[HN Gopher] Show HN: BAREmail ?**? - minimalist Gmail client for...
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Show HN: BAREmail ?**? - 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.
Author : Virgo_matt
Score : 42 points
Date : 2026-04-08 14:44 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| rallypi wrote:
| [removed]
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| I fear for all the bots that aren't as obvious as this one
| tranchms wrote:
| Fantastic lite weight client. Perfect for travel and spotty
| reception/ low bandwidth. Cool interface too.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| In a better world we'd still be using a common protocol to
| interact with mail submission/delivery agents.
| ambicapter wrote:
| Email is not a common protocol?
| tiberious726 wrote:
| Random web apps are not. Imap pop and smtp don't sanely
| support mfa, so the insurance industry is slowly killing them
| off
| 0x457 wrote:
| 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.
| Multicomp wrote:
| 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.
| 0x457 wrote:
| > 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.
| shhsshs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| binaryturtle wrote:
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| throawayonthe wrote:
| but i'm assuming this is a client for their webmail
| sixtyj wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You can't just configure mutt (or alpine, et al.) to use Gmail?
| tonymet wrote:
| Lovely app and it's a shame that Google hasn't created a better
| solution for oauth CLI apps.
| Virgo_matt wrote:
| 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!
| tonymet wrote:
| I agree. I've made a few myself and I just wish they would
| make cli's more user friendly.
| boplicity wrote:
| 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.
| isaachinman wrote:
| 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.
| Virgo_matt wrote:
| Marco looks really nice! would you consider open sourcing it?
| isaachinman wrote:
| Yes, absolutely. If it would give users more confidence,
| I'd be happy to.
| mzajc wrote:
| 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.
| isaachinman wrote:
| Not intentional! Thank you for pointing that out. I'll get
| a fallback in place within the next 24 hours.
| pixel_popping wrote:
| 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.
| isaachinman wrote:
| 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.
| jsbsbdbd wrote:
| I don't get it, why not use _any_ client with IMAP instead?
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| Virgo_matt wrote:
| 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.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| 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.
| Virgo_matt wrote:
| 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?
| tombelieber wrote:
| 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.
| Virgo_matt wrote:
| 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!
| samtheDamned wrote:
| Gmail used to have a lightweight fallback but they shut it
| down relatively recently (couple of years I think).
| Virgo_matt wrote:
| Yea I saw some Reddit threads about that...which was the
| final straw to just build it
| loremm wrote:
| 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
| loremm wrote:
| 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
| Virgo_matt wrote:
| Exactly! Love it! Is yours on GitHub? Would love to check it
| out
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(page generated 2026-04-08 23:02 UTC)