isaachinman

It's very sad indeed that email ever allowed HTML. The world would be a better place if email was only plaintext

Absolutely nothing. I have active subscriptions for both. Claude is better at FE stuff. Codex is better at actual programming.

I would strongly advise using Codex for a project like that

I can confirm that basically all third-party apps have to handle this "Gmail weirdness" and come up with an abstraction layer to make Gmail IMAP accounts play nicely with "regular" IMAP accounts.

I don't mean to be contrarian, but this is completely false.

IMAP _seems_ to be a straightforward (but nasty and stateful) protocol, until you find out that every major provider ignores RFCs and does things slightly differently.

It's a hellscape.

The deeper issue here isn't about Antigravity specifically. It's that email is most people's de facto digital identity. Every password reset, every 2FA recovery, every account verification flows through it. When a company can revoke access to your email over a ToS violation in a completely unrelated product, the stakes are disproportionate.

The fix is surprisingly straightforward: own your domain, use a provider that focuses on email, and keep your client separate from your provider. Standard IMAP means all three pieces are interchangeable. If one fails, swap it out.

(I work on Marco [0], an IMAP email client. The number of people looking to decouple from Gmail/Google has been growing steadily, definitely a current trend.)

[0] https://marcoapp.io

Yeah, Gmail's "implementation" of IMAP is essentially unusable. They basically force consumers to use their proprietary API.

We're building a cross-provider, cross-platform email client, and literally had to build special cases for all Gmail actions:

https://marcoapp.io

The upside is that it's fast... The downside is that it's NOT IMAP!

As far as I know, Spotify still doesn't have lossless

An LLM with a strongly-typed language and capable dev would produce better results. If you don't believe me, have a look through the codebase.

It's slow, unreliable, very feature-limited, and extremely expensive for what it is.

Especially these days, you could vibe-code something an order of magnitude better within a day or two and not be locked into a single author's rat's nest of code.

Yes indeed. The criticism is well-founded and comes from months of experience with the product.

For anyone reading, I would highly recommend steering clear of EmailEngine.

On the flip side, our iOS app which _uses the Gmail API_ and also supports raw IMAP is ~14MB:

https://marcoapp.io

Interesting!

Just curious, if this is a completely greenfield project, why IMAP instead of JMAP?

This is coming from someone who works with IMAP on a daily basis and has rightfully grown a disdain for it.

Check us out, we support Outlook and any other possible IMAP/OAuth provider. Cross platform, offline-first, and instant syncing:

https://marcoapp.io

So... An iframe?

InstantDB is a far better choice

How or why is this better than InsantDB?

> The only thing I'm missing is on iOS. Email on my phone is a literal joke.

I hear you on that. I'd even go a step further and say Apple Mail on desktop is a joke too.

That led me to build Marco, an IMAP‑primitive, offline‑first, cross‑platform email client for web, iOS, and macOS:

https://marcoapp.io

No love for Railway? They're running their own metal and are a fantastic team.

Check out our product. I'm also a "leave everything in inbox" kind of user.

I've got 100k+ threads in my inbox and full text search is single digit ms.

IMAP search itself is unusable. SQLite on the other hand...

https://marcoapp.io

A rules engine is our primary next focus at Marco. What you're describing is exactly the way email should work.

https://marcoapp.io

Yeah. Try it on web.

And how up-to-date is that experience? Have you deployed Flutter to web?

I've worked and researched heavily in this field. If you want to write one codebase that hits all platforms with _actual native performance_ your only option at the moment is RN/Expo.

This is laughably wrong. Expo exported to a web target is the same or better than Capacitor.

For anyone looking for a cross-platform, local-first IMAP email client that "just works" and doesn't jam AI down your throat, check us out:

https://marcoapp.io

I strongly agree with this, just couldn't be bothered to type it out. I've tried it both ways many times, and you are indeed right on the money.

Well Jobs is long gone. Apple Mail seems like it hasn't been touched much since his days.

I've written about my experience and motivations here:

https://marcoapp.io/blog/marco-an-introduction

Gmail does indeed _intentionally_ provide poor IMAP service. But the long and short of it is that Apple Mail simply isn't a first-class product. It's an afterthought.

Gilded tower? Are we living in separate universes?

Shameless plug for a client with true offline-first IMAP support:

https://marcoapp.io