Retro Mail 95 is a local-first Gmail client wrapped in a pixel-faithful Windows 95 interface. It reads, searches, sends, replies, forwards, archives and stars real mail through the Gmail API — with no delete path anywhere in the code. The frontend is vanilla HTML/CSS/JS; the backend is one Python file using nothing but the standard library.
I’ve been staring at my inbox for years. One evening, I was thinking about a strange question: what if my inbox was put on a floppy disk back in 1995? That’s how I wrote Retro Mail 95a real email client that appears to be from that decade: blue title bar, working menu bar, the whole shebang. I managed to do this solely with CSS without any systems or images. The main challenge was ensuring everything was perfectly aligned; even two pixels off makes it look unrealistic. I began by designing the user interface with simulated emails, which proved to be an excellent decision. After that, I linked it to its backenda single Python file utilizing only the standard library, requiring no additional installations or dependencies. This was quite a task, in particular implementing the OAuth 2. 0 loopback flow myself, which consumed about 60 lines of code. Still, I am pleased that the application cannot delete emails. It only has read permissions and requests permission to modify and send emails, but there’s no mechanism to delete anything. Several aspects consumed most of my time: enabling the app to process HTML emails safely, troubleshooting a strange bug that corrupting the app after a week, and implementing polling for new emails without annoyance. Due to its dependency on native protocols, the app cannot be hosted online. But, I successfully created a demo that functions on GitHub Pages. This demo uses the same frontend code but employs simulated data. I am quite satisfied with the results. Feel free to try the demoit functions even when you’re not logged in, with the ability to browse folders search compose star archive, close the window, and re-open it by double-clicking the icon.
