finds open slots that actually fit, and creates, moves, or cancels events for you, always showing you the change before it makes it. It can block time for a todo, or fire off a quick note to everyone in a meeting when you're running late. (Part of the Franz Pro assistant.)
  • Meeting prep, before you walk in. Ask the assistant to get you up to speed on a meeting and it gathers what you already know about the people in the room — quietly, from your own Franz email history, with nothing leaving your device. Need more than your inbox holds? One tap sends Franz to research them on the web, and you can save the whole briefing as a document in your Downloads. (Part of the Franz Pro assistant.)
  • Ask the assistant to research the web. Franz's assistant can now look things up on the open web — a person, a company, a product — and hand back a clear summary with links to its sources, so you can always see where an answer came from. When a question names a specific person, Franz checks with you before anything leaves your device. (Part of the Franz Pro assistant.)
  • Inline images in your emails. Drag an image into the composer or paste one from your clipboard and it embeds right in the message body, where you're writing, rather than landing as a lone attachment. Hold Shift while dropping if you'd rather attach it as a file instead. Images stay put when you save and reopen a draft, and they show up embedded for whoever you send to.

Improved

  • Your email accounts show their faces. The Email Accounts settings pane now displays each connected account's photo alongside a Gmail or Outlook icon, so it's easy to tell them apart at a glance.
  • Clearer sender details when reading email. A message's header now shows the sender's address right next to their name, plus a plain To: line for who it went to — and you can copy any address with a click.
  • "Show in folder" speaks your system's language. The download menu now says Finder on macOS, Explorer on Windows, and Show in Folder on Linux, instead of always saying Finder.
  • Settings is in the menu on Windows and Linux. There's now a Settings entry (Ctrl+,) in the menu, matching what macOS already had.
  • Tidier window controls in the horizontal tab layout. On Windows and Linux, the window buttons now sit flush in the tab bar, with the empty gap that used to sit beside them removed.

Fixed

  • Your notification choices stick now. Turning notifications off for a service used to quietly revert after a restart, or come back on a second device. The setting is saved properly now and stays the way you left it.
  • Signal links your device again. A change on Signal's side had started rejecting device linking; the bundled Signal component is updated, so linking and reconnecting work as expected again.
  • Signal starts on Windows even with a space in your username. On accounts with a path like C:\Users\Jane Doe, Signal could be wrongly reported as broken before it ever launched. It now starts normally.
  • The application menu is reachable on Linux. Linux uses a native window frame with no in-window menu bar, which left the Franz menu unreachable on many desktops. There's now a menu button in the header to open it.
  • No more silent startup crash on Wayland-only Linux. On some Linux sessions Franz would exit a moment after launch with no message. It now falls back to a compatible display mode and starts cleanly.
  • Ctrl+Plus zooms in on Windows. Zoom-in used to fire only if you also held Shift; it now works with the plain Ctrl+Plus you'd expect.
  • A mistyped proxy no longer breaks a service. Typing an invalid value into a service's proxy field used to route all its traffic through a dead proxy and fail every request. Invalid entries are now ignored, and the service stays on a direct connection.
  • Custom service icons stick around. Icons you'd set yourself could disappear after a sync. They're now kept and restored.
  • "Summarize this email" reads the whole message. Asking the assistant to summarize a long open email no longer works from a cut-off copy — it now sees the full message.
  • The workspace switcher no longer wraps in German. Longer labels like "Alle Dienste" stay on one line and truncate cleanly instead of spilling to two.

Under the hood

  • A newer browser engine. Franz moved up to a newer version of its underlying Chromium engine, bringing the latest security and stability fixes to every service you run.

6.3.1

Franz learned to read the room this release, quite literally. If your computer runs in a right-to-left language, Franz now mirrors its whole layout to match, so everything sits where your eyes expect it. We also tracked down two email quirks that chipped away at trust (attachments that slipped off drafts, paragraphs that looked squashed before sending) and put a stop to a startup crash that hit some Windows machines without a word of explanation.

New

  • Franz now follows your system's text direction. Set your computer to a right-to-left language (Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, or Urdu) and the entire app mirrors to match: the sidebar, your services, settings, popups, even popped-out and preview windows all land on the correct side. Writing right-to-left feels natural too. The search field, the email composer, and the assistant now align your text the way it should read, whatever language Franz itself is displayed in.

Improved

  • Unread badges in the horizontal tab bar are smaller and tidier, so they tell you what's waiting without crowding the tab.

Fixed

  • Email drafts keep their attachments. Files you added to a draft could quietly disappear when you reopened it later. They now save with everything else, so your draft is exactly how you left it.
  • What you see in the composer is what they get. Multi-paragraph emails (especially pasted text) looked squashed together while you wrote them, even though recipients saw proper spacing. The composer and Franz's own message view now match the sent mail.
  • Franz no longer crashes silently on some Windows PCs. On certain machines, often ones with integrated AMD graphics, a hardware check could take Franz down a few seconds after launch with no error at all. That check now runs safely on its own, isolated from the rest of the app, and Franz only uses graphics acceleration when it's proven stable on your hardware.

6.3.0

The thing you'll notice the moment you open this release: Franz now speaks French — the whole app, top to bottom — so if French is your language, you can switch to it in Settings and feel at home right away. Around that headliner we tidied up a lot of the small daily friction — dark mode that stuck, email sync that got stuck, popups that didn't size themselves quite right — and gave Signal on Windows the missing piece it needed to connect.

New

  • Franz speaks French. The entire app — menus, settings, the email view, everything — is now available in French. Pick it from the language list in Settings and Franz switches over instantly. (German is fully covered too, including the parts that were still slipping back to English.)
  • A new About page in Settings — with an optional Beta program. App updates now live on their own About page, and from there you can opt in to early Beta builds if you like getting new things first. Beta follows your account across every device you're signed in on, and the page tells you that up front before you flip the switch.
  • See where a link goes before you click it. Hover any link inside a service or an email and Franz shows you its destination in a small preview. Hold ⌘/Ctrl/Shift while clicking to open it the opposite way to your usual setting — system browser or in-app — without changing your preference.

Improved

  • The workspace switcher and Privacy Shield now slide down inside the window instead of opening as separate floating windows. They feel quicker, stay out of your way, and the shield's toggle now plainly says "Block Trackers" so it's obvious what it does.
  • The AI assistant explains itself better. When a request is beyond what your current AI model can handle, you now get a clear, actionable message — and a one-tap way to switch to a more capable option — instead of a vague "something went wrong." Local models are handled more reliably, too.

Fixed

  • Dark mode no longer slips off your services at startup. A timing issue at launch could quietly reset some services (LinkedIn was a common one) back to your system theme even though Franz was set to dark. They now stay the way you set them.
  • Email sync no longer gets stuck. A leftover email account could cause a whole sync to fail and keep retrying. Sync now skips the stray account and keeps everything else flowing.
  • Signal connects on Windows again. Packaged Windows builds were missing a component Signal needs to start up. It's now bundled, so Signal links and runs as expected.
  • Deleting a Signal service on Windows no longer leaves leftover folders behind, and any that piled up before get cleaned out automatically on launch.
  • Search and sign-in popups size themselves correctly. The search box and the basic-auth window were leaving an empty gap below their content — or, in one case, clipping the buttons at the bottom. Both now hug their content exactly.
  • Camera and microphone prompts now show up in the right window when you've popped a service out into its own window.
  • The trial badge now clearly reads when your free trial ends instead of being vague about the date.

6.2.2

Fixed

  • Franz no longer quits unexpectedly on Windows. Franz could crash a few seconds after launch — often while it was quietly syncing email attachments in the background — and disappear without explanation. The cause was the part of Franz that pulls text out of PDF attachments; it now runs safely on its own, isolated from the rest of the app, so a hiccup there can't bring Franz down with it. Startup and attachment sync are stable again.

6.2.1

A maintenance release — there's no new feature to show off this time. What landed is the kind of work you only notice when it stops getting in your way. The headline: Franz on Windows now updates itself properly again — the auto-update was downloading but failing to actually install and relaunch, so it could quietly leave you a version behind. That's fixed. Alongside it, the extra windows Franz opens — external links, the email-preview window, and pop-out service windows — now look and behave the way they should on Windows and Linux.

Fixed

  • Windows updates install and relaunch on their own again. On Windows, Franz would download a new version and then stall at the last step — the installer couldn't replace the running app, so nothing actually updated and Franz didn't come back up. It now hands off cleanly to the installer and relaunches itself, so staying current is automatic the way it's meant to be.
  • The extra windows Franz opens are fixed on Windows and Linux. When Franz pops open a separate window — an external link, the email preview/save window, or a popped-out service — the minimize, maximize, and close buttons were invisible against the light header, and when you could find them they didn't always act on the right window. They're now clearly visible, sit flush in the corner at the full height of the header, and reliably control the window you're actually looking at. The header content no longer starts with a stray gap on Windows or gets pushed off the left edge on Linux, and the three-dot app menu only shows up on the main window, where it belongs.

6.2.0

Every inbox quietly accumulates ghosts — the people you used to talk to all the time, who slipped off your radar without you noticing. This release gives them a name. Ghosts, new in Franz Mail, surfaces the relationships that are cooling off so you can reach back out before they go cold for good — and it's computed entirely on your own machine, so nothing about who you talk to ever leaves your device. Around it: you can now bring your own Google Gemini key to the Pro AI assistant, Cmd+K finally searches inside your WhatsApp messages instead of just chat names, overdue todos now count toward your dock badge so nothing slips, and a run of fixes lands on draft handling, smoother reply sending, and pop-up windows on Windows and Linux.

New

  • Ghosts — see the relationships that are fading. Franz Mail now has a dedicated Ghosts view that gathers the people you used to be in regular contact with and have quietly drifted from, grouped by how cool things have gotten (Cooling, Cold, Frozen) and sorted by how warm the relationship once was. Each one is a single click away from a pre-addressed reply. It's all worked out on your device from your own mail history — the warmth math never goes to a server. The free plan shows your three warmest quiet relationships; Franz Pro opens up the full list. And when you start writing to someone you haven't spoken to in a while, a gentle note in the composer lets you know — no nagging, just a heads-up.
  • Bring your own Google Gemini key. Franz Pro's AI assistant now supports Google Gemini alongside the existing providers — drop in your own Gemini API key in Settings and the assistant runs on it, with full support for the assistant's multi-step actions.
  • Search inside your WhatsApp messages. Cmd+K now reaches into the text of your WhatsApp messages, not just conversation names. Find that thing someone mentioned, and the result jumps you straight to that message in the thread. Group chats are searched too.
  • Overdue todos in the dock badge. Todos that are overdue now add to the count on your dock and tray icon, right alongside unread services — so an overdue task is visible without opening Franz. Tick one off and the badge updates immediately.

Improved

  • Your draft is waiting where you left it. Reopen an email thread that has a saved draft and Franz now drops you straight into the composer with that draft loaded, instead of making you find and click Reply again. A Forward chip stays handy in case you meant to forward instead.
  • Search every email from one sender. The sender details panel in Franz Mail gets a Search button that pulls up every email from that address in one go.
  • Sending a reply is smoother. The moment between hitting send and seeing your message land in the thread used to flicker and briefly go blank. The reply now stays visible the whole way through, with no jump.
  • App menu items reflect what you can actually do. Entries like Focus Search Bar, Find Next/Previous, and Toggle AI Assistant are now active only when they apply to what's on screen, instead of being there but doing nothing.

Fixed

  • Avatars and custom service icons sync again. Setting a profile picture or a custom icon for a service was silently failing to save — it never made it to your other machines or to your account on the web. Uploads work again, so your avatar and icons follow you everywhere.
  • Cmd+K stopped hijacking other services' shortcuts. A recent change meant to protect WhatsApp's search was over-broad and broke the native Cmd+K quick-switchers in Slack, Discord, and Teams. Cmd+K now behaves normally in those services again.
  • Slack huddles and similar pop-ups open again. Some services open a blank pop-up window and then fill it in — Slack huddles, certain sign-in and feature dialogs. Those were being blocked and would fail with an error; they open correctly now.
  • Google Calendar sign-in stays put. Signing in to the Google Calendar service used to bounce you to a separate browser window and leave the calendar stuck on its marketing page. Sign-in now stays inside the service where it belongs.
  • Generated-draft paragraphs survive sending. Drafts written with the AI generate shortcut looked right in the editor but arrived in the recipient's inbox with the paragraph breaks flattened into one run-on block. Your paragraphs now make it through intact.
  • Pop-up windows look right on Windows and Linux. The Basic Auth, Download Manager, and screen-share windows no longer show stray app title-bar buttons, the corners are now drawn cleanly by the OS instead of doubling up on Windows 11, and the Basic Auth dialog sizes itself to its content instead of clipping the buttons at the bottom.
  • Search box sizing and shortcut hints. The Cmd+K search pop-up now sizes itself to its results instead of clipping the last row or showing up too narrow on Windows, and the keyboard hint correctly reads "Ctrl+K" on Windows and Linux rather than the macOS ⌘ symbol.

6.1.0

This release brings Franz 6 finally to Linux. AppImage, .deb, and snap packages on x64 and arm64, with native window decorations, system tray, autostart, live OS theme sync, and proper franz:// and mailto: handling — the goal was for Linux to feel native rather than ported. Alongside that, a new "Mute all services" button silences every tab in one click (with a per-service mute toggle in each tab's header), email search now reads the message body and not just the subject, and a stack of cross-app fixes lands on frozen email folders, smart-reply line breaks, and WhatsApp typing lag.

New

  • Linux builds, finally. Franz 6 now ships natively on Linux as AppImage, .deb, and snap packages, for both x64 and arm64. Your desktop environment draws the window decorations; the tray icon registers on KDE (and on GNOME with the AppIndicator extension installed); the autostart toggle in Settings writes a proper XDG entry; the OS dark/light theme is followed live; and franz:// links plus the optional default-mail-client handler register the same way they do on macOS and Windows. Signal device-linking works on Linux arm64 too.
  • Mute everything, or just one. A new "Mute all services" button at the bottom of the sidebar silences every service in one click. Each service tab also gets its own mute icon in the header, so you can quiet one without touching the rest. Both settings persist across restarts; turning global mute off restores your per-service preferences exactly as you left them.

Improved

  • Email search reads the message body. Searching for a word that only appears inside an email — not in the subject or sender name — now finds it. The index rebuilds automatically the first time you open a folder after upgrading.
  • Smart reply keeps your paragraph breaks. Inserting a smart-reply suggestion into the composer used to flatten line breaks into spaces; the paragraph structure now survives all the way into the sent message.
  • Thread reader opens at the latest message. Opening a long thread no longer scrolls you to the top — it lands at the most recent reply, with the sender row visible instead of tucked under the sticky header.
  • WhatsApp typing is snappier. A background poll and an over-broad DOM observer were stealing main-thread time on the WhatsApp tab; both are gone, so the typing cursor keeps up with you.
  • WhatsApp unread badge counts every conversation. Group chats no longer get demoted to a separate indirect dot — every unread chat, 1:1 or group, contributes to the same direct count the way unread mail does.
  • Folder unread badges match the folder. The "N new" badge was counting messages that lived in both a folder and Trash or Spam, so it disagreed with what the folder actually showed. The badge now uses the same filter the folder list does, so the two numbers agree.
  • Browser and custom-website services contribute to the dock and tray. Self-reporting services published via the new in-page unread schema now count toward the macOS dock badge and the system tray badge alongside everything else.

Fixed

  • Post-send failures surface as toasts. The 10-second undo-send countdown used to silently swallow any error that fired after the countdown ended — the draft just reappeared with no feedback. You now see a toast explaining what happened (rate-limit, network error, etc.) when a send fails.
  • Email folders freezing on open. Opening folders with very few items — Drafts, low-volume labels — could lock the email tab with one CPU core pinned and the UI frozen but still scrollable. The folder load no longer spins on itself.
  • Avatar upload in Settings → Account. Applying a custom avatar after cropping was throwing "An object could not be cloned" and silently failing. It saves now.
  • Failed and cancelled downloads have a context menu. Right-clicking a download that errored or was cancelled used to do nothing; the menu now opens with "Remove from List".
  • Download Manager popup double-border on macOS. The popup was painting its own rounded border on top of the OS window frame, producing a visible double-edge. Cleaned up.

6.0.4

The way Franz Assistant answers catch-me-up questions got most of the work this release — the idea is to have the assistant do more of the reading for you so you can scan and act. Ask "what do I need to do today?" and you get a structured briefing instead of long prose — emails grouped by priority with a one-line summary on each card and Reply, Snooze, Archive, or Remind one tap away; todos grouped by what's overdue or due today, with a checkbox to tick off right there. Elsewhere, a new Settings → Network toggle helps Franz get past managed corporate networks that were blocking Gmail and WhatsApp, inline images finally display inside HTML emails, and the Help menu has a new entry that opens an in-app summary of what changed in the version you're on.

New

  • Structured catch-me-up briefings. Catch-me-up in Franz Assistant now returns structured cards instead of long prose. Emails group by priority — Urgent / Important / Informational — with a short summary on each card; todos group by Overdue / Due today / Upcoming with a checkbox you can tick off right there. Hover any email card for Reply, Snooze, Archive, or Remind. Up to three follow-up actions for the whole answer sit in a row of pills beneath the cards.
  • Corporate network compatibility. Settings → Network has a new toggle for managed corporate networks where Gmail, WhatsApp, or other Services wouldn't load. When a service fails to load with a network error, the recovery panel also offers "Enable corporate network compatibility" as a secondary action so you can fix it from the error screen.

Improved

  • Stronger passwords for new accounts. New signups and password changes now require at least 12 characters. Existing accounts keep working — only newly-set passwords are subject to the new minimum.
  • Quieter background activity when your session expires. When the app's sign-in expires, background syncing and entitlement checks pause instead of repeatedly retrying with a stale token. They resume automatically once you sign in again.

Fixed

  • Inline images in HTML email now display in the message body. Images embedded directly into the message (rather than fetched from a remote server) were being dropped silently. The "Images are hidden for privacy" banner still appears for messages that try to load images from a remote server.
  • A pass over catch-me-up rough edges. The spinner no longer hangs above the answer when the model's output is slightly malformed, the structured cards reliably render instead of occasionally falling back to a plain text chip, the redundant prose recap that used to follow the cards is gone, and the raw "Looking up todos / Checking emails" intermediate cards are hidden from the start instead of flashing for a few seconds before collapsing.
  • The page header search bar resizes with the window instead of staying at full width on narrow windows and squeezing the buttons on either side.

6.0.3

Mostly an unblocking release. Gmail sign-in had quietly stopped working for consumer accounts. Corporate networks running authenticated proxies were swallowing every outbound request Franz made. Both are sorted. Alongside that, Mattermost and Rocket.Chat get back their Hosted / Self-hosted choice, Signal opens cleanly on a fresh install, and a handful of smaller papercuts around email attachments, service deletion, and the session-expired banner are gone.

New

  • Hosted or Self-hosted for Mattermost and Rocket.Chat. Adding or editing one of these services now shows a Hosted / Self-hosted toggle. Hosted points at the official cloud and works on any plan; Self-hosted lets you point Franz at your own server and is available with Franz Pro. Existing services keep working as before — if you're on Free with a self-hosted setup, you'll see an upgrade card on the service until you upgrade to Pro or switch to a hosted instance.

Improved

  • Discord unread and mention counts stay accurate as Discord keeps redesigning its UI. The number on the sidebar matches what's actually waiting for you.
  • Email thread attachments in the list and collapsed view now include attachments from every message in the thread — a paperclip on an older reply is no longer hidden behind a newer text-only one.
  • The "X new" pill on email folders matches what's actually in the folder. Archived, trashed, and snoozed mail were being counted, which produced "N new" badges over folders that showed nothing fresh.
  • Login, register, and password-reset rate limits are more generous. Households and corporate networks — anyone behind a shared internet connection — were sometimes hitting rate-limit walls made up of strangers' traffic. Successful sign-ins also no longer count against the login budget.
  • The unread badge font shrinks when the count reaches "99+" so the number fits inside the circle instead of overflowing it.
  • Service icons in tight layouts hold their size instead of being squeezed by neighbouring elements.
  • Pressing Enter inside a service-settings field saves the form, instead of accidentally triggering the upgrade modal.

Fixed

  • Gmail sign-in for consumer accounts is working again.
  • Sign-in behind authenticated corporate proxies goes through cleanly now, including networks that require proxy authentication, certificates installed by your IT team, or Windows-domain credentials.
  • Signal failing to load on a fresh install with a "no such table" error. Signal now opens cleanly the first time you launch it.
  • Deleting a service didn't unlock the rest. If you were over your service limit and then removed one, the others stayed locked. They unlock as soon as the count drops back within your plan.
  • Trial accounts that should have expired could stay entitled indefinitely when a renewal signal never arrived. Trials now end on the date they were supposed to.
  • Cancelled paid subscriptions that were still inside their billing period were being silently downgraded to Free. They now keep their plan until the period actually ends.
  • The session-expired banner appears immediately the first time your sign-in is rejected, rather than around thirty minutes later, and no longer leaves the app stuck in a half-signed-in state with no clear way out.
  • The unverified-email banner dismisses when you verify in the browser and switch back to Franz. Previously the app didn't notice the window had regained focus, so the banner lingered until you restarted.

6.0.2

This release closed a few things you'd likely noticed missing like Email accounts now sync across your machines. Add Gmail on your desktop and the account shows up on your laptop, ready to sign in.

New

  • Email accounts sync across devices. Add a Gmail or Outlook account on one machine and it appears on every other machine you're signed in to. Synced accounts arrive with a Reconnect button — one sign-in per device and mail starts flowing in. If an account is removed on one device, the others ask you to confirm before clearing it locally, so a sync glitch can't quietly wipe a mailbox out from under you.
  • Unverified-email banner. If you haven't confirmed the email on your Franz account yet, you'll see an amber banner with a one-click Resend confirmation button. The Franz Assistant stays unavailable until confirmation lands, and shows a clear card explaining why with the same Resend in place.

Improved

  • Cross-machine setup. Copying your Franz data to a new computer no longer leaves the app in a half-signed-in state where nothing worked but nothing looked broken either. The app now detects an unreadable session cleanly and asks you to sign in again.

Fixed

  • Email search filter chips stay active when you clear the text query, instead of dropping you back to the Priority Inbox. Marking a search result as read also updates the row in place, instead of leaving it bold until you re-run the search.
  • Search typeahead finds Signal contacts and WhatsApp chat partners again. Both had quietly stopped returning results.
  • Dark mode contrast on email-account rows that need reconnecting — the account name is legible again against the amber background.
  • Banner buttons on Windows no longer slide under the minimize / maximize / close controls in the top-right corner. The fix that v6.0.1 applied to the unverified-email banner now covers every top-edge banner in the app.
  • Settings · AI providers: removed a duplicate "Pro" label on the provider card — the tier badge already says it.

6.0.1

A small follow-up to v6.0.0 that cleans up three rough edges only the broader rollout could surface: sign-in stalling at the Cloudflare challenge on Windows after a fresh install, the new app-menu button crowding the page header on Windows, and freshly arrived emails staying bold in the global inbox until you switched folders.

Fixed

  • Sign-in on Windows after a cold start no longer hangs at the Cloudflare challenge. The challenge reuses warmed-up state between attempts now, so a second try settles in a handful of seconds instead of repeating the same long wait, and a real error surfaces when something actually goes wrong instead of a silent timeout.
  • Window controls on Windows — the new app-menu button stops overlapping the icons in the page header next to it, its glyph is the vertical ellipsis it should have been, and the stray divider line beside it is gone.
  • Newly arrived emails in the global inbox flip from bold to read the moment you open them, instead of staying bold until you click into a folder.

6.0.0

Franz turns ten this year, and Franz 6 is the release that marks it. One person at the keyboard, the same one who shipped the first prototype on a weekend in 2016, with everything ten years of stubborn work taught us built into a single version. This is the one I am proudest of. If you have used Franz at any point in the last decade, you are the reason it is still here. Thank you.

6.0.0-beta.3

This beta closes a long-standing gap: Franz finally tells you what changed. A new Release notes item in the Help menu and a matching link in Settings → Update both open this changelog scrolled straight to the version you're running. The next time Franz prompts you to install an update, the "what's new" dialog shows real notes written for you instead of a commit log. The integrations behind Slack, Discord, WhatsApp and the rest also refresh on their own at startup now, so fixes for upstream service changes reach you without waiting for a Franz release. Underneath that headline sits a long pass of polish: Signal voice notes that play natively on every phone, a Drafts folder that finally shows your drafts the moment you create them, and a long list of small fixes across email, onboarding, and WhatsApp that had been quietly nicking at the day.

New

  • Release notes inside Franz — a Release notes item in the Help menu and a matching link in Settings → Update, both opening the changelog scrolled to the version you're running.
  • Update dialogs that tell you what changed — when Franz offers to install an update, the notes are written for you, not pulled from a commit log.
  • Service updates that arrive on their own — the bits that integrate Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, and the rest now refresh at startup, so fixes for upstream service changes reach you without waiting for a Franz release.

Improved

  • Signal voice notes send in a format every Signal client decodes natively. Your iPhone and Android contacts hear them in the chat instead of getting a generic file attachment.
  • Signal stays connected through the cold-start hiccups (slow disks, big sync backlogs) that used to flicker the linked-device status to "unlinked" half a dozen times in a row before settling.
  • Email Drafts show drafts you started from "New email" or "Reply" the moment you start them. Clicking a draft row opens it in the composer where you left off, with attachments and signatures intact, instead of opening the read view and silently spawning duplicates.
  • Email composer polish — emoji typeahead anchors to your caret instead of the top of the window, replies stop seeding your own address into the recipient list, and quoting wraps just the line you selected.
  • Settings search no longer traps you — pressing Escape while typing in a settings search clears the search instead of closing the whole Settings window.

Fixed

  • Copy buttons inside services that had been silently doing nothing now actually copy. If "Copy" in Slack, Notion, or any other service had stopped working for you, it works again.
  • Onboarding no longer leaves you on a blank screen after signup. The first sidebar service activates automatically once setup completes.
  • Open email threads refresh when new messages arrive, instead of staying frozen on whatever was there when you clicked in.
  • Email search filters work again. Searches that relied on priority, smart tags, or folder scopes had been quietly returning nothing.
  • Long URLs and tokens in emails no longer push the message body off-screen.
  • Undo send restores attachments along with the message, so you don't have to re-attach files after fixing a typo.
  • WhatsApp contact suggestions stop showing the same name twice on the same row.
  • Email sender intelligence — the "Communication" card on a sender's profile now reflects how often you actually reply to them, instead of reading 0% for everyone.

6.0.0-beta.2

The release where privacy stopped being a promise and became a switch. Franz has always said that you shouldn't have to trade focus for surveillance — this beta makes that a setting you can see and control. A new Privacy & Analytics section in Settings lays out exactly what Franz collects, why, and how to turn it off, with anonymous product analytics and crash reports both explicitly opt-in. Beyond that, the polish updates only reveal once people start actually updating: auto-updates that finish cleanly on macOS, Windows installers that stop crying wolf, and a tray icon that respects your system theme.

New

  • Privacy & Analytics settings — a single place to see what's collected and turn it off. Product analytics and crash reports are both opt-in, both anonymous, and both listed field-by-field in a disclosure panel. Whatever leaves your device is stripped of email addresses, tokens, and file paths before it goes anywhere.
  • "Reset service data" action in Settings — when a service gets stuck (a logged-out Slack, a frozen WhatsApp), reset it without reinstalling the service.

Improved

  • macOS tray icon follows the system theme instead of drawing a dark icon on a light menu bar.
  • Settings update section now shows a colour-coded status badge right in the navigation so you can see at a glance whether Franz is up to date.

Fixed

  • Auto-updates on macOS finish properly on beta channels instead of hanging at "update downloaded" and making you relaunch by hand.
  • Windows installer no longer throws a false "Franz is already running" error during an upgrade.
  • Cross-device sync reconciles sidebar drift instead of overwriting what you just changed on the other machine.
  • Priority inbox deduplicates threads and clears stale "in the loop" entries that were sticking around.

6.0.0-beta.1

Ten years in, Franz 6 lays the foundation for the next ten. Underneath it's a full rewrite onto a modern runtime — on screen it's the Franz you already know, sharper around the edges. A Franz Cloud onboarding that finally feels right, Windows Hello unlock that shows up before you set a PIN instead of after, and a long list of the small fixes that accumulated over time and needed a release to call home. The first beta's job is simple: everything that worked before still works, only better.

New

  • Franz Cloud onboarding in-app — sign up, confirm consent, and reset your password without leaving the app.
  • Quit Franz from the Windows taskbar — right-click the Franz icon and quit directly, without opening a window.

Improved

  • Service and workspace forms now behave the way you'd expect — hit Enter to submit, screen readers read them correctly, and errors surface consistently.
  • Windows Hello settings stay visible whenever a Hello provider is available on your machine, so you can find the biometric unlock option even before setting your PIN.
  • Priority inbox sorts newest-first and regenerates the priority briefing without carrying over messages you already deleted.
  • Trial and upgrade modals no longer stack on top of each other mid-upgrade.

Fixed

  • Orphaned tabs from removed services are cleaned up at startup, so tab order stays stable across restarts.
  • Cross-device sync preserves changes you made offline instead of dropping them when a full sync runs.
  • Deleting a message, thread, or service sticks across your other devices instead of reappearing after the next sync.
  • Gravatar avatars stay visible after the app remounts from cache instead of flickering back to generic initials.
  • Saving an email as a file works from the preview window again — Cmd+S was being swallowed before.
  • Email composer — a whole pass through the reply experience: signatures route correctly, line breaks render as they should, draft restores stop duplicating content, the slash menu stops eating the first character you type, and the Manage Signatures deep link actually goes there.
  • Attachments and links inside the file viewer open in your system browser instead of stealing focus back into the viewer.
  • "Continue with Free" on the trial-ended modal now closes the modal instead of leaving it hanging.
  • Trial expiry registers immediately after a restart instead of needing a second relaunch.
  • Windows notification toasts are no longer hidden behind the window controls in the top-right corner.
  • Franz installer on Windows stops claiming Franz is running during an upgrade when it isn't.

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