6 ms·

When Google Mail was invite only, it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be. Fast, forward thinking in the way mails were presented. Then it became

by Lutzb 6y ago

When Google Mail was invite only, it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be. Fast, forward thinking in the way mails were presented. Then it became a monstrosity that I can no longer recommend to anyone. Suddenly Google Inbox came along. Fast, simple, focused packed with useful new features like mail grouping and content extraction. And it was killed off after roughly two years without any of the features being migrated to another product. It seems like Google became unable to innovate in the basic services they once revolutionized.

ogjunkyard 6y ago
Google Inbox was so good. I was honestly shocked that they got rid of what felt like true innovation in the email space (at the time).
- websterisk 6y ago
  And any hands for Google Reader? I don't think any other tool has had that level of impact on my content consumption, prior or since. It was everything it needed to be and not anything more. RIP.
  - discordance 6y ago
    I don’t know if it would still work well these days, but when Google Reader left I genuinely felt less information-abled
    - Hasu 6y ago
      I never used Google Reader, but did use other RSS, and I stopped years ago - not because RSS doesn't still work great, it does. But because so much of the content I used to consume with it is gone now. I used to follow a few dozen blogs that got updated regularly, and had RSS feeds. Now almost all those blogs are dead, migrated to Substack or Twitter, or post so infrequently that it's not worth a subscription. A decade ago, the web browser felt like an endless source of amazing content, and an RSS feed was a great way to keep track of a lot of it at once. Today, I feel like there's still great content, but it's in Twitter feeds and newsletters, and my browser is for accessing webapps and storefronts. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong content or just don't know where to go to find the good stuff anymore, but somehow the end of Google Reader was prophetic, and whether that was a self-fulfilling prophecy or not is up to each of us to decide.
      - nxtbl 6y ago
        You can follow twitter, facebook, vkontakte, newsletters, youtube etc. with a RSS reader. The page you're interested in doesn't offer a feed? Try the integrated web feeds from your reader or another source. https://www.inoreader.com/blog/ https://www.inoreader.com/blog/
  - sliken 6y ago
    I miss it, kinda annoyed by feedly, but not quite enough to find or host my own RSS aggregator.
  - astrange 6y ago
    Do people know that other RSS readers exist and always have? I feel like they don’t. I’ve always used NetNewsWire and it’s never let me down.
    - mattkevan 6y ago
      Reeder on Mac and iOS is good, been using it for years. You used to need a third party service like Feedly to sync across devices but the latest version has iCloud syncing which is pretty handy.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    Well, compared to native RSS readers Google Reader was crap. Why do people rememeber it fondly? Was it the fact that it was web based, or was it the only/first RSS reader people have used?
    - fomine3 6y ago
      Web-based is big feature who read articles in original website rather than reader itself.
  - ddoolin 6y ago
    I stopped reading all the feeds I had after they killed Reader. I couldn't get back into it after having used it for years.
  - nxtbl 6y ago
    First I felt anger about the coming closure. Then I went thru and tried all the competitors, new and old. Quickly a few rose over what GR ever was and of them I settled with Inoreader - been a happy, paying customer ever since. GR was holding down the evolution of feed readers by keeping theirs free. That was what, 5 million users not paying anybody for the service? When it was gone, things started moving forward again, fast. So actually, it's good that they closed GR.
camjohnson26 6y ago
Google inbox was the last Google product I used and easily the best. Completely got rid of my inbox clutter and gave the ability to snooze emails.
polishdude20 6y ago
What sort of email client would you recommend instead?
- kerng 6y ago
  I cant believe I'm saying this but Outlook. I used to not like Outlook at work, but when I worked for a startup they used GSuites and the Google mail experience is so bad I honestly couldn't believe that anyone would be using it. Threads are mixed together when multiple people reply its impossible to read content anymore and they do also change the formatting of content which puzzled me the most. Maybe for people that only ever used Gmail it's okay, because they are used to its weirdness and have never seen a more structured and visually appealing way to read email.
  - jyrkesh 6y ago
    Outlook for Desktop has its quirks, but it's still extremely usable and (mostly) performant, especially compared to any of the web-based mail clients out there.
  - ryantgtg 6y ago
    I just changed from a job that used GSuite to one that uses Office 365. I think Outlook is total garbage. The desktop client especially, and the website is barely an improvement. I've gotten used to it in the last month, but I still think the threading UX (my main gripe at this point) is really poor. Maybe the lesson here is that if you use one of them for years, then the other seems really bad.
- wcarron 6y ago
  I actually just began the process of migrating away from Google about two weeks ago. I chose FastMail for my new email provider. It's $5/mo, but honestly, I'm fine paying that, solely to get Google out of my emails. I find their UI to be simple and clear. I enjoy the notes/calendar features that come with the email. Their mobile app works fine on my android phone, and the push notifications from the Fastmail calendar are relatively unobtrusive. Only downside so far was I had to cancel my NYTimes sub (honestly probably a plus) because it doesn't recognize the @fastmail.com domain as a valid email address. It's the only service I've had that problem with, including the important ones like banking, etc.
jyrkesh 6y ago
Weird for me to see all the love for Inbox in a thread about bloated webapps. I liked the Inbox UI a lot, but until it was spun down, I had an issue where each Inbox tab would eventually bloat up to 2-3 GBs. Considering I'd have 3 of those open, one for each of my Gmail accts, it quickly became something I couldn't use on my laptop (unless I refreshed each tab every couple hours).
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  I never noticed that. Inbox was what got me to inbox zero, quickly. I also used it almost exclusively on my phone, however.
  - jyrkesh 6y ago
    Yeah, the phone app was crazy fast, and having moved from Mailbox, I loved the ability to easily archive from notifications. Now that's Gmail standard, though
deckard1 6y ago
> it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google. Google has relied on their reputation in search to carry most of their products since the early 2000s, right up until Google Plus when things started to fall apart for them and people started to realize that Google is not the invincible Superman they pretended to be. Their "don't be evil" motto was a lie and not everything they touched turned to gold. In fact, it was almost always the opposite of that.
- twblalock 6y ago
  > you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google. It also introduced, and led to the broad adoption of, a few really nice features: truly effective spam filtering, conversation threading that actually works, and tags instead of folders (e.g. a message can have more than one tag, but it can only be in one folder). At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it.
  - deckard1 6y ago
    > truly effective spam filtering I don't recall it being that much better than the competitors. And even today it seems like a coin toss as to whether an obviously spam email lands in the spam folder or not. Not to mention the seemingly shady backroom deals companies like Sendgrid, SES, etc. are making to ensure their emails get delivered to the inbox. That seems like an area ripe for corruption. > At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it. Anecdotal, but I very much preferred Thunderbird to Gmail, and was using it up until 2010 or so. Nowadays I use K-9 Mail (Android) where I need to and try to avoid the disaster that is modern email as much as possible.
  - philsnow 6y ago
    > conversation threading that actually works Gmail's "threading" is probably its worst sin (beating out its weird IMAP interface). When I started using Gmail, my other mail client was mutt, but every other client at the time showed replies to email threads properly as a tree. As an aside, you could argue that email conversations should look like a DAG (since you could totally quote multiple emails and have multiple In-Reply-To headers, why not) but I'm not aware of any clients that did that. Gmail went a third way, completely linearizing a thread into a "conversation". This view makes it harder to have discourse over email: if you want to make sure to split a conversation and have both forks get addressed, you have to change the subject line to un-thread replies to your message.
istillwritecode 6y ago
I was a Google employee from 2005 to 2018. I HATED inbox, and I certainly wasn't alone. It divided users into two pieces, and the real issue was Google tried to force it on users rather than make it an option.

by Lutzb 6y ago

ogjunkyard 6y ago

Google Inbox was so good. I was honestly shocked that they got rid of what felt like true innovation in the email space (at the time).

websterisk 6y ago
And any hands for Google Reader? I don't think any other tool has had that level of impact on my content consumption, prior or since. It was everything it needed to be and not anything more. RIP.
- discordance 6y ago
  I don’t know if it would still work well these days, but when Google Reader left I genuinely felt less information-abled
  - Hasu 6y ago
    I never used Google Reader, but did use other RSS, and I stopped years ago - not because RSS doesn't still work great, it does. But because so much of the content I used to consume with it is gone now. I used to follow a few dozen blogs that got updated regularly, and had RSS feeds. Now almost all those blogs are dead, migrated to Substack or Twitter, or post so infrequently that it's not worth a subscription. A decade ago, the web browser felt like an endless source of amazing content, and an RSS feed was a great way to keep track of a lot of it at once. Today, I feel like there's still great content, but it's in Twitter feeds and newsletters, and my browser is for accessing webapps and storefronts. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong content or just don't know where to go to find the good stuff anymore, but somehow the end of Google Reader was prophetic, and whether that was a self-fulfilling prophecy or not is up to each of us to decide.
    - nxtbl 6y ago
      You can follow twitter, facebook, vkontakte, newsletters, youtube etc. with a RSS reader. The page you're interested in doesn't offer a feed? Try the integrated web feeds from your reader or another source. https://www.inoreader.com/blog/ https://www.inoreader.com/blog/
- sliken 6y ago
  I miss it, kinda annoyed by feedly, but not quite enough to find or host my own RSS aggregator.
- astrange 6y ago
  Do people know that other RSS readers exist and always have? I feel like they don’t. I’ve always used NetNewsWire and it’s never let me down.
  - mattkevan 6y ago
    Reeder on Mac and iOS is good, been using it for years. You used to need a third party service like Feedly to sync across devices but the latest version has iCloud syncing which is pretty handy.
- coldtea 6y ago
  Well, compared to native RSS readers Google Reader was crap. Why do people rememeber it fondly? Was it the fact that it was web based, or was it the only/first RSS reader people have used?
  - fomine3 6y ago
    Web-based is big feature who read articles in original website rather than reader itself.
- ddoolin 6y ago
  I stopped reading all the feeds I had after they killed Reader. I couldn't get back into it after having used it for years.
- nxtbl 6y ago
  First I felt anger about the coming closure. Then I went thru and tried all the competitors, new and old. Quickly a few rose over what GR ever was and of them I settled with Inoreader - been a happy, paying customer ever since. GR was holding down the evolution of feed readers by keeping theirs free. That was what, 5 million users not paying anybody for the service? When it was gone, things started moving forward again, fast. So actually, it's good that they closed GR.

camjohnson26 6y ago

Google inbox was the last Google product I used and easily the best. Completely got rid of my inbox clutter and gave the ability to snooze emails.

polishdude20 6y ago

What sort of email client would you recommend instead?

kerng 6y ago
I cant believe I'm saying this but Outlook. I used to not like Outlook at work, but when I worked for a startup they used GSuites and the Google mail experience is so bad I honestly couldn't believe that anyone would be using it. Threads are mixed together when multiple people reply its impossible to read content anymore and they do also change the formatting of content which puzzled me the most. Maybe for people that only ever used Gmail it's okay, because they are used to its weirdness and have never seen a more structured and visually appealing way to read email.
- jyrkesh 6y ago
  Outlook for Desktop has its quirks, but it's still extremely usable and (mostly) performant, especially compared to any of the web-based mail clients out there.
- ryantgtg 6y ago
  I just changed from a job that used GSuite to one that uses Office 365. I think Outlook is total garbage. The desktop client especially, and the website is barely an improvement. I've gotten used to it in the last month, but I still think the threading UX (my main gripe at this point) is really poor. Maybe the lesson here is that if you use one of them for years, then the other seems really bad.
wcarron 6y ago
I actually just began the process of migrating away from Google about two weeks ago. I chose FastMail for my new email provider. It's $5/mo, but honestly, I'm fine paying that, solely to get Google out of my emails. I find their UI to be simple and clear. I enjoy the notes/calendar features that come with the email. Their mobile app works fine on my android phone, and the push notifications from the Fastmail calendar are relatively unobtrusive. Only downside so far was I had to cancel my NYTimes sub (honestly probably a plus) because it doesn't recognize the @fastmail.com domain as a valid email address. It's the only service I've had that problem with, including the important ones like banking, etc.

jyrkesh 6y ago

Weird for me to see all the love for Inbox in a thread about bloated webapps. I liked the Inbox UI a lot, but until it was spun down, I had an issue where each Inbox tab would eventually bloat up to 2-3 GBs. Considering I'd have 3 of those open, one for each of my Gmail accts, it quickly became something I couldn't use on my laptop (unless I refreshed each tab every couple hours).

IggleSniggle 6y ago
I never noticed that. Inbox was what got me to inbox zero, quickly. I also used it almost exclusively on my phone, however.
- jyrkesh 6y ago
  Yeah, the phone app was crazy fast, and having moved from Mailbox, I loved the ability to easily archive from notifications. Now that's Gmail standard, though

deckard1 6y ago

> it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google. Google has relied on their reputation in search to carry most of their products since the early 2000s, right up until Google Plus when things started to fall apart for them and people started to realize that Google is not the invincible Superman they pretended to be. Their "don't be evil" motto was a lie and not everything they touched turned to gold. In fact, it was almost always the opposite of that.

twblalock 6y ago
> you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google. It also introduced, and led to the broad adoption of, a few really nice features: truly effective spam filtering, conversation threading that actually works, and tags instead of folders (e.g. a message can have more than one tag, but it can only be in one folder). At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it.
- deckard1 6y ago
  > truly effective spam filtering I don't recall it being that much better than the competitors. And even today it seems like a coin toss as to whether an obviously spam email lands in the spam folder or not. Not to mention the seemingly shady backroom deals companies like Sendgrid, SES, etc. are making to ensure their emails get delivered to the inbox. That seems like an area ripe for corruption. > At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it. Anecdotal, but I very much preferred Thunderbird to Gmail, and was using it up until 2010 or so. Nowadays I use K-9 Mail (Android) where I need to and try to avoid the disaster that is modern email as much as possible.
- philsnow 6y ago
  > conversation threading that actually works Gmail's "threading" is probably its worst sin (beating out its weird IMAP interface). When I started using Gmail, my other mail client was mutt, but every other client at the time showed replies to email threads properly as a tree. As an aside, you could argue that email conversations should look like a DAG (since you could totally quote multiple emails and have multiple In-Reply-To headers, why not) but I'm not aware of any clients that did that. Gmail went a third way, completely linearizing a thread into a "conversation". This view makes it harder to have discourse over email: if you want to make sure to split a conversation and have both forks get addressed, you have to change the subject line to un-thread replies to your message.

istillwritecode 6y ago

I was a Google employee from 2005 to 2018. I HATED inbox, and I certainly wasn't alone. It divided users into two pieces, and the real issue was Google tried to force it on users rather than make it an option.