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Show HN: BAREmail – minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi

github.com

44 pointsVirgo_matt44 comments

I've been frustrated one too many times by terrible airplane wifi and not being able to load Gmail or Superhuman when all I want to do is get a few simple text-only emails out the door.

These clients have become pretty bloated with the assumption you've always got great bandwidth.

So I vibe coded BAREMAIL. It's open source, has no backend, and you can just set it up for yourself. Takes ~3 mins to setup API access via Google Cloud Platform (thanks for making this not super easy Google!)

I tried to maintain nice design and some important keyboard shortcuts without getting to overBEARing.

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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.

I recall we could dial up a super slow connection over telephone lines, get all our mails into such client in less than 4 minutes over said slow line, just to dial off again.¹ Afterwards we would read all our mails offline with all the time in the world, carefully crafting replies and put those into an "Outgoing" folder for the next time we could dial up a connection again (usually the next day). :)

¹) back then you paid Internet by the minute, or in case of the Deutsche Telekom it was a 4 minute tact in the evening, so you had to wait until after 21:00 to get the cheaper prices.

That worked because while the link may have been slow, it was circuit-switched and generally provided the 2400 bits. "Bad wifi" is unbelievably bad compared to an old dial-up link. It's so much worse than you're imagining.

but i'm assuming this is a client for their webmail

I 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 initial state cached in your browser, it behaves very well under bad network conditions.

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.

If 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?

I 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?

Yes, absolutely. If it would give users more confidence, I'd be happy to.

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.

Not intentional! Thank you for pointing that out. I'll get a fallback in place within the next 24 hours.

Not bad! If I may, the onboarding monthly price is too expensive and I feel you'd have more customers if you show directly a cheap yearly price instead of monthly, my reasoning is that when it comes to emails, people have a bad feeling about anything that doesn't last.

Fair enough, I've recently had similar thoughts about pricing. Will adjust soon. Please (extended to anyone reading this) ping me directly for a few months free.

That looks nice! I do have to say, though, that having the contact history automatically visible in a sidebar is incredibly useful. I would consider adding it as an option to your app. Having it available at a glance, versus having to click through to a different page, makes a huge difference. Em Client also lets me hover over a message in this sidebar to pop-up a small version of it, so I can see just what it said. It's very useful when writing someone to be sure what you've recently (or distantly) said to them. Removing steps to getting this information is vital.

Great feature request. Will put it on the roadmap immediately.

That's great!

Any chance I can pay for a license that includes one year of updates, as opposed to just doing a monthly subscription?

Yes, we have an annual price of $40.

You can't just configure mutt (or alpine, et al.) to use Gmail?

I made a version of this also bare gmail API -- not that I can't use imap but I often have emails related to tasks I want to keep open. But if I have many GMail tabs open, it kills my ram.

I also habitually want to open a new GMail tab to check for new email, but waiting for the heavy webapp to load takes forever. So a simple client-side only app which calls the gmail api for the top 20 emails and allows to search (so find the email and then leave that tab open) works great

also the nice thing about making personal apps is I can make it entirely keyboard shortcut oriented and harcode the vimium like navigation (f, then modals pop up, then click to go to that email). I got the loading down time to feel instant

Exactly! Love it! Is yours on GitHub? Would love to check it out

Not yet I'll post later, need to make sure I didn't hard code anything

I need to talk to claude and read the oauth docs, but when I kept it entirely client side, I had to reauth/re login with gmail every ~ hour. Did you run into that?

I feel like I ran into this in the past and need to have my server renew the token? Or use the service worker? I'll read your code to see how you did it

yea I didn't read it super closely, but I think setting it up as a test user keeps the oauth token for ~7 days. let me know what you find!

This 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.

thank you! honestly gmail, superhuman, etc. should all just have "bad wifi mode" but until they do, might as well vibe code an open source alternative!

Gmail used to have a lightweight fallback but they shut it down relatively recently (couple of years I think).

Yea I saw some Reddit threads about that…which was the final straw to just build it

You can use thunderbird or any other desktop mail software for connecting to gmail.

And then just use gmail as smtp for outgoing mails and imap or pop3 for incoming mails.

I would love one of these for Google Chat. It feels like it's been getting slower and slower these past few years.

In a better world we'd still be using a common protocol to interact with mail submission/delivery agents.

Email is not a common protocol?

Random web apps are not. Imap pop and smtp don't sanely support mfa, so the insurance industry is slowly killing them off

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.

> mostly because Fastmails primary mail partners like Gmail, AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail are all 20 year old legacy dot com companies

Pretty sure it's because MS wants you to use Outlook New (New) New and Google wants you to use their web interface. Nothing to with them being old, but everything to do with owning as much of your data as possible and have as many opportunities to show you ads as possible.

Fantastic lite weight client. Perfect for travel and spotty reception/ low bandwidth. Cool interface too.

Lovely 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!

I agree. I’ve made a few myself and I just wish they would make cli’s more user friendly.

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