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