alt Hacker NewsShow HN: BAREmail ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ – minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi
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.
Comments
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.
I don't get it, why not use _any_ client with IMAP instead?
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.
You can't just configure mutt (or alpine, et al.) to use Gmail?
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.
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.
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.