5 ms·

If you're a heavy email user, you should not be using webmail. You should be using a real email client.

jzb 15y ago
Gmail was actually OK for heavy use for a long time. And I've never found a mail client that I actually like - more like clients that suck less than others.
stevenleeg 15y ago
What argument do you have to support this? What can a native client do that a web-based one could not?
- a3_nm 15y ago
  I'm currently using a setup where I can see incoming mail in a taskbar (unread count and subject), press Win-o to spawn mutt, enter to open first unread, z to archive, and qq<enter> to close mutt. With this, a lot of email is dealt with in six keystrokes and under two seconds total (no interruption in workflow). I'm not saying that you wouldn't be able to do this with a web-based mail client, but I think that the machinery to do that would be less natural. (My sense of what is natural might be warped, though.) Also, there is much to be said about the ability to customize your mail client to suit your needs. The very fact that people are complaining about Gmail's new design shows that a lot of people are relying on Google to tell them how they should manage their email, and try to adapt their needs to the tool rather than the other way around. This is not a technical limitation of web-based mail clients, but most webmails I know aren't really hackable.
  - mjschultz 15y ago
    > I'm not saying that you wouldn't be able to do this with a web-based mail client. In fact, using gmail should take fewer strokes than that. Assuming you have a keyboard shortcut to spawn a gmail window, enter will take you to the first message, and 'e' will archive that message. Command-Q/Alt-F4 to quit. Labels can be applied with an 'l' and the label name, next/last message is 'n'/'p'. The full list of keyboard shortcuts is available here: https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6594 https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6594 It would, of course, be better if they let you customize the shortcuts and sped up the loading of the initial page.
    - Stratoscope 15y ago
      You can customize the keyboard shortcuts. Go to Labs and enable Custom Keyboard Shortcuts, then go to town! I changed a bunch of my shortcuts, for example an operation I do quite often is "select all unread, them mark as read." But I couldn't remember the shortcuts they assigned - they didn't seem mnemonic at all. I changed them to SU for Select Unread and MR for Mark Read. Bingo!
    - nkurz 15y ago
      I'm not sure it's universal, but I have "Custom keyboard shortcuts" available under Labs that let's me customize as desired. Click on the non-intuitive gear-shaped icon in the upper right corner to check if it's there for you too.
    - a3_nm 15y ago
      > It would, of course, be better if they let you customize the shortcuts and sped up the loading of the initial page. Those were the main things I had in mind (along with adequately customizable desktop notifications). As for shortcut customizations, the Labs feature isn't as good as a configuration file in my opinion (slower to edit, harder to share, harder to diff, etc.). As for the loading of the initial page, I still wonder why it takes so long... You could probably get a nice setup by keeping a Gmail window open and assigning a shortcut in your WM to display this window, but it's not a common feature in WMs.
- JohnTHaller 15y ago
  Properly working right-click and click and drag for starters. Neither of those exist in Gmail.
btilly 15y ago
If you're a heavy email user who uses your email from multiple machines, an efficient webmail is perfect.
- dredmorbius 15y ago
  No, you use offlineimap to dump the mail to the host(s) you need to access it from, and GET SHIT DONE. Or you aggregate the mail to a single system you access via SSH and GET SHIT DONE. So long as you're using Web protocols to talk to your mail, cut out the complexity of the browser and leverage ssh & screen. Similarly, if you deal with mail from multiple systems, you can relay/forward it, or aggregate it via multiple retrieval systems (offlineimap is great and synchronizes sent/read mail from numerous locations), but older POP protocols can also work) I have a daily mailstream that runs in the thousands of messages (many boxes, much complaining, many people, other stuff). I need an email system that surfaces stuff that matters, fast, effectively, and efficiently, and lets me find, process, and adjudicate mail practically. If you've never used an efficient and powerful console/CLI mail client such as mutt or mh, you have no idea of the power this provides.
  - enneff 15y ago
    You can't just say "No." It's not rational. Plenty of Googlers get thousands of messages per day and they use Gmail. There are filters and importance heuristics built into Gmail to help with huge volumes of email. To say "nope, you can't do it that way," flies in the face of reality.
    - dredmorbius 15y ago
      I can filter out the stuff that I don't necessarily need to look at with GMail. What I can't do is invoke programmatic tools on the web interface itself (at least not without learning a slew of web API stuff). As opposed to being able to process my local Maildirs with shell tools. How do you, say, generate stats or view diffs on 84,800 gmail messages? I can do that, trivially, with mutt (tags and commands/pipes) or from the shell outside of mutt. I still find mutt's filtering notation (~f ~t ~N ~U ~d ... ) to be far more useful and far faster for most use-cases than GMail. I'm accessing that corpus via both tools right now. Mutt is generally the more useful of the two. One of the advantages, again, of offlineimap is that I've got the option of doing either. And while I'll fully admit that there are some mails for which a full GUI client is more useful, plain text still wins in most instances. And even where I'm not in mutt (say, on an Android device), straight text virtually always wins. I'll also admit to using GMail's filter rules to classify my mail, though they have problems, most notably the inability to un-archive specific messages, or to re-order / order filters at all. At least so far as I've discovered. They're still generally better than Microsoft's pants mail rules.
dasil003 15y ago
Disagree completely. I have yet to find a mail client that pairs Gmail's keyboard shortcuts for rapid mail processing with a decent GUI (not pretty, but extremely utilitarian). I use labels heavily, I use multi-stars, and I control everything by the keyboard. I guess the old-school UNIX mail clients can match the keyboard efficiency, but they don't have as useful a GUI. Maybe if I was on Linux there is a client to prove me wrong, but I'm on OS X, so an X GUI is not going to cut it.
sliverstorm 15y ago
I'm not going to go so far as to say "should", but I will throw in that I use Gmail for personal use (1-5 emails per day) and Outlook at my day job. Outlook 2010 has proven itself stable & valuable when I am getting 100+ emails per day and keeping many of them, as it is pretty good at managing a lot of email. (If you are big on "Inbox Zero" that's not an important feature, but here email backlogs often serve as another type of reference, complimenting our wikis. It sounds awful, but in practice you wouldn't really want to commit a lot of information to a wiki that is priceless for a week and trash thereafter)
- a3_nm 15y ago
  Huh? Keeping email backlog for reference and inbox zero aren't mutually exclusive. Why would you keep this backlog in your inbox?

jzb 15y ago

Gmail was actually OK for heavy use for a long time. And I've never found a mail client that I actually like - more like clients that suck less than others.

stevenleeg 15y ago

What argument do you have to support this? What can a native client do that a web-based one could not?

a3_nm 15y ago
I'm currently using a setup where I can see incoming mail in a taskbar (unread count and subject), press Win-o to spawn mutt, enter to open first unread, z to archive, and qq<enter> to close mutt. With this, a lot of email is dealt with in six keystrokes and under two seconds total (no interruption in workflow). I'm not saying that you wouldn't be able to do this with a web-based mail client, but I think that the machinery to do that would be less natural. (My sense of what is natural might be warped, though.) Also, there is much to be said about the ability to customize your mail client to suit your needs. The very fact that people are complaining about Gmail's new design shows that a lot of people are relying on Google to tell them how they should manage their email, and try to adapt their needs to the tool rather than the other way around. This is not a technical limitation of web-based mail clients, but most webmails I know aren't really hackable.
- mjschultz 15y ago
  > I'm not saying that you wouldn't be able to do this with a web-based mail client. In fact, using gmail should take fewer strokes than that. Assuming you have a keyboard shortcut to spawn a gmail window, enter will take you to the first message, and 'e' will archive that message. Command-Q/Alt-F4 to quit. Labels can be applied with an 'l' and the label name, next/last message is 'n'/'p'. The full list of keyboard shortcuts is available here: https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6594 https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6594 It would, of course, be better if they let you customize the shortcuts and sped up the loading of the initial page.
  - Stratoscope 15y ago
    You can customize the keyboard shortcuts. Go to Labs and enable Custom Keyboard Shortcuts, then go to town! I changed a bunch of my shortcuts, for example an operation I do quite often is "select all unread, them mark as read." But I couldn't remember the shortcuts they assigned - they didn't seem mnemonic at all. I changed them to SU for Select Unread and MR for Mark Read. Bingo!
  - nkurz 15y ago
    I'm not sure it's universal, but I have "Custom keyboard shortcuts" available under Labs that let's me customize as desired. Click on the non-intuitive gear-shaped icon in the upper right corner to check if it's there for you too.
  - a3_nm 15y ago
    > It would, of course, be better if they let you customize the shortcuts and sped up the loading of the initial page. Those were the main things I had in mind (along with adequately customizable desktop notifications). As for shortcut customizations, the Labs feature isn't as good as a configuration file in my opinion (slower to edit, harder to share, harder to diff, etc.). As for the loading of the initial page, I still wonder why it takes so long... You could probably get a nice setup by keeping a Gmail window open and assigning a shortcut in your WM to display this window, but it's not a common feature in WMs.
JohnTHaller 15y ago
Properly working right-click and click and drag for starters. Neither of those exist in Gmail.

btilly 15y ago

If you're a heavy email user who uses your email from multiple machines, an efficient webmail is perfect.

dredmorbius 15y ago
No, you use offlineimap to dump the mail to the host(s) you need to access it from, and GET SHIT DONE. Or you aggregate the mail to a single system you access via SSH and GET SHIT DONE. So long as you're using Web protocols to talk to your mail, cut out the complexity of the browser and leverage ssh & screen. Similarly, if you deal with mail from multiple systems, you can relay/forward it, or aggregate it via multiple retrieval systems (offlineimap is great and synchronizes sent/read mail from numerous locations), but older POP protocols can also work) I have a daily mailstream that runs in the thousands of messages (many boxes, much complaining, many people, other stuff). I need an email system that surfaces stuff that matters, fast, effectively, and efficiently, and lets me find, process, and adjudicate mail practically. If you've never used an efficient and powerful console/CLI mail client such as mutt or mh, you have no idea of the power this provides.
- enneff 15y ago
  You can't just say "No." It's not rational. Plenty of Googlers get thousands of messages per day and they use Gmail. There are filters and importance heuristics built into Gmail to help with huge volumes of email. To say "nope, you can't do it that way," flies in the face of reality.
  - dredmorbius 15y ago
    I can filter out the stuff that I don't necessarily need to look at with GMail. What I can't do is invoke programmatic tools on the web interface itself (at least not without learning a slew of web API stuff). As opposed to being able to process my local Maildirs with shell tools. How do you, say, generate stats or view diffs on 84,800 gmail messages? I can do that, trivially, with mutt (tags and commands/pipes) or from the shell outside of mutt. I still find mutt's filtering notation (~f ~t ~N ~U ~d ... ) to be far more useful and far faster for most use-cases than GMail. I'm accessing that corpus via both tools right now. Mutt is generally the more useful of the two. One of the advantages, again, of offlineimap is that I've got the option of doing either. And while I'll fully admit that there are some mails for which a full GUI client is more useful, plain text still wins in most instances. And even where I'm not in mutt (say, on an Android device), straight text virtually always wins. I'll also admit to using GMail's filter rules to classify my mail, though they have problems, most notably the inability to un-archive specific messages, or to re-order / order filters at all. At least so far as I've discovered. They're still generally better than Microsoft's pants mail rules.

dasil003 15y ago

Disagree completely. I have yet to find a mail client that pairs Gmail's keyboard shortcuts for rapid mail processing with a decent GUI (not pretty, but extremely utilitarian). I use labels heavily, I use multi-stars, and I control everything by the keyboard. I guess the old-school UNIX mail clients can match the keyboard efficiency, but they don't have as useful a GUI. Maybe if I was on Linux there is a client to prove me wrong, but I'm on OS X, so an X GUI is not going to cut it.

sliverstorm 15y ago

I'm not going to go so far as to say "should", but I will throw in that I use Gmail for personal use (1-5 emails per day) and Outlook at my day job. Outlook 2010 has proven itself stable & valuable when I am getting 100+ emails per day and keeping many of them, as it is pretty good at managing a lot of email. (If you are big on "Inbox Zero" that's not an important feature, but here email backlogs often serve as another type of reference, complimenting our wikis. It sounds awful, but in practice you wouldn't really want to commit a lot of information to a wiki that is priceless for a week and trash thereafter)

a3_nm 15y ago
Huh? Keeping email backlog for reference and inbox zero aren't mutually exclusive. Why would you keep this backlog in your inbox?