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Show HN: BAREmail – minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi (github.com)

44 points by Virgo_matt ↗ HN
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.

14 comments

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tranchms
Fantastic lite weight client. Perfect for travel and spotty reception/ low bandwidth. Cool interface too.
kevin_thibedeau
In a better world we'd still be using a common protocol to interact with mail submission/delivery agents.
shhsshs
I would love one of these for Google Chat. It feels like it's been getting slower and slower these past few years.
rep_lodsb
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.
sixtyj
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.

ghost-of-dmr
You can't just configure mutt (or alpine, et al.) to use Gmail?
tonymet
Lovely app and it’s a shame that Google hasn’t created a better solution for oauth CLI apps.
boplicity
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.
jsbsbdbd
I don't get it, why not use _any_ client with IMAP instead?
cadamsdotcom
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.

tombelieber
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.
loremm
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