4 ms·

Why are you even using the Gmail as your mail app?

by vachina 7mo ago

al_borland 7mo ago
The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible to totally migrate away from. On top of that, since Google does their own thing, it doesn’t fit well into standard IMAP that most clients use. Sparrow made Gmail a great experience, but Google bought it and shut it down. I’m still rather bitter about that. It’s the only email client that actually made me enjoy email.
- asutekku 7mo ago
  Spark is a good replacement for Sparrow.
  - al_borland 7mo ago
    I just checked out a video. I don’t think it’ll do it for me. What I liked about Sparrow is it made email feel more like Messages or Twitter. Going back and forth in email didn’t feel so formal. I didn’t see that in Spark. They also seem to be leaning really hard into AI, which is a bit of a turn off.
- ninjagoo 7mo ago
  > The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible to totally migrate away from. Not that hard. Get new email, autoforward old email to new. In old email, set reply-to as new email. After suitable time has elapsed, disable old email.
  - hallway_monitor 7mo ago
    I hate to say it but you are right. It might be finally time to cut the gcord
  - al_borland 7mo ago
    This doesn’t solve the root of the problem. Google is still the backbone of a significant amount of the email and no meaningful progress would be made toward the day when I could delete the Google account. It would require systematically changing my email at the 300+ sites I’m aware of, assuming they allow that, or deleting the account if they allow that. I’ve been making efforts here and it’s painful. Many companies don’t have good systems for that, if any at all. Even big companies like Amazon and Sony, I was told to just abandon old accounts and let them hang out there forever… I had duplicate Audible and PlayStation accounts. No way to delete them. I found this particularly upsetting with Sony, considering how many times they’ve been hacked. On some sites I also ended up in captcha purgatory. Then there are the hundreds more who have my email somewhere. I tied to change my email 13 years ago. My own mother still sends to my old gmail account. I think she used the new one a few times, but do I really want to nag my 70 year old mother about using the wrong address? My dad is the only one who reliably uses it, because he uses his contacts app properly. Over a decade and the progress has been almost non-existent. All this effort did was make email and logins harder to manage by spreading it out. The pragmatic approach is to go back to Gmail, since most stuff is still there. I don’t want to be in bed with Google, but at least it’s only one thing to think about. Thinking about it, my Gmail account is also my Apple ID. I think Apple only recently made an option available to change that, but it feels risky.
    - ribosometronome 7mo ago
      I changed my Amazon sign in a few weeks back, no real issue. I just popped over to Audible and there seems to be a pretty straight forward flow to changing your email, although I didn’t actually try it out. What issue did you have? Was it awhile back? Not trying to be contentious but curious / you may have some luck now if you struggled with it in the past. It’s certainly not trivial to just abandon one email for another, especially if you have been using the same for two decades.
      - al_borland 7mo ago
        I had 2 accounts. A legacy Audible account and my main Amazon account. The Audible account was created before Amazon bought them, and I think after the acquisition I just started using my Amazon account. My main Amazon account has all the Audible stuff I actually care about, as well as copies of the stuff on my legacy account, so I wouldn’t lose anything that mattered if they deleted it. My goal was to delete the legacy account and all my personal data related to it (which I believe is required by law in some places). I ended up on the phone with support and talked to them for quite a while. They said there was nothing that could be done. This was probably a year ago, Best I could do I guess is delete as much as I can, if they allow it, change the email to a 10 minute email, and then let it go. This is what I had to do for Papa John’s last week and a couple other places, but I’d rather my account actually be deleted so I don’t have to worry about a future data breach on an account I would no longer be able to get into. I don’t know how their database is setup, if I change something I can see, is it actually gone or does the DB keep a history? There are a lot of unknowns that make me uncomfortable with just abandoning an account. With Sony it was worse. At least Amazon talked to me. Similar situation with 2 accounts. Their website said to call to have your account deleted. I called, waited on hold for 40 minutes, then was told they couldn’t do it. They hung up on me while I was trying to tell them their website said to call the number. This past weekend I migrated out of 1Password, which I had been using for 18 years. That was a fairly big job. The export/import did OK, but I still had to go one-by-one through 600+ entires to sure things up and fix little things. The main job is done, but I have a little more I’d like to do. The email job is bigger and has lots of other people involved, which is where the real challenge is, as they’re all different.
  - AndrewDucker 7mo ago
    And the accounts I have in many many places which use email address as a primary key?
    - g947o 7mo ago
      You don't need to update all of them. Nobody is asking you to give up your Gmail. You can start with the 20 sites you use the most frequently which takes an hour. For the rest, either take time to migrate or leave them in Gmail, since you don't actually need to visit those sites or get updates often.
- komali2 7mo ago
  I've not had issues plugging Gmail into Thunderbird, aquamail, k-9 mail, maybe you could try one of those?
  - al_borland 7mo ago
    The issues I had (granted this was probably a decade ago), was that Gmail uses tags and IMAP uses folders. The translation there always felt messy and cumbersome. To me, this is why I felt Gmail wasn’t good in generic mail clients and really needed one built for Gmail. Maybe all those apps have since updated to natively support all Gmail’s features, but that is also a cat and mouse game with all the stuff they try that doesn’t fit neatly into established mail protocols.
    - isaachinman 7mo ago
      I can confirm that basically all third-party apps have to handle this "Gmail weirdness" and come up with an abstraction layer to make Gmail IMAP accounts play nicely with "regular" IMAP accounts.
- wafflemaker 7mo ago
  >The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible You can use mobile Thunderbird with a Gmail account.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- g947o 7mo ago
  It's possible and I migrated almost all my emails from Outlook and Gmail. That's two services. I still have those accounts and occasionally check for emails from old contacts or service emails, but on a daily basis I don't interact with Gmail at all.
- tiberious726 7mo ago
  I still use emacs gnus with Gmail. You need a token instead of old fashioned imap auth, but it works fine

Why are you even using the Gmail as your mail app?

by vachina 7mo ago

Why are you even using the Gmail as your mail app?

The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible to totally migrate away from. On top of that, since Google does their own thing, it doesn’t fit well into standard IMAP that most clients use. Sparrow made Gmail a great experience, but Google bought it and shut it down. I’m still rather bitter about that. It’s the only email client that actually made me enjoy email.

asutekku 7mo ago
Spark is a good replacement for Sparrow.
- al_borland 7mo ago
  I just checked out a video. I don’t think it’ll do it for me. What I liked about Sparrow is it made email feel more like Messages or Twitter. Going back and forth in email didn’t feel so formal. I didn’t see that in Spark. They also seem to be leaning really hard into AI, which is a bit of a turn off.
ninjagoo 7mo ago
> The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible to totally migrate away from. Not that hard. Get new email, autoforward old email to new. In old email, set reply-to as new email. After suitable time has elapsed, disable old email.
- hallway_monitor 7mo ago
  I hate to say it but you are right. It might be finally time to cut the gcord
- al_borland 7mo ago
  This doesn’t solve the root of the problem. Google is still the backbone of a significant amount of the email and no meaningful progress would be made toward the day when I could delete the Google account. It would require systematically changing my email at the 300+ sites I’m aware of, assuming they allow that, or deleting the account if they allow that. I’ve been making efforts here and it’s painful. Many companies don’t have good systems for that, if any at all. Even big companies like Amazon and Sony, I was told to just abandon old accounts and let them hang out there forever… I had duplicate Audible and PlayStation accounts. No way to delete them. I found this particularly upsetting with Sony, considering how many times they’ve been hacked. On some sites I also ended up in captcha purgatory. Then there are the hundreds more who have my email somewhere. I tied to change my email 13 years ago. My own mother still sends to my old gmail account. I think she used the new one a few times, but do I really want to nag my 70 year old mother about using the wrong address? My dad is the only one who reliably uses it, because he uses his contacts app properly. Over a decade and the progress has been almost non-existent. All this effort did was make email and logins harder to manage by spreading it out. The pragmatic approach is to go back to Gmail, since most stuff is still there. I don’t want to be in bed with Google, but at least it’s only one thing to think about. Thinking about it, my Gmail account is also my Apple ID. I think Apple only recently made an option available to change that, but it feels risky.
  - ribosometronome 7mo ago
    I changed my Amazon sign in a few weeks back, no real issue. I just popped over to Audible and there seems to be a pretty straight forward flow to changing your email, although I didn’t actually try it out. What issue did you have? Was it awhile back? Not trying to be contentious but curious / you may have some luck now if you struggled with it in the past. It’s certainly not trivial to just abandon one email for another, especially if you have been using the same for two decades.
    - al_borland 7mo ago
      I had 2 accounts. A legacy Audible account and my main Amazon account. The Audible account was created before Amazon bought them, and I think after the acquisition I just started using my Amazon account. My main Amazon account has all the Audible stuff I actually care about, as well as copies of the stuff on my legacy account, so I wouldn’t lose anything that mattered if they deleted it. My goal was to delete the legacy account and all my personal data related to it (which I believe is required by law in some places). I ended up on the phone with support and talked to them for quite a while. They said there was nothing that could be done. This was probably a year ago, Best I could do I guess is delete as much as I can, if they allow it, change the email to a 10 minute email, and then let it go. This is what I had to do for Papa John’s last week and a couple other places, but I’d rather my account actually be deleted so I don’t have to worry about a future data breach on an account I would no longer be able to get into. I don’t know how their database is setup, if I change something I can see, is it actually gone or does the DB keep a history? There are a lot of unknowns that make me uncomfortable with just abandoning an account. With Sony it was worse. At least Amazon talked to me. Similar situation with 2 accounts. Their website said to call to have your account deleted. I called, waited on hold for 40 minutes, then was told they couldn’t do it. They hung up on me while I was trying to tell them their website said to call the number. This past weekend I migrated out of 1Password, which I had been using for 18 years. That was a fairly big job. The export/import did OK, but I still had to go one-by-one through 600+ entires to sure things up and fix little things. The main job is done, but I have a little more I’d like to do. The email job is bigger and has lots of other people involved, which is where the real challenge is, as they’re all different.
- AndrewDucker 7mo ago
  And the accounts I have in many many places which use email address as a primary key?
  - g947o 7mo ago
    You don't need to update all of them. Nobody is asking you to give up your Gmail. You can start with the 20 sites you use the most frequently which takes an hour. For the rest, either take time to migrate or leave them in Gmail, since you don't actually need to visit those sites or get updates often.
komali2 7mo ago
I've not had issues plugging Gmail into Thunderbird, aquamail, k-9 mail, maybe you could try one of those?
- al_borland 7mo ago
  The issues I had (granted this was probably a decade ago), was that Gmail uses tags and IMAP uses folders. The translation there always felt messy and cumbersome. To me, this is why I felt Gmail wasn’t good in generic mail clients and really needed one built for Gmail. Maybe all those apps have since updated to natively support all Gmail’s features, but that is also a cat and mouse game with all the stuff they try that doesn’t fit neatly into established mail protocols.
  - isaachinman 7mo ago
    I can confirm that basically all third-party apps have to handle this "Gmail weirdness" and come up with an abstraction layer to make Gmail IMAP accounts play nicely with "regular" IMAP accounts.
wafflemaker 7mo ago
>The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible You can use mobile Thunderbird with a Gmail account.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
g947o 7mo ago
It's possible and I migrated almost all my emails from Outlook and Gmail. That's two services. I still have those accounts and occasionally check for emails from old contacts or service emails, but on a daily basis I don't interact with Gmail at all.
tiberious726 7mo ago
I still use emacs gnus with Gmail. You need a token instead of old fashioned imap auth, but it works fine