Matt Schwartz

BAREMAIL ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ - Minimalist Gmail client for bad wifi connections

BAREMAIL — email's bare necessities. A minimalist, open-source Gmail client built for spotty connections. Airplane wifi. Rural networks. Developing regions. Anywhere Gmail's multi-megabyte interface refuses to load — BAREMAIL gets your email through in kilobytes. Get BAREMAIL on GitHub: https://github.com/matt-virgo/ba...

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Matt Schwartz
My name is Matt. By day I run a startup called Virgo (https://virgosvs.com) that's building AI for endoscopy to solve diseases mediated by the gut. By night I like to hack away on fun side projects. BAREMAIL was inspired by my own frustration just trying to get a few emails taken care of while dealing with spotty airplane wifi. Gmail's web interface transfers megabytes on every load. On a connection throttled to 50–200 Kbps — the kind you get at 35,000 feet — that means 30–60 second load times, frequent timeouts, and an essentially unusable experience. All to read a few text emails and send a short reply. So I built BAREMAIL: a Gmail client where the entire UI fits in ~60KB, caches itself permanently, and the only thing that travels over the wire is your actual email content. A few kilobytes per inbox load. A couple kilobytes per message. It's open source, has no backend, and your data never touches a third party. Just you, your browser, and Gmail's API. PS. check out the inbox zero easter eggs!
Logan Sullivan

No backend local first design makes this really appealing from a privacy standpoint .

Matt Schwartz

@logan_sullivan1 thanks and totally agree! Part of the rationale for open sourcing is that with vibe coding, this is now easy enough that anyone can fork and design it to their liking...no backend needed :)