I would normally agree with you but I can actually see the point of Electron for email because you'd need a HTML renderer anyway to display emails (assuming you want the ability to view HTML emails, if not then you're better off with a console client and save yourself even more RAM :p)

Plus Gmail and a few others big names in webmail require a HTTP client for authentication if you want to use their proprietary sync (granted there's also POP3 and IMAP. But while IMAP is good in a number of ways it's still far from perfect).