HaikuMail

Masks Gmail behind a calm, search-only reader. A haiku holds the first 30 seconds.

You open Gmail forty times a day, and most of those times you did not want anything. You wanted a moment away from what you were doing. HaikuMail does not block Gmail. It hides it, and makes the door slow. Open your inbox and the message list is gone. In its place is a haiku, arriving a line at a time, and a small counter counting down from thirty. Until it reaches zero you cannot ask for mail. Usually, by the time it does, you remember that you did not need any. THE WAIT Thirty seconds, every time — and reloading the page does not skip it, it starts it again. The way in costs the same however you enter, which is what makes it work when willpower does not. THEN, SEARCH ONLY Nothing appears until you ask for it. Search for the thing you came for, read it, and leave. There is no list to scroll and no unread count to answer to. OR BROWSE, BY KIND When you do not have a name in mind, browse by kind rather than by date — and tag the senders that matter so they are one click away. READING Two views. Plain rebuilds the message as text with the quoted history dropped; Original shows the sender's own markup. Either way it is first stripped of scripts, event handlers, form tags and unsafe links, and tracking pixels are removed — so opening a message does not quietly tell the sender that you opened it. IT IS NOT A PRISON One link drops the mask for that tab and gives you the real Gmail, for the times you genuinely need to compose or manage something. Coming back restarts the thirty seconds. THE TAB STOPS BEING A NOTIFICATION The title and the favicon are replaced, so a Gmail tab sitting in your window stops advertising how much mail is waiting. NOTHING LEAVES YOUR BROWSER This is the part worth checking rather than believing. HaikuMail asks for one permission — mail.google.com — and makes no network requests of its own. There is no account, no OAuth screen, no API key and no server, which means there is no server to breach and nothing to sell. Your preferences and sender tags live in your browser's local storage and never leave it. The extension is open source (MIT). The manifest is four lines long and you can read it: https://github.com/code-creativeapps/haikumail THE POEMS 157 of them. 100 written for this, and 57 new translations of the classical Japanese poets, made for the extension because the well-known English renderings are still in copyright. You will not see the same one twice in a row. The poems and the reasoning behind the translations are at https://haikumail.app/haiku Free, and it stays free. Privacy policy: https://haikumail.app/privacy