BAREmail
minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi
Details
- External ID
- 47690950
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- BAREmail
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- April 8, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 44
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8277634961439588
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- email infrastructure and inbox utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Communication
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- lightweight email client for slow connections
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes The author self-describes vibe coding this minimalist Gmail client, which primarily involves standard Gmail API authentication and lightweight HTML/text rendering optimized for low bandwidth.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Em Client, Superhuman, Gmail, Outlook, Fastmail
Concerns raised: Monthly pricing feels too expensive compared to yearly, OAuth token refresh issues with client-side implementation, Gmail API has heavy resource usage when multiple tabs open, WebGL dependency causes landing page errors for unsupported browsers, Gmail webapp loading speed is slow
Feature requests: Contact history sidebar with quick preview on hover, Annual/yearly payment option instead of monthly subscription only, Bad WiFi/offline mode support, Keyboard shortcut navigation with vim-like shortcuts
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 106 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #22 of 107 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 159 days after the earliest competitor.
- Dodosend · hn · 2026-09-28 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- My10Mail · ph · 2026-09-18 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Mail client optimized for self-hosted email across multiple domains · hn · 2026-08-20 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Marco, a privacy-first, offline-first email client (IMAP-native, no AI) · hn · 2026-03-25 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- mailtrim · hn · 2026-04-05 · 34 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- TempGmail Edge · ph · 2026-09-20 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Free HTML email signature generator · ph · 2026-09-16 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Mail Memories · hn · 2026-07-02 · 103 upvotes · similarity 0.42
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.