Dedicated mail clients have existed for a lot longer than GMail has, work with any service using the POP3 or IMAP protocol, and don't run inside a web browser.
but i'm assuming this is a client for their webmail
Show HN: BAREmail – minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi
21–30 of 49 posts
Re: Show HN: BAREmail – minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi
#22If you’re in a position of considering alternatives, I find Fastmail to be fully featured, support saving the key stuff offline, and most importantly FAST!
No ”try our AI for free!” nudges or “smart features” that you need to go through and decide whether to disable.. which is a feature these days.
Re: Show HN: BAREmail – minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi
#23If you’re in a position of considering alternatives, I find Fastmail to be fully featured, support saving the key stuff offline, and most importantly FAST! No ”try our AI for free!” nudges or “smart features” that you need to go through and decide whether to disable.. which is a feature these days.
appreciate the suggestion, but I like my gmail account! I just want a fast, stripped down interface. and BAREmail is free, doesn't need a backend, and open source. looks like Fastmail is paid only?
Re: Show HN: BAREmail – minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi
#24I don't get it, why not use _any_ client with IMAP instead?
Because IMAP sucks on bad network links. It involves a huge number of round trips to synchronize the state, and re-establishing the shared state when the connection is interrupted takes forever. A lot of online commenters refuse to believe this but the standard Gmail interface is highly optimized to cope with bad network connections, hide latency, and recover from interruptions. If you have the code assets and initia…
yea it's fair that you can just use IMAP and sync before your trip then send after.
but I was on a flight, didn't have Gmail or Superhuman cached and could not get either to even load. I do suspect that if it were already loaded, Gmail probably would have functioned decently well.
still Gmail and Superhuman just seem...bloated. kinda cool to just have a simple, open source interface for the Gmail REST API.
Re: Show HN: BAREmail – minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi
#25Lovely app and it’s a shame that Google hasn’t created a better solution for oauth CLI apps.
thanks! totally agree on the the Google OAuth...it's not the end of the world, but certainly not the most user friendly to need to create a GCP project and create an OAuth client just to get your own Gmail API access!
Re: Show HN: BAREmail – minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi
#26I really want a fast multi-email client that can easily show full contact history in a sidebar. Any options out there? Em Client does this, but it is buggy and/or slow. No such Thunderbird plugins exist, either.
Yes, Marco does this (disclaimer, I'm the solo founder):
Contacts populate alongside email threads in search results. If you click on a contact, it will take you to a dedicated contact screen with every thread you've ever had with that contact, as well as every attachment they've ever sent you.
Re: Show HN: BAREmail – minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi
#27I really want a fast multi-email client that can easily show full contact history in a sidebar. Any options out there? Em Client does this, but it is buggy and/or slow. No such Thunderbird plugins exist, either.
Yes, Marco does this (disclaimer, I'm the solo founder): https://marcoapp.io Contacts populate alongside email threads in search results. If you click on a contact, it will take you to a dedicated contact screen with every thread you've ever had with that contact, as well as every attachment they've ever sent you.
Marco looks really nice! would you consider open sourcing it?
Re: Show HN: BAREmail – minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Email is not a common protocol?
Email isn't a protocol. SMTP, POP, IMAP, JMAP are protocols. GMail requires you to enable IMAP/POP to use it and uses proprietary auth protocol or use unsafe application passwords. GMail IMAP also has a bunch of IMAP extensions that are unique to GMail. Point is - primary interface to GMail is REST API that is (again) unique to GMail.
Fastmail was developing JMAP for a while, it's not gotten a lot of uptake (mostly because Fastmails primary mail partners like Gmail, AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail are all 20 year old legacy dot com companies...did Microsoft spend all day trying to get Fairchild Semiconductor to play nice with them? No, they did a worse is better DOS and the rest is history).
But email is a least common denominator, and like how plan9 failed to take over from unix bc unix inertia, JMAP or deltachat IM over email won't take over bc of network effect inertia, I suspect.
Re: Show HN: BAREmail – minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi
#29I really want a fast multi-email client that can easily show full contact history in a sidebar. Any options out there? Em Client does this, but it is buggy and/or slow. No such Thunderbird plugins exist, either.
Yes, Marco does this (disclaimer, I'm the solo founder): https://marcoapp.io Contacts populate alongside email threads in search results. If you click on a contact, it will take you to a dedicated contact screen with every thread you've ever had with that contact, as well as every attachment they've ever sent you.
Not sure if that's intentional, but the entire landing page gets replaced with an error if WebGL is not available:
> Something went wrong!
> Error creating WebGL context.
Re: Show HN: BAREmail – minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi
#30This is the kind of app idea that immediately makes sense if you’ve ever had to do email on trash internet. Optimizing for bad Wi-Fi is way more useful than chasing another layer of polish.