6 ms·

Email was meant to be kept simple, and Google is making this exponentially hard with every single "design" iteration. Get off Gmail - it'll break your email.

by pmlnr 9y ago

Email was meant to be kept simple, and Google is making this exponentially hard with every single "design" iteration. Get off Gmail - it'll break your email. The article has very good points, especially when it touches the issue of "hidden" mail, like the promotions tab: there are labels and tabs. There should be only one system, and no, don't hide things from the user at this level. When there's 17k mails in promotions, eating up 6GB alert them, let them know. (This ties back to how WordPress keeps hiding anything technical from users, which is also bad[^1]) Filtering on Gmail is outrageous, especially when you compare it to Sieve. No option to match on custom header, seriously? Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security. I'm aware of all the arguments against email, but so far nobody could come up with a robust, reliable (see SMTP retries), async, world wide, federated solution, that even touches the level of email. Here's a revolutionary idea: instead of trying to come up with a new email, stop breaking the current one, and keep using it. [^1]: https://www.rarst.net/wordpress/technical-responsibility/ https://www.rarst.net/wordpress/technical-responsibility/

Normal_gaussian 9y ago
> Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security. It also fundamentally breaks with what the user expects. The user expects their email to be theirs, to do with what they will. I know of no situation in which I would like an email which I specifically cannot print; I have no idea how I would explain it to my Grandfather.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  e-MAIL. The stress is on the mail part. When your Grandfather sends a letter via post, he doesn't expect it to be his anymore, does he?
  - Illniyar 9y ago
    That's the other way around. The grandfather is the one receiving the email that he can't print.
    - pmlnr 9y ago
      I misunderstood the parent. Sorry, and you are right.
  - Normal_gaussian 9y ago
    No. He bloody well expects what comes through the door with his name on it to be his to do with as he pleases.
- potatoyogurt 9y ago
  It's not really about ordinary users like you. Google is shifting their strategy for Google Drive more towards enterprise, and this is a useful feature for enterprise users. Have you ever seen one of those email signatures stating "this email is property of XXX corporation, etc. etc." or seen an email sent to a large group of people in a company with strong exhortations not to send it anywhere else? This is a strict improvement over that. Yes, people can actively work around the printing restriction, so it's not 100% secure. But people were already using email for sensitive information, and this decreases the ways the information can get leaked from negligence or active subversion to just subversion.
  - spookthesunset 9y ago
    > Yes, people can actively work around the printing restriction, so it's not 100% secure. And the people that do work around it in order to violate company policy can be dealt with here in meatspace. Eg: HR -- "We didn't want you printing that sensitive email.... why did you go out of your way to print it?"
  - Normal_gaussian 9y ago
    And by doing so, it is still violating what the user expects.
Jaruzel 9y ago
> Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security. I'm not a GMail user, but can someone explains how this 'security' feature works? If a GMail user creates a 'secure' email and sends it to a non-GMail recipient (so it goes over SMTP/TLS), how is the DRM enforced at the other end. I know MS Outlook has DRM features.. but are they compatible with GMail's ?
- amoshi 9y ago
  If you for example send an expiring email, the recipient will receive an email with a link to some online storage where this expiration will be enforced, the email itself won't contain the content.
- mseebach 9y ago
  It's not "secure" and it's not "enforced", at least not in the strict senses of those words. It's a protection against accidents and carelessness, sensitive information being reply-all'd around in long threads that people aren't reading anymore, the accidental forward to an external party. Many organisations for whom this is an attractive feature, have long had policies around emailing sensitive information, instead links are emailed, and securing access to the information is handled by the application. If the link is forwarded to the wrong person, all they can see is a login screen.
- shaklee3 9y ago
  Gmail is the only one that displays it as an email. All other clients and servers will just see it as a link. That's how they handle the self-destruction.
michaelmior 9y ago
My understanding is that if you connect with a non-Gmail client or send to a non-Gmail user, the email is just a link to a webpage that enforces the restrictions.
- pletnes 9y ago
  Printscreen. Photograph your screen with your phone. It’s still just a «please don’t print».
  - jclos 9y ago
    It's not meant to stop malicious users, it's meant to stop careless ones. Malicious users will always find a way.
jasode 9y ago
>Email was meant to be kept simple, [...] instead of trying to come up with a new email, stop breaking the current one, and keep using it. The "email was meant to be kept simple" can't be stated in isolation. Many suffering recipients of email see the outside world stuffing their inbox as making "email complicated". They can't control how others misuse email. Paul Graham explained that email has become overwhelming for him and his peers.[1] What's your recommendation for their pain points with the current email system? [1] from 7m29s to 11m50s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI&feature=youtu.be&t=7m29s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI&feature=youtu.be...
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  It seems like he's talking about a very specific use of email. I can't be the only person who actually writes letters to people using email and not expecting anything to end up on their "todo list".
  - jasode 9y ago
    >I can't be the only person who actually writes letters to people using email and not expecting anything to end up on their "todo list". Many like you definitely exist but your "pure 100% communications only" usage isn't what the Gmail enhancements (that many dislike) were trying to solve. The blog author, Avi Ashkenazi, wrote: >From a business perspective I understand that there are more people using Gmail than Calendar, Keep or the new Tasks, but the way Google has attempted to bring people into the fold and have them use add-ons and the rest of their products is just crazy. There is overlap between the non-communication features that Avi Ashkenazi mentioned and what Paul Graham is talking about. PG recommends creating a new and different protocol. Avi Ashkenazi is saying don't try to shoehorn things like "tasks" into the Gmail UI/UX because it makes it complicated. Google/Alphabet apparently is working from a different philosophical base: many people use Gmail as the central dashboard so let's put everything there.
    - heavenlyblue 9y ago
      The issue with this approach is that quite frankly - email by itself should be just like our water supply. Better water exists, but it's not much better than the usual one. You can use water for many things, but it doesn't matter whose supply you're using. E-mail must be kept that way: there's nothing to invent in terms of email itself. You can only invent on top of it. It's just like HTTP: HTTP/2 exists, but it doesn't change the idea of HTTP, it only evolves it.
ShorsHammer 9y ago
> like the promotions tab Settings >> Inbox type >> Unread first Suddenly all that junk previously ignored is prominent again. Within a week I had unsubscribed from 95% of unwanted correspondence. Was quite liberating to have a real inbox again.
Waterluvian 9y ago
If I want to take my 20GB of email out of Gmail and put it elsewhere for the next 15 years without having to think about it, where do I go?
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  I would use fastmail https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/ https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/ I used to use it for awhile. Then I got some AWS credit so I setup Amazon Work Mail.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  I second Fastmail. Great company, great service, super fast (much faster than Gmail), and the import process is trivial. I've been a happy user for years and recommend them to everyone. Seriously, migration is as easy as pointing your MX records to them and running their import tool. It takes ten minutes (I thought switching off Gmail would take ages, but no, literal ten minutes).
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    This is phenomenal to hear (import process ease). Can’t wait for them to support multiple labels.
    - StavrosK 9y ago
      Yeah, it was really easy. You basically give them IMAP credentials and that's it. They even do some clever stuff about putting your mail in the folders it should be when importing from Gmail, although now I forget exactly what.
    - conradk 9y ago
      That would be great indeed! I think the problem here is that this is a Gmail-specific, non-standard feature, meaning there is no specification that allows to implement this in a reliable, cross-client way. However, Fastmail is working on something similar with JMAP. I found this earlier HN comment to be really interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16372835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16372835
mseebach 9y ago
> Email was meant to be Email isn't a religion and originalism isn't a meaningful framework for analysis. Email started as a simple answer to a simple question, and has evolved from there to answer increasing hard questions. The original inventors totally failed to anticipate many important realities about email (most significantly, spam, but also encryption and signing), and email has evolved to deal with that. You're free to keep using email as you believe it should be used, but you have no right to insist that other people hold back in adopting new ways of doing things that they feel suits them better.
- heavenlyblue 9y ago
  > increasing hard questions Over the past, what... 30 years? - e-mail remains what it had been in the first place: a protocol for exchanging messages. You're still sending text. You're still attaching links to your messages if you'd like to send a large file. You're still trying to keep concise in your comm. What have evolved, exactly? Sans encryption - that's not really a "hard question". Gmail's a great spam-free platform, but it doesn't add anything revolutionary.
  - twblalock 9y ago
    Good spam filters, tags instead of folders, and a lot of storage were the features Gmail brought to the table, for free, that made it so popular. It was also a nicer web interface than the competition -- so nice that it managed to get a lot of people to use it instead of desktop mail clients, which were the norm at the time.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >Over the past, what... 30 years? - e-mail remains what it had been in the first place: a protocol for exchanging messages. The difference is (a) those messages started to measure in the hundreds or thousands per day, not 5 of them at most like in the eighties, (b) people started using it for all kinds of work collaboration and organization. Not just some academics exchanging ideas.
    - 9y ago
ghaff 9y ago
I agree that things like unprintability probably give a false sense of security. But as far as how email is “supposed” to be I used an email system in the late eighties or so that had security features like that. They meant more then because it was originally a centralized terminal based system. Not everything was Unix.
nasredin 9y ago
One more stupid design: Deleting an email in a thread: Find a small button. Click. Find "delete". It is in the middle of the list. This is just simply stupid. Click. BTW you should delete your email. IIRC after 6 month (?) the government doesn't need a warrant to access it.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  > the government Which country?
  - ReverseCold 9y ago
    https://www.aclu.org/youre-not-gonna-need-warrant https://www.aclu.org/youre-not-gonna-need-warrant
0x00000000 9y ago
> Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security Funny when you look at Chrome where they don't protect saved passwords to avoid giving users a "false sense of security and encouraging dangerous behavior"[1], which seems to be a valid argument here too [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6166886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6166886
- arkitaip 9y ago
  It used to be that you had to use Chrome's dev tools to inspect a password field and change it to a text field to see someone's password. These days not even that is required as the password is plainly visible as a element attribute called data-initial-value.
- hshehehjdjdjd 9y ago
  What possible protection could you have in a non-master password scenario? If you’ve decided that you don’t want the user to have to enter a password, it’s game over from a perspective of trying to keep the password from being retrieved by an attacker with local execution. Even with a master password, you’re only safe until you enter it, then the attacker has that info as well.
coldtea 9y ago
>Filtering on Gmail is outrageous, especially when you compare it to Sieve. No option to match on custom header, seriously? What percentage of users would even know what a custom header is, much less ever attempt to match one? Is that what one would call a basic feature lacking from Gmail, for its lack to guarantee a "seriously?"?
- jadeklerk 9y ago
  +1 to this. You have to realize that over a billion users use gmail. You can't possibly imagine that prioritizing .0000000001% of users that know about something like filtering on custom headers is remotely good decision-making against all the other work being done that helps the majority of users.
  - pmlnr 9y ago
    I have Gmail at work, and I can't filter on list ID in the header. Gmail is not just simple users, it's also corporate who's paying for it.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      It's not like 99% of corporate users know about headers and header filters either.
    - jiveturkey 9y ago
      but you can. isn’t list name filter the list id? works for me.
hota_mazi 9y ago
Get off Gmail and get on... what? You're only offering non constructive criticism. Gmail is light years ahead of any other email client I have tried so far.
- Mister_Snuggles 9y ago
  Gmail is not just an email client though, it's also the email provider. If you want to get off of Gmail the client, you can use an IMAP client like Apple Mail, Thunderbird, etc. There are quirks with how the IMAP protocol's concepts get mapped to Gmail's concepts though. If you want to get off of Gmail the provider, that's a different story. There are many free and paid providers, but there's still a large effort to switch since you have to ask people to update your email address and probably keep the old one around (and forwarding to the new one) for a long time. If you have your own domain that's backended by Gmail, this is a lot easier.
  - 333c 9y ago
    Regarding getting off of Gmail: I switched away from Gmail at the start of 2018. So far everything has gone smoothly. My new email provider (Fastmail) has a tool to import all emails from another provider, which ran overnight. I forward all mail from my Gmail address to my new address. One feature of Gmail which makes it particularly easy to switch away from is that it's free, so I can keep my Gmail account open indefinitely to forward mail. Asking people to update my address hasn't been a huge problem. Even when they email me at the old one, I still get their messages.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  It's really not, nor the web client, nor the provider, and the options are plenty, mentioned even in this very thread. Fastmail, self hosted iredmail, protonmail, etc., are fine providers. Geary, rainloop, macos mail, k9, are very nice clients. Have you actually tried any alternative clients, before you made this comment?
  - criddell 9y ago
    I too would leave GMail (Inbox) if I could find a web client I like as well. For work, I use Thunderbird because I need Enigmail for PGP and I absolutely hate it. Inbox does an almost perfect job of catching spam and sorting my mail. It has saved me many hours over the years.

by pmlnr 9y ago

Normal_gaussian 9y ago

> Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security. It also fundamentally breaks with what the user expects. The user expects their email to be theirs, to do with what they will. I know of no situation in which I would like an email which I specifically cannot print; I have no idea how I would explain it to my Grandfather.

pmlnr 9y ago
e-MAIL. The stress is on the mail part. When your Grandfather sends a letter via post, he doesn't expect it to be his anymore, does he?
- Illniyar 9y ago
  That's the other way around. The grandfather is the one receiving the email that he can't print.
  - pmlnr 9y ago
    I misunderstood the parent. Sorry, and you are right.
- Normal_gaussian 9y ago
  No. He bloody well expects what comes through the door with his name on it to be his to do with as he pleases.
potatoyogurt 9y ago
It's not really about ordinary users like you. Google is shifting their strategy for Google Drive more towards enterprise, and this is a useful feature for enterprise users. Have you ever seen one of those email signatures stating "this email is property of XXX corporation, etc. etc." or seen an email sent to a large group of people in a company with strong exhortations not to send it anywhere else? This is a strict improvement over that. Yes, people can actively work around the printing restriction, so it's not 100% secure. But people were already using email for sensitive information, and this decreases the ways the information can get leaked from negligence or active subversion to just subversion.
- spookthesunset 9y ago
  > Yes, people can actively work around the printing restriction, so it's not 100% secure. And the people that do work around it in order to violate company policy can be dealt with here in meatspace. Eg: HR -- "We didn't want you printing that sensitive email.... why did you go out of your way to print it?"
- Normal_gaussian 9y ago
  And by doing so, it is still violating what the user expects.

Jaruzel 9y ago

> Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security. I'm not a GMail user, but can someone explains how this 'security' feature works? If a GMail user creates a 'secure' email and sends it to a non-GMail recipient (so it goes over SMTP/TLS), how is the DRM enforced at the other end. I know MS Outlook has DRM features.. but are they compatible with GMail's ?

amoshi 9y ago
If you for example send an expiring email, the recipient will receive an email with a link to some online storage where this expiration will be enforced, the email itself won't contain the content.
mseebach 9y ago
It's not "secure" and it's not "enforced", at least not in the strict senses of those words. It's a protection against accidents and carelessness, sensitive information being reply-all'd around in long threads that people aren't reading anymore, the accidental forward to an external party. Many organisations for whom this is an attractive feature, have long had policies around emailing sensitive information, instead links are emailed, and securing access to the information is handled by the application. If the link is forwarded to the wrong person, all they can see is a login screen.
shaklee3 9y ago
Gmail is the only one that displays it as an email. All other clients and servers will just see it as a link. That's how they handle the self-destruction.

michaelmior 9y ago

My understanding is that if you connect with a non-Gmail client or send to a non-Gmail user, the email is just a link to a webpage that enforces the restrictions.

pletnes 9y ago
Printscreen. Photograph your screen with your phone. It’s still just a «please don’t print».
- jclos 9y ago
  It's not meant to stop malicious users, it's meant to stop careless ones. Malicious users will always find a way.

jasode 9y ago

>Email was meant to be kept simple, [...] instead of trying to come up with a new email, stop breaking the current one, and keep using it. The "email was meant to be kept simple" can't be stated in isolation. Many suffering recipients of email see the outside world stuffing their inbox as making "email complicated". They can't control how others misuse email. Paul Graham explained that email has become overwhelming for him and his peers.[1] What's your recommendation for their pain points with the current email system? [1] from 7m29s to 11m50s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI&feature=youtu.be&t=7m29s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI&feature=youtu.be...

cup-of-tea 9y ago
It seems like he's talking about a very specific use of email. I can't be the only person who actually writes letters to people using email and not expecting anything to end up on their "todo list".
- jasode 9y ago
  >I can't be the only person who actually writes letters to people using email and not expecting anything to end up on their "todo list". Many like you definitely exist but your "pure 100% communications only" usage isn't what the Gmail enhancements (that many dislike) were trying to solve. The blog author, Avi Ashkenazi, wrote: >From a business perspective I understand that there are more people using Gmail than Calendar, Keep or the new Tasks, but the way Google has attempted to bring people into the fold and have them use add-ons and the rest of their products is just crazy. There is overlap between the non-communication features that Avi Ashkenazi mentioned and what Paul Graham is talking about. PG recommends creating a new and different protocol. Avi Ashkenazi is saying don't try to shoehorn things like "tasks" into the Gmail UI/UX because it makes it complicated. Google/Alphabet apparently is working from a different philosophical base: many people use Gmail as the central dashboard so let's put everything there.
  - heavenlyblue 9y ago
    The issue with this approach is that quite frankly - email by itself should be just like our water supply. Better water exists, but it's not much better than the usual one. You can use water for many things, but it doesn't matter whose supply you're using. E-mail must be kept that way: there's nothing to invent in terms of email itself. You can only invent on top of it. It's just like HTTP: HTTP/2 exists, but it doesn't change the idea of HTTP, it only evolves it.

ShorsHammer 9y ago

> like the promotions tab Settings >> Inbox type >> Unread first Suddenly all that junk previously ignored is prominent again. Within a week I had unsubscribed from 95% of unwanted correspondence. Was quite liberating to have a real inbox again.

Waterluvian 9y ago

If I want to take my 20GB of email out of Gmail and put it elsewhere for the next 15 years without having to think about it, where do I go?

zitterbewegung 9y ago
I would use fastmail https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/ https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/ I used to use it for awhile. Then I got some AWS credit so I setup Amazon Work Mail.
StavrosK 9y ago
I second Fastmail. Great company, great service, super fast (much faster than Gmail), and the import process is trivial. I've been a happy user for years and recommend them to everyone. Seriously, migration is as easy as pointing your MX records to them and running their import tool. It takes ten minutes (I thought switching off Gmail would take ages, but no, literal ten minutes).
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  This is phenomenal to hear (import process ease). Can’t wait for them to support multiple labels.
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    Yeah, it was really easy. You basically give them IMAP credentials and that's it. They even do some clever stuff about putting your mail in the folders it should be when importing from Gmail, although now I forget exactly what.
  - conradk 9y ago
    That would be great indeed! I think the problem here is that this is a Gmail-specific, non-standard feature, meaning there is no specification that allows to implement this in a reliable, cross-client way. However, Fastmail is working on something similar with JMAP. I found this earlier HN comment to be really interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16372835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16372835

mseebach 9y ago

> Email was meant to be Email isn't a religion and originalism isn't a meaningful framework for analysis. Email started as a simple answer to a simple question, and has evolved from there to answer increasing hard questions. The original inventors totally failed to anticipate many important realities about email (most significantly, spam, but also encryption and signing), and email has evolved to deal with that. You're free to keep using email as you believe it should be used, but you have no right to insist that other people hold back in adopting new ways of doing things that they feel suits them better.

heavenlyblue 9y ago
> increasing hard questions Over the past, what... 30 years? - e-mail remains what it had been in the first place: a protocol for exchanging messages. You're still sending text. You're still attaching links to your messages if you'd like to send a large file. You're still trying to keep concise in your comm. What have evolved, exactly? Sans encryption - that's not really a "hard question". Gmail's a great spam-free platform, but it doesn't add anything revolutionary.
- twblalock 9y ago
  Good spam filters, tags instead of folders, and a lot of storage were the features Gmail brought to the table, for free, that made it so popular. It was also a nicer web interface than the competition -- so nice that it managed to get a lot of people to use it instead of desktop mail clients, which were the norm at the time.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Over the past, what... 30 years? - e-mail remains what it had been in the first place: a protocol for exchanging messages. The difference is (a) those messages started to measure in the hundreds or thousands per day, not 5 of them at most like in the eighties, (b) people started using it for all kinds of work collaboration and organization. Not just some academics exchanging ideas.
  - 9y ago

ghaff 9y ago

I agree that things like unprintability probably give a false sense of security. But as far as how email is “supposed” to be I used an email system in the late eighties or so that had security features like that. They meant more then because it was originally a centralized terminal based system. Not everything was Unix.

nasredin 9y ago

One more stupid design: Deleting an email in a thread: Find a small button. Click. Find "delete". It is in the middle of the list. This is just simply stupid. Click. BTW you should delete your email. IIRC after 6 month (?) the government doesn't need a warrant to access it.

pmlnr 9y ago
> the government Which country?
- ReverseCold 9y ago
  https://www.aclu.org/youre-not-gonna-need-warrant https://www.aclu.org/youre-not-gonna-need-warrant

0x00000000 9y ago

> Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security Funny when you look at Chrome where they don't protect saved passwords to avoid giving users a "false sense of security and encouraging dangerous behavior"[1], which seems to be a valid argument here too [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6166886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6166886

arkitaip 9y ago
It used to be that you had to use Chrome's dev tools to inspect a password field and change it to a text field to see someone's password. These days not even that is required as the password is plainly visible as a element attribute called data-initial-value.
hshehehjdjdjd 9y ago
What possible protection could you have in a non-master password scenario? If you’ve decided that you don’t want the user to have to enter a password, it’s game over from a perspective of trying to keep the password from being retrieved by an attacker with local execution. Even with a master password, you’re only safe until you enter it, then the attacker has that info as well.

coldtea 9y ago

>Filtering on Gmail is outrageous, especially when you compare it to Sieve. No option to match on custom header, seriously? What percentage of users would even know what a custom header is, much less ever attempt to match one? Is that what one would call a basic feature lacking from Gmail, for its lack to guarantee a "seriously?"?

jadeklerk 9y ago
+1 to this. You have to realize that over a billion users use gmail. You can't possibly imagine that prioritizing .0000000001% of users that know about something like filtering on custom headers is remotely good decision-making against all the other work being done that helps the majority of users.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  I have Gmail at work, and I can't filter on list ID in the header. Gmail is not just simple users, it's also corporate who's paying for it.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    It's not like 99% of corporate users know about headers and header filters either.
  - jiveturkey 9y ago
    but you can. isn’t list name filter the list id? works for me.

hota_mazi 9y ago

Get off Gmail and get on... what? You're only offering non constructive criticism. Gmail is light years ahead of any other email client I have tried so far.

Mister_Snuggles 9y ago
Gmail is not just an email client though, it's also the email provider. If you want to get off of Gmail the client, you can use an IMAP client like Apple Mail, Thunderbird, etc. There are quirks with how the IMAP protocol's concepts get mapped to Gmail's concepts though. If you want to get off of Gmail the provider, that's a different story. There are many free and paid providers, but there's still a large effort to switch since you have to ask people to update your email address and probably keep the old one around (and forwarding to the new one) for a long time. If you have your own domain that's backended by Gmail, this is a lot easier.
- 333c 9y ago
  Regarding getting off of Gmail: I switched away from Gmail at the start of 2018. So far everything has gone smoothly. My new email provider (Fastmail) has a tool to import all emails from another provider, which ran overnight. I forward all mail from my Gmail address to my new address. One feature of Gmail which makes it particularly easy to switch away from is that it's free, so I can keep my Gmail account open indefinitely to forward mail. Asking people to update my address hasn't been a huge problem. Even when they email me at the old one, I still get their messages.
pmlnr 9y ago
It's really not, nor the web client, nor the provider, and the options are plenty, mentioned even in this very thread. Fastmail, self hosted iredmail, protonmail, etc., are fine providers. Geary, rainloop, macos mail, k9, are very nice clients. Have you actually tried any alternative clients, before you made this comment?
- criddell 9y ago
  I too would leave GMail (Inbox) if I could find a web client I like as well. For work, I use Thunderbird because I need Enigmail for PGP and I absolutely hate it. Inbox does an almost perfect job of catching spam and sorting my mail. It has saved me many hours over the years.