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/baremail
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!
