Gmail, behind a haiku

You check it when you’re bored. You check it in a lift. You check it while someone is still talking to you. You checked it four minutes ago.

Almost none of those times is there anything there. The inbox is not the problem — the door is the problem. It opens instantly, it always has something new-looking in it, and it costs nothing to push.

HaikuMail doesn’t block Gmail. It just makes the door slow.

Thirty seconds, first

Open Gmail and you get a poem instead, one line at a time, and a small grey number counting down. Every control is locked until it reaches zero. The counter is kept small and quiet on purpose — a big ticking number is just one more thing to stare at.

Reloading does not help you: it starts a fresh thirty seconds. There is no settings page to shorten it, because a wait you can shorten is a wait you will shorten, usually on exactly the day it was working.

Mostly what happens in those thirty seconds is that you remember you didn’t need anything.

Then: nothing, until you ask

No list. No unread count. No bold senders arranged to be glanced at. Just a search field, and whatever you came for.

Gmail’s own operators all work — from:anna, has:attachment, newer_than:2d — because the search is Gmail’s search. You are using the same index, without the room attached to it.

Or read by kind

Sometimes you don’t have a search term, you have a mood. Browse gives you the categories you’d have made yourself — favourites, the people you actually read, newsletters, notifications, social, promotions — and you pick one deliberately rather than being handed all of them at once.

You can tag a sender once and have every message from them filed that way afterwards.

Reading a message

Two views. Plain rebuilds the message as text, with the quoted history dropped. Original shows the sender’s real markup, images and all.

Before anything is displayed it is stripped of scripts, event handlers, form tags and unsafe links, and tracking pixels are removed — so opening a message here does not quietly tell the sender that you opened it.

It isn’t a prison

One link drops the mask and gives you the real Gmail for that tab, for when you genuinely need to compose something or dig through a thread. A small mark stays in the corner to put it back.

Coming back restarts the thirty seconds — the way in costs the same however you enter. That is the only thing HaikuMail is strict about.

The tab stops being a notification

Gmail writes your unread count into the tab title and the favicon, which is how an inbox reaches you from across the room while you are doing something else. Both are replaced. The tab keeps HaikuMail’s name and mark even while unmasked.

Nothing leaves your browser

HaikuMail has no server. It makes no network requests. It asks for no account, shows no OAuth screen, and holds no API key — because it never asks Google for your mail at all. It reads the page already open in the tab in front of you.

This is the whole of what it asks for:

"host_permissions": ["https://mail.google.com/*"]

One origin. No access to your other tabs, your history, your downloads or any other site. No analytics inside the extension. There is no breach to worry about, because there is nowhere for anything to have been kept.

You do not have to take that on trust. It is open source, it is one content script, and if it made a request you would find one. The privacy policy says the same thing at length.

About the poems

There are 157 of them, and you get a different one each time. 100 were written for this extension. The other 57 are Bashō, Buson, Issa, Shiki and a few others.

Those needed translating rather than quoting, which is the trap in collecting “famous haiku” from the web: the Japanese originals have been public domain for centuries, but the English translations everyone circulates — Blyth, Henderson, Hass — are still firmly in copyright. So these renderings were made here. Each is labelled an AI translation, because you deserve to know the English is machine-made rather than a scholar’s, and each carries the romaji of its source so it can be checked rather than trusted.

Read all 157 →

Questions

Does it read my email?

It reads the Gmail page already open in your browser, in order to show you the message you asked for. Nothing is stored and nothing is sent anywhere — the extension makes no network requests at all, and has no server to send anything to.

Do I have to sign in or give it access to my Google account?

No. There is no account, no OAuth screen and no API key. Because it works inside the tab where you are already signed in, it never needs permission from Google to see your mail.

Can I still send mail?

Yes. HaikuMail does not block Gmail, it hides it. 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, so the way in costs the same however you enter.

Can I change the thirty seconds?

Not at the moment, and that is deliberate. A wait you can shorten is a wait you will shorten, usually on precisely the day it was working.

Can I skip the wait by reloading the page?

No — reloading starts a fresh thirty seconds, so it costs you more than waiting.

Does it work with Google Workspace accounts?

Yes. It runs on mail.google.com, which is where Workspace mail is read, so a work account behaves the same as a personal one.

Does it work on my phone?

No. It is a Chrome extension, and mobile Chrome does not run extensions. The phone is where most compulsive checking actually happens, which is one of the reasons a hosted version is being considered.

What happens if Gmail changes?

The extension reads Gmail’s own page structure, so a large enough change on Google’s side can break searching or reading until it is updated. Those internals have been stable for years, but there is no promise from Google that they will stay that way.

Is it free?

Yes, and it stays free. A hosted version with an archive and background cleanup is being built separately, and that one will be paid — but everything described on this page is the free extension.