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.
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.
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.
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.
And then just use gmail as smtp for outgoing mails and imap or pop3 for incoming mails.
GMail requires you to enable IMAP/POP to use it and uses proprietary auth protocol or use unsafe application passwords.
GMail IMAP also has a bunch of IMAP extensions that are unique to GMail.
Point is - primary interface to GMail is REST API that is (again) unique to GMail.
But email is a least common denominator, and like how plan9 failed to take over from unix bc unix inertia, JMAP or deltachat IM over email won't take over bc of network effect inertia, I suspect.
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.