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). :)<p>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.
but i'm assuming this is a client for their webmail
I don't get it, why not use _any_ client with IMAP instead?
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.<p>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. <i>If</i> 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.<p>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.<p>still Gmail and Superhuman just seem...bloated. kinda cool to just have a simple, open source interface for the Gmail REST API.
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.
Yes, Marco does this (disclaimer, I'm the solo founder):<p><a href="https://marcoapp.io" rel="nofollow">https://marcoapp.io</a><p>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.
Not sure if that's intentional, but the entire landing page gets replaced with an error if WebGL is not available:<p>> Something went wrong!<p>> Error creating WebGL context.
Marco looks really nice! would you consider open sourcing it?
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!<p>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?
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.<p>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.
[removed]