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My CS instructor once asked everyone in the class to "raise you hand if you still use an email client." My hand was the only one that went up, and a couple of p

My CS instructor once asked everyone in the class to "raise you hand if you still use an email client." My hand was the only one that went up, and a couple of people laughed and said "really?" I think that was almost 10 years ago.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
I use e-mail client (Outlook) at work. Two reasons: - it's very convenient for accounts you check only in one place - it's infinitely more convenient than any browser-based interface besides GMail that I've seen so far I'd be using a client for my personal mail too, if configuring Emacs to work with GMail wasn't such a pain. Also, don't tell me that on your phone you check your e-mail through a browser!
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  There's still some major features missing in gmail. The biggest, for me, is "sort by." I use this feature at least once a week in Outlook and for the life of me can't figure out why this relatively simple feature hasn't been added to gmail.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    What do you sort by, if I may ask? I'm so used to GMail that I guess I don't feel like I'm missing anything. All of my needs are handled by searching for stuff and and/or applying stars.
    - Consultant32452 9y ago
      Try finding the first email you ever got from Amazon (or any common sender). In Outlook this would be trivial. from: Amazon, sort by date. With Gmail you can search by the sender, but you have to click through page after page to find the oldest one.
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Right. Well, now I'm sad because I realized that indeed I had this problem occasionally; the way GMail implements search I don't exactly even trust them that the first mail they show me is actually the first mail, and not search bugging out. I guess I forgot about that because I very rarely need to do such a search. You also reminded me of another e-mail annoyance - people sending PGP signatures in attachments make it nigh-impossible to search for actual attachments, as every conversation with those senders looks like it has one.
        Thlom 9y ago
        You can search by attachment size, which might help a bit.
  - puddintane 9y ago
    The feature does exist however it doesn't work in every scenario. Essentially when your pager shows "X - Y of Z" (and not "X - Y of many") the keyword being many of course. Your able to hover over the "X - Y of Z" and choose "Oldest" [1]. So essentially if data is indexed your able to. I was not able to search any filter and apply this however on any Label I created I was able to do this. So steps to find the oldest from amazon would probably have to be 1. Create filter+label that groups them all into one category. Wait for indexing to catch up should be fairly quickly since we are not talking petabytes of random data. 2. Choose the label on the left and on the top right hover over the "1-100 of 9999" and choose oldest. Not the best work-a-round of course and makes sense why it's setup this way (Helps with optimization) however if a person sets up a lot of labels then they are already set up to do this feature. [1] https://gsuitetips.com/tips/gmail/sort-email-by-oldest-first/ https://gsuitetips.com/tips/gmail/sort-email-by-oldest-first... edit Also there is the method of using the search field parameters for example. "Amazon.com before:2004/04/16" [2] then you could more quickly go thru them (however if you didn't know your starting point this would prove to be tricky of course!) [2] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en
    - Consultant32452 9y ago
      I appreciate the response and in the case of a dire need I suppose I might utilize that. But WOW that's a lot of trouble to do something that's essentially a couple clicks in Outlook.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    When I deleted my gmail accounts in 2013 (post Snowden leaks) they still didn't have partial word search. I had to connect to Gmail using Thunderbird and Google's terrible IMAP implementation just to search for parts of words .. in 2013 .. from the e-mail provider that's a search company. O_o
- NoGravitas 9y ago
  The desktop Outlook client still has a lot of features that the Outlook (Office365) web client still doesn't have. Some of those features are critical to handling large volumes of mail.
- svdr 9y ago
  I do, with fastmail.
- ashark 9y ago
  > Also, don't tell me that on your phone you check your e-mail through a browser! Basic-html gmail, yes.
  - sandworm101 9y ago
    You arent alone. Its also a great idea if you travel. Unlocking the phone doesnt give them access to email.
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    I'd use gmail's native app for this but it's just awful. All my fav native email clients get bought and killed by larger companies.
pavement 9y ago
Everyone laughed, because absolutely no one connects their phone's mail client to their webmail provider. That would be crazy. (or they're a bit clueless about how their work phone connects to some sort of IMAP host)
- SamReidHughes 9y ago
  The story happened 10 years ago. But also, yeah, I kind of stopped worrying about offline email clients when I realized how much I check from my phone. The only thing I'd use them for on a desktop is mailing lists.
- neuronexmachina 9y ago
  You can run Thunderbird on iOS/Android?
  - kiliankoe 9y ago
    The comment above wasn't specifically about Thunderbird, but any native non-webmail client.
    - ionised 9y ago
      I'm still not following. It sounds like he is saying everybody uses a phone browser to check their webmail, which is obviously not true.
  - pavement 9y ago
    Dare to dream! Maybe such a thing will come to pass with all these changes afoot!
- ionised 9y ago
  So absolutely noone, not a single person uses GMail on Android? Interesting.
drzaiusapelord 9y ago
Students don't have office jobs. Get a real job and suddenly things like Outlook or TB make a lot of sense. Webmail is ultimately overly limiting compared to a native client for many common work-related use cases. Not to mention, your phone email app is an email client. I like to think of myself as being minimalist and flexible in some ways, but if I started a company tomorrow I could see myself springing for Outlook running the front end for a postfix/dovecot server just for the convenience.
- jamesgeck0 9y ago
  What sorts of use cases? My Thunderbird experience doesn't mirror this at all. I've found setting up complex filters to be easier to set up in Gmail. Gmail's search is also much faster and it's results more relevant with huge mailboxes. Gmail also lets you create calendar events from keywords in messages, which Lightning didn't do last time I used it, iirc. I admittedly haven't used Lightning very much; I found that syncing Google Calendars in Thunderbird had a nasty tendency to lock up the app.
- nucleardog 9y ago
  Nine year veteran of "real office jobs". There was a one or two year stint with Thunderbird, but otherwise it's all been Gmail's web interface and Android app. Exactly what work use cases have I been missing out on?
closeparen 9y ago
My company GMail session is invalidated every time I quit Chrome, and there's a moderately annoying 2FA process required to log back in. Thunderbird's IMAP credentials always work. I don't use it all the time, but sometimes I want to read my email without digging out my phone.
tjoff 9y ago
I don't get how anyone (that are somewhat computer savvy) can live without one. Sure, webmail is an awesome backup for when you don't use your main device. But seriously, gmail and the like are absolutely horrible to use compared to a real client. I guess the sad state of affair in regards to email syncing protocols (POP3 and IMAP) are partly to blame, JMAP might help a little but I guess it's too late.
- ashark 9y ago
  > I guess the sad state of affair in regards to email syncing protocols (POP3 and IMAP) are partly to blame, JMAP might help a little but I guess it's too late. I'd say it's entirely that. Sync was so often half-broken with real email clients across multiple devices that having no offline access was a price nearly everyone was willing to pay to fix that, provided the web client were good enough (and, clearly, the problem was so bad that it didn't even need to be that good). [EDIT] Also: accessing your email on devices you don't own/control.
- jldugger 9y ago
  GMail seems fine? The threading & quote collapse feature is a godsend compared to godawful attempts by offline clients.
  - tripzilch 9y ago
    threading, agreed. but the way quote collapse features and is pushed in Gmail basically created or greatly exacerbated the very problem it's a solution for. People used to clean their quotes for relevance, but now they're hidden out of mind, and every mail contains nearly the full conversation, collapsed. it's useless extra data quietly dragging along every mail in a thread, hardly any human ever sees it, but I bet it's super useful for their machine learning (targeted advertising) priorities.
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  What are you doing that's so complicated with email? I get email. I read them. I archive them. I only interact with each email for about 10s and then it's gone, usually forever. Very occasionally I need to search for something in the archive. I also need to send so I just need a text box to write in and somewhere to drop attachments. What else is there that you need in a client?
abalashov 9y ago
I don't know, I went back to Mutt after 10 years of Thunderbird recently and couldn't be happier. But more pointedly, I don't see how I could live without an e-mail client.
ionised 9y ago
I use Postbox with my three webmail providers. Logging into the webmail separately honestly seems like a pain. Why do that when I can just fire up Postbox on my desktop and have all my mail right there?

TeMPOraL 9y ago

I use e-mail client (Outlook) at work. Two reasons: - it's very convenient for accounts you check only in one place - it's infinitely more convenient than any browser-based interface besides GMail that I've seen so far I'd be using a client for my personal mail too, if configuring Emacs to work with GMail wasn't such a pain. Also, don't tell me that on your phone you check your e-mail through a browser!

Consultant32452 9y ago
There's still some major features missing in gmail. The biggest, for me, is "sort by." I use this feature at least once a week in Outlook and for the life of me can't figure out why this relatively simple feature hasn't been added to gmail.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  What do you sort by, if I may ask? I'm so used to GMail that I guess I don't feel like I'm missing anything. All of my needs are handled by searching for stuff and and/or applying stars.
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    Try finding the first email you ever got from Amazon (or any common sender). In Outlook this would be trivial. from: Amazon, sort by date. With Gmail you can search by the sender, but you have to click through page after page to find the oldest one.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Right. Well, now I'm sad because I realized that indeed I had this problem occasionally; the way GMail implements search I don't exactly even trust them that the first mail they show me is actually the first mail, and not search bugging out. I guess I forgot about that because I very rarely need to do such a search. You also reminded me of another e-mail annoyance - people sending PGP signatures in attachments make it nigh-impossible to search for actual attachments, as every conversation with those senders looks like it has one.
      - Thlom 9y ago
        You can search by attachment size, which might help a bit.
- puddintane 9y ago
  The feature does exist however it doesn't work in every scenario. Essentially when your pager shows "X - Y of Z" (and not "X - Y of many") the keyword being many of course. Your able to hover over the "X - Y of Z" and choose "Oldest" [1]. So essentially if data is indexed your able to. I was not able to search any filter and apply this however on any Label I created I was able to do this. So steps to find the oldest from amazon would probably have to be 1. Create filter+label that groups them all into one category. Wait for indexing to catch up should be fairly quickly since we are not talking petabytes of random data. 2. Choose the label on the left and on the top right hover over the "1-100 of 9999" and choose oldest. Not the best work-a-round of course and makes sense why it's setup this way (Helps with optimization) however if a person sets up a lot of labels then they are already set up to do this feature. [1] https://gsuitetips.com/tips/gmail/sort-email-by-oldest-first/ https://gsuitetips.com/tips/gmail/sort-email-by-oldest-first... edit Also there is the method of using the search field parameters for example. "Amazon.com before:2004/04/16" [2] then you could more quickly go thru them (however if you didn't know your starting point this would prove to be tricky of course!) [2] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    I appreciate the response and in the case of a dire need I suppose I might utilize that. But WOW that's a lot of trouble to do something that's essentially a couple clicks in Outlook.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  When I deleted my gmail accounts in 2013 (post Snowden leaks) they still didn't have partial word search. I had to connect to Gmail using Thunderbird and Google's terrible IMAP implementation just to search for parts of words .. in 2013 .. from the e-mail provider that's a search company. O_o
NoGravitas 9y ago
The desktop Outlook client still has a lot of features that the Outlook (Office365) web client still doesn't have. Some of those features are critical to handling large volumes of mail.
svdr 9y ago
I do, with fastmail.
ashark 9y ago
> Also, don't tell me that on your phone you check your e-mail through a browser! Basic-html gmail, yes.
- sandworm101 9y ago
  You arent alone. Its also a great idea if you travel. Unlocking the phone doesnt give them access to email.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  I'd use gmail's native app for this but it's just awful. All my fav native email clients get bought and killed by larger companies.

pavement 9y ago

Everyone laughed, because absolutely no one connects their phone's mail client to their webmail provider. That would be crazy. (or they're a bit clueless about how their work phone connects to some sort of IMAP host)

SamReidHughes 9y ago
The story happened 10 years ago. But also, yeah, I kind of stopped worrying about offline email clients when I realized how much I check from my phone. The only thing I'd use them for on a desktop is mailing lists.
neuronexmachina 9y ago
You can run Thunderbird on iOS/Android?
- kiliankoe 9y ago
  The comment above wasn't specifically about Thunderbird, but any native non-webmail client.
  - ionised 9y ago
    I'm still not following. It sounds like he is saying everybody uses a phone browser to check their webmail, which is obviously not true.
- pavement 9y ago
  Dare to dream! Maybe such a thing will come to pass with all these changes afoot!
ionised 9y ago
So absolutely noone, not a single person uses GMail on Android? Interesting.

drzaiusapelord 9y ago

Students don't have office jobs. Get a real job and suddenly things like Outlook or TB make a lot of sense. Webmail is ultimately overly limiting compared to a native client for many common work-related use cases. Not to mention, your phone email app is an email client. I like to think of myself as being minimalist and flexible in some ways, but if I started a company tomorrow I could see myself springing for Outlook running the front end for a postfix/dovecot server just for the convenience.

jamesgeck0 9y ago
What sorts of use cases? My Thunderbird experience doesn't mirror this at all. I've found setting up complex filters to be easier to set up in Gmail. Gmail's search is also much faster and it's results more relevant with huge mailboxes. Gmail also lets you create calendar events from keywords in messages, which Lightning didn't do last time I used it, iirc. I admittedly haven't used Lightning very much; I found that syncing Google Calendars in Thunderbird had a nasty tendency to lock up the app.
nucleardog 9y ago
Nine year veteran of "real office jobs". There was a one or two year stint with Thunderbird, but otherwise it's all been Gmail's web interface and Android app. Exactly what work use cases have I been missing out on?

closeparen 9y ago

My company GMail session is invalidated every time I quit Chrome, and there's a moderately annoying 2FA process required to log back in. Thunderbird's IMAP credentials always work. I don't use it all the time, but sometimes I want to read my email without digging out my phone.

tjoff 9y ago

I don't get how anyone (that are somewhat computer savvy) can live without one. Sure, webmail is an awesome backup for when you don't use your main device. But seriously, gmail and the like are absolutely horrible to use compared to a real client. I guess the sad state of affair in regards to email syncing protocols (POP3 and IMAP) are partly to blame, JMAP might help a little but I guess it's too late.

ashark 9y ago
> I guess the sad state of affair in regards to email syncing protocols (POP3 and IMAP) are partly to blame, JMAP might help a little but I guess it's too late. I'd say it's entirely that. Sync was so often half-broken with real email clients across multiple devices that having no offline access was a price nearly everyone was willing to pay to fix that, provided the web client were good enough (and, clearly, the problem was so bad that it didn't even need to be that good). [EDIT] Also: accessing your email on devices you don't own/control.
jldugger 9y ago
GMail seems fine? The threading & quote collapse feature is a godsend compared to godawful attempts by offline clients.
- tripzilch 9y ago
  threading, agreed. but the way quote collapse features and is pushed in Gmail basically created or greatly exacerbated the very problem it's a solution for. People used to clean their quotes for relevance, but now they're hidden out of mind, and every mail contains nearly the full conversation, collapsed. it's useless extra data quietly dragging along every mail in a thread, hardly any human ever sees it, but I bet it's super useful for their machine learning (targeted advertising) priorities.
chrisseaton 9y ago
What are you doing that's so complicated with email? I get email. I read them. I archive them. I only interact with each email for about 10s and then it's gone, usually forever. Very occasionally I need to search for something in the archive. I also need to send so I just need a text box to write in and somewhere to drop attachments. What else is there that you need in a client?

abalashov 9y ago

I don't know, I went back to Mutt after 10 years of Thunderbird recently and couldn't be happier. But more pointedly, I don't see how I could live without an e-mail client.

ionised 9y ago

I use Postbox with my three webmail providers. Logging into the webmail separately honestly seems like a pain. Why do that when I can just fire up Postbox on my desktop and have all my mail right there?