Neil Jhaveri

Neil Jhaveri is an American software engineer and founder best known for Mimestream, a native macOS email client built specifically for Gmail. Before going independent he spent seven and a half years at Apple as a software engineer and engineering manager, leading teams that worked on Mail and Notes.

Jhaveri left Apple in 2017 as engineering manager of the Mail team. Convinced that Gmail users on the Mac were stuck between a browser tab and generic IMAP clients, he founded Mimestream in 2019 and built it as a fully native Mac app that talks to Gmail through the Gmail API rather than IMAP. That lets it support Gmail features such as labels, categories, filters and aliases while looking and feeling like a first-party Apple app.

The first version appeared in November 2019, and a free public beta opened in the fall of 2020. Mimestream stayed in beta for nearly three years, shipping more than 220 updates while over 167,000 people tried it. Version 1.0 launched on May 22, 2023 as a subscription app at $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year, and Jhaveri appeared on The Talk Show and later on Mac Power Users to discuss native Mac development.

The company remains small and bootstrapped: a fully remote team of five that has raised no outside funding, according to its own site. Recent releases added Apple Intelligence Writing Tools, Liquid Glass design updates and private push notifications. In July 2026 Mimestream opened TestFlight access to its long-awaited iPhone and iPad app for eligible customers.

Jhaveri is a notable example of a big-company platform engineer turning deep domain expertise into an indie product, proving that a focused native app can win paying users in a category dominated by free clients from Google, Apple and Microsoft.