// the take
PolyMail is a 2015-era demo recreating the new Gmail Android app's UI as a mobile-first, offline-capable web client, built on Polymer 1.0 and Service Worker. It's aimed at people curious about early PWA patterns (offline caching, push notifications, Gmail API history sync) rather than anyone wanting an actual Gmail client — it's explicitly read-only and a work in progress.
Real Gmail API integration depth for a demo: incremental sync via the history API, push notifications, and full Gmail search query syntax (to:/from: operators), not just a mocked inbox. Service worker offline support with API response caching was ahead of its time for 2015. The author actually measured and documented performance (paint ~393ms, 1.66s first paint on 3G Moto G) rather than just claiming it's fast.
It's read-only and most buttons are non-functional — no composing, replying, thread reading, or label filtering, so it's a UI shell over live data, not a usable client. The stack is built on now-dead tooling: Polymer 1.0 (discontinued), Bower, vulcanize, and HTML Imports (removed from Chrome years ago), so it likely won't even build or run on a current browser without a rewrite. No commits since January 2016 means it predates Google's move to Google Identity Services, so the Sign-in 2.0 flow it depends on is almost certainly broken. Pagination, accessibility (keyboard/tab support), and i18n are all explicitly unimplemented, not just rough edges.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →