Does it automatically filter my email into bins for primary, promotions, social, and updates? Cause that is the single most useful feature offered by Gmail that I have yet to find elsewhere.

I'm not talking about manually tagging, setting up, and filtering all incoming email before my inbox can self-organize. I mean automatically. Only show me the true primary items in my inbox from the jump. Everything else can wait.

In the absence of this feature my inbox becomes a torrent of incoming mail that is far harder to manage and prioritize. I keep my inbox at "zero" and I can completely understand why other people give up and let their inbox be overrun. This feature is essential for me.

Mash that unsubscribe button my dude.

I unsubscribe aggressively. I keep my inbox well maintained, but that's still not the feature I'm talking about.

My work sends me several shipping notifications a day, but they are not priorities. They are emails to be reviewed later in the day. I don't want push notifications for them. I don't want them in my primary inbox. Gmail (without me telling it to) puts them in the "updates" tab.

Same for the promotional emails that come in. They go in "promotions".

If I get a 2FA email or an update on a social website they are sorted in the "social" tab without my having to set anything up.

This is extraordinarily helpful for managing my email, and it is absent in every client I have tried.

Exactly. I do unsubscribe--perhaps not as aggressively as I should--but there's a ton of stuff I may want to be aware of that I don't want polluting my primary mailbox. Sometimes I even shift them to my primary tab but, in general, I'm happy with keeping my primary to stuff that I generally do mostly care about and have a few other categories I care about to varying degrees.

Shouldn't updates go to "social", and 2fa - to inbox?

This has been my strategy. I've had location history turned off since they introduced the tabbed inbox because for some reason the only way to turn off the tabs was to never save my location history. Not sure how those features got co-mingled but...One inbox feels much nicer. I don't get a ton of email though.

I don't want to unsubscribe from everything that I might not be interested in at the moment but may want to skim now and then to various degrees. I find gmail is very effective for that sort of thing. I find gmail's tabs pretty useful.

Maybe just me but I’d rather have and triage a single inbox instead of several. “Oh it’s in my social inbox that’s why I didn’t see it for 5 days”.

fwiw, you can easily see the contents of these tabs from your inbox. Each tab shows a preview of their two most recent emails, so you can easily monitor the activity. I check them directly 1-2 times a day with a single click. Things rarely get overlooked.

It's a pretty elegant design, which is why I'm so frustrated that Gmail has been the only service where I have found comparable functionality. I'd like to move away from reliance on Google.

No it doesn’t.

But luckily you’re about 5 email filter rules away from your ideal setup.

yes. Fastmail can "automatically" do that, if you configure it to have those rules.

If I configure my rules today and then tomorrow I sign up for a new site do I have to amend my rules to also filter the new site? Because that's too much manual management. It's not a lot for a single site, yes, but x10 new sites a month it is too much. It's death by 1,000 cuts.

I don't ever have to do it with Gmail, and that is a tremendous amount of time saved. It is a lifesaver.

If the email body contains the word unsubscribe, send it to the promotional folder.

One rule to rule them all.

And then my banking updates go into promotions. Along with notifications I set up on streaming sites, and newsletters, and patreon posts. It's not that simple.

Someone creating a more intuitive, graph-based UI for rules would be good, otherwise it’s easy to get lost in the overlapping mess, like you have to run the ‘bank email’ rule run before the ‘promotion’ rule, but after the ‘important’ rule.

Gmail’s auto-sorting is extremely simple to look at, but is out of the user’s control, it’s like a secretary handling your letters instead of a predictable system

I receive promotions from my bank, but only because they bothered to ask my email, other banks spam robocalls.

You can create one thematic alias and give it as your email to 1000 sites that belong to that category, they all will send millions messages to that alias.

> Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates?

This is where email MUAs[0] shine. Mail user agents such as Thunderbird[1], KMail[2], Apple Mail[3], and nmh[4] (for hard-core Unix command-line aficionados) support filtering and automatic categorization to varying degrees.

All while being mail service agnostic.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_client

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird

2 - https://apps.kde.org/kmail2/

3 - https://support.apple.com/mail

4 - https://www.nongnu.org/nmh/

I've tried Thunderbird, Kmail, and Apple's client, and maybe I just have too many emails, but these apps completely crumble under my inbox. I don't see any "shine" with these third-party clients. Mimestream, my favorite email client on macOS, "just works" because it uses the Gmail API. It seems like Fastmail made JMAP, but this doesn't seem widely supported.

Are there mail clients that actually support things like priority inbox and categorization that don't simply crumble for large inboxes?

> Are there mail clients that actually support things like priority inbox and categorization that don't simply crumble for large inboxes?

Of the exemplars listed, nmh is by far the most flexible and capable of handling large inboxes. The reason why is that it is a set of command-line executables which can be scripted with whatever language you prefer. So prioritization and/or categorization is a matter of how one wants each to be defined.

I used IMAP via fetchmail[0] with nmh to allow multiple MUAs (on different machines and/or OSs) access/management to the same email accounts with great success. IIRC, for nmh I used lynx to render HTML messages and xview to display image attachments. Other attachments were processed separately but had similar workflows.

0 - https://www.fetchmail.info/fetchmail-man.html

Thunderbird does not seem to have auto-categorization from what I see, just filtering. Neither does KMail. Unless you’re referring to some addons? For apple mail you have to add it on each client. And a lot of comments are about how to disable it because it categorizes wrong.

It’s not that making rules isn’t possible, it’s that it’s done automatically, out of the box, correctly by Gmail.

Ahem, https://neomutt.org/

Good call!

I have not used mutt myself, but have heard great things about it and it is definitely worthy of consideration.

Frankly I've tried quite a few clients and haven't found one I can settle for. I used Mailspring for a while because it was close to being a gmail experience, but that went some kind of bad way I don't remember and I don't think is developed anymore.

I want a client that is simple but flexible by default, extensible, themeable would be nice, and for the love of god has key shortcuts for everything THAT CAN BE CHANGED. LOOKING AT YOU, THUNDERBIRD.

Thunderbird is almost usable for me, but the UI is just absolutely abysmal. The kicker is not being able to change key shortcuts, making Thunderbird unusable for me.

One of the handy things that Fastmail (among other providers) lets you do is set up a wildcard email address, so literallyanything@mydomain goes to a specific folder. Any time I want to sign up for some service I don't trust, I'll give them a specific email address. Long-standing practice, blah blah. Also, as my sibling said, "mash that unsubscribe button".

Less practically, it is pretty obnoxious for you to act superior about inbox 0, while pretending not to judge people who "let their inbox be overrun", and at the same time refuse to accept any solution to your inbox that isn't fully automatic. There are lots of options available to you besides leaning entirely on Google's machines of loving grace watching over your inbox.

I think seeing superiority or obnoxiousness in the comment you replied to was a pretty large reading error on your part. The tone was sympathetic to people whose inboxes receive more than they can handle.

The last sentence of your comment sounds quite condescending.

The part of their comment I quoted is not particularly subtle in my opinion. It undercuts the superficially "sympathetic" tone. If they actually intended it to be sympathetic they should be more careful in their phrasing. I'm skeptical.

GP post is correct; you are reading way too far into it. Zero superiority intended.

I'm stating it as a style of how I manage my inbox. It's not some big achievement on my part. It's how I stop from feeling overwhelmed by my inbox. Everyone else can do whatever they want.

It's not like I'm that loyal to Gmail. But I've yet to find an alternative that replaces this functionality that I've become accustomed to. It's why I'm asking so many questions of people in this thread.

>The tone was sympathetic to people whose inboxes receive more than they can handle.

But categorization doesn't reduce volume of received messages and it remains more than they can handle.

Interesting to see people have such strong faith in Google's ability to filter. My experience is email from addresses marked safe ends up in the spam category. Wish you luck.

Ironically my experience with Fastmail was that every email ended up in spam. This included emails from myself, others from my own gmail, and even replies from people I'd emailed first. It was literally sending 100% of emails to spam. The spam filter setting was set to the most basic level, nothing aggressive, so I was forced to disable spam filtering completely. Luckily it was a new email so spam hasn't been an issue but that has slowly been changing.

I still love fastmail though. Top choice. But they do have quirks to work out even this many years in.

I want to second this. Love Fastmail but I'm seeing the same mails that I constantly mark as "not spam" go into spam again and again. Their spam filter needs a lot of work. Otherwise I got a solid workflow (inspired by Hey) set ujp that I haven't modified in years that works for me

(Chief Product Officer at Fastmail here.)

> every email ended up in spam. This included emails from myself, others from my own gmail, and even replies from people I'd emailed first.

It should go without saying, but that's definitely not the common (or expected!) experience. Our support team would be very happy to look into it for you: https://www.fastmail.com/support/

Normally when people see this kind of behaviour, it's because of one of the following: * They've connected an IMAP client that has its own spam filter turned on, and it's actually this moving all the messages to Spam, not Fastmail's spam filter. * They've accidentally mis-trained their personal filter by reporting email they want as spam.

Having said that, of course we can have issues on our end too — that's why we have a real human support team with the power to escalate to the relevant engineers.

Brand new email. Behaviour stopped when I disabled spam filter.

Good point about working with support. I’ll keep this in mind if I get around to re-enabling spam filters and experience the same behaviour.

I had to turn off that gmail feature, because to enable it you also have to enable the horrible AI stuff. So gmail is less useful to me now than it used to be. You can't have the good features (automatic categorization, reminders of plane flights) without the intrusive son-of-Clippy crap I can't stand.

Setting up your own filtering rules seems like a relatively tiny time investment compared to the productivity gains if you have a busy mail account. Other features that Gmail lack are IMO more important than magic filtering, like a proper threaded view, or not being pestered by their AI bullshit.

What's clever about the "promotions" tab being automatic is that it actually makes me want to read them on my own time. Before Gmail my old pattern was classify with read/delete/save. Commercial emails were usually deleted.

> Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates? Cause that is the single most useful feature offered by Gmail that I have yet to find elsewhere.

Surprising. I turned that off cause I found that to be yet another google nonsense. It did not filtered well and I simply hit unsubsribe for stuff I dont want.

it doesn't. I've been using fastmail for years and miss this, a lot.

This is the one great feature about Gmail I think.

But I haven’t touched Gmail in years, been on fastmail for about 6 years now.

I’ve solved this by using the fastmail-mcp plugin and have a skill that organises all my mails for me and highlights high priority ones. Works great - I run it every few days, takes about 5-10 minutes.

I guess everyone is different? That's one thing I hate about Gmail. I use Fastmail and funnel emails to different folders. I treat spam as a fact of life.

+1

When I migrated from Gmail to Fastmail years ago, I thought Fastmail felt... less featureful.

When I rarely visit my abandoned Gmail, I can't believe I put up with the clunkiness.

Lean software stands the test of time.

Fastmail hasn't had a noteworthy UI change ever.

Minor annoyances:

  - Clicking an iPhone notification opens the app, but never brings me to the actual email
  - It is difficult to unfold the full extended header section on iPhone
  - ...I can't think of more...

It saves my drafts, it's not annoying, it has a mobile app.

I might switch away for a solution that is more affordable when hosting emails for many family members and organisations. But for a handful, I really can't recommend it enough.

I use it with Spark on macOS and iOS (Spark Classic) and it just works. Archiving works fine, marking as spam actually moves and 'activates' Fastmail's training. There's email masks, aliases, the UI is always fast and responsive in the web view when I go there.

Have you had any issues with Spark or are there any downsides using it? I haven’t used Spark since I started using Fastmail and have been thinking about it

None that I've found. I think just make sure when you configure the account in Spark that the folders are set correctly (i.e. archive and spam folders are mapped to their folders in Fastmail) so you get the correct functionality from them.

The only thing I miss from Gmail is a "send and archive" button to save me a click when replying to emails.

Why are people accessing emails from the webUI. Email is SMTP and IMAP, use any number of clients to access your email.

I find myself using the web UI because it's much faster than MacOS Mail, which often gets a bit stuck when downloading new emails via IMAP. I'd prefer to use a native app, but it happened without me thinking - I just ended up going for the fastest option unconsciously.

Try Thunderbird. It's easy to set up IMAP to gmail, and it's very quick. Keep what you want on the server (or download and delete) and just never look at the web client again.

I wanted to use Thunderbird, but there is no Thunderbird for iOS (well, there is one in development, you can install it through TestFlight, but didn't work at all the last time I tried it). I try to use the same apps everywhere to have some consistency.

Probably the nothing to install experience. Every Android phone comes with Gmail and every device has a web browser. Do people have to install Gmail on iOS?

I'm using Thunderbird with POP3 accounts, download on my laptop then remove from the server, daily backups. My phone has K9 (the old one with the UI I like) and I never remove messages from the phone. When I send mail from the phone I bcc myself so I can see the message from my laptop later.

Why? Because I don't like to leave my mail forever on somebody's else server. They can lock me out at any time (it will probably never happen) and my mail is mine.

Would I recommend this to anybody? Of course not.

Is it a problem not to have access to all of my mail when I don't have my laptop with me? It never happened to be a problem and it's always less likely to be a problem because of all the messages that are exchanged outside email and on mobile first platforms, even for work.

iOS comes with a mail client. It connects to my exchange, gmail and Zoho accounts.

You don’t install gmail, you connect a mail client to it or visit it in a web browser.

This is obviously better, but until just now it never occurred to me that this would be the way iOS users would engage with gmail, since I've only ever used Android. I always thought the iOS built-in email app was just for Apple mail or something.

TIL. We really do live in separate bubbles.

And a great email client at that. Both iOS and macOS's. I can't imagine trading it for some web UI.

“Great” isn’t how I would describe it. Searching for “delivery” from my inbox, when the third email in my inbox has a literal subject line of “delivery notification”? Zero results.

It’s great if you never search for email I guess.

It used to break the search index sometimes, but I experienced it twice at most, and it searches instantly for me, never failed to find an e-mail I was looking for...

...from 5 accounts with at least a decade of history each, incl. my office e-mail.

The problem is the actual architecture Apple uses for search in iOS and macOS. Spotlight powers all of it, and it applications like Mail that need search, do so by donating data to spotlight for indexing.

But that means any spotlight bug is a mail search bug, and a settings search bug, and a “just launch this app” search bug, etc etc etc.

It also means that any bugs caused by one of these applications end up affecting them all. So if Contacts causes an indexer crash, none of your searches anywhere work any more. It’s a super fragile architecture. They did some work to split some of the plugins into separate processes but somehow it always ends up being insufficient.

At least on macOS there are some commands to blow away your spotlight index when it goes bad. On iOS you’re basically screwed unless you wipe and restore the OS.

There’s another nasty one I encountered where power loss on a mac mini with 4 external drives connected made one drive refuse to mount on that machine. All recommendations online were to nuke the OS and/or drive to get it to mount there again. It would mount on other machines fine. There’s some cache/index file buried (I think related to spotlight) that got corrupted. Nuked that file, drive mounted instantly again.

These types of things should stand as big massive red flashing warnings with all these locked down systems - as you point out, in certain situations on iOS you’re just stuffed.

The worst is that if you look at Console.app and stream error logs from the system processes, there's hundreds of error logs per minute being dumped out on a brand new system with nothing installed on it yet, including and especially from spotlight. There's bugs all over the place that some engineer at Apple thought enough to emit a log for, and the result is they just ship with the errors anyway. They only seem to care about 100% reproducible bugs, and even then they sometimes ship with them anyway. They don't seem to care about all these little unobservable issues that "only" log errors, even though 9 times out of 10, when a bug does become a reproducible/observable issue, there was an error log that was warning you about it the whole time.

If I took over Apple's software engineering, I would tell every engineer "None of you are working on features until a stock OS install has zero error/warning logs. No exceptions. Contribute to fixes or use your vacation time, but nobody touches anything until we get it all fixed. Then once that's done, nobody's allowed to work on features while there are open bugs in their backlog. No exceptions."

Totally agree. I hit another crazy iOS bug this morning I hadn't hit for a few months - search for an old email - specifically my old Ableton licence from 2022... Return to my inbox 20-30 mins later on that device and it's now full with every email returned from my earlier Ableton search. Open my email on any other machine (MacBook, iPad, etc.) and it shows correctly, but iOS will keep showing all those old emails until I manually move each one back to its original folder. Pretty annoying if they come from different folders, and deleting them deletes the original in the email account. Persists across reboots, so again clearly spotlight search borks out and wrecks the local mail index. It needs a "rebuild" button, like Mac Mail has to "solve" this.

When I open Gmail, whether an app or on the web, it already has the latest emails loaded. When I open Mail.app, I have to wait for them to download.

This is why Gmail is nicer in many areas.

> Do people have to install Gmail on iOS?

Why would Gmail be pre-installed on iOS?

They aren't sure, that's why they are asking..

Thank goodness, Gmail does not come on iOS. No other apps are pre installed except Apple's, and I am always very thankful for that when I set up a Samsung tablet as a kiosk and have to delete sponsored apps, AI apps, Spotify, Microsoft apps, Samsung apps, Google apps, kids apps...horrible experience.

The Apple Mail client works very well with Gmail. The only real negative is that it’s not true push email, though it is largely close enough.

The thing I miss most about macOS now that I’ve gone all-in on Linux is actually Apple Mail. It’s just a simple and clean Mail app.

My current choice is Evolution and I’ve had very good luck with it so far. But ultimately the best Mail experience is on my iPhone.

I was using Thunderbird/BetterBird, but now that a Windows client isn’t a requirement for me anymore, I much prefer Evolution. Thunderbird is a notable pain when it comes to an inability to reliably export/import your user profile to other machines. It’s also such a cluttered application and I find the calendar UI to be horrendous. Good luck using a trackpad to scroll through months of the year.

If your concern is just having access to your emails if someday shit hits the fan and you’re locked out, why no smtp ? Seems easier.

SMTP is to send mail and that's how I send it from my laptop and from my phone. POP3 is to read from a mailbox.

Or imap !

IMAP usually means that mail is stored on the provider server even if one can download and delete. Furthermore POP3 is a trivial protocol that could be operated via telnet before everybody went TLS.

The real reason I'm still using POP3 is that I'm using the mailboxes that are bundled with my domains. One on the registrars announced IMAP support a few days ago. All the others are still on POP3 probably because POP3 servers have been available since forever.

Thanks. I meant IMAP

A lot of providers don't give you imap anymore or it's an extra cost option. SMTP also comes with a ton of traps because of spam fighting measures.

Also monopolies and mobile devices and skill issues.

Which providers don’t give IMAP?

> Why are people accessing emails from the webUI. Email is SMTP and IMAP, use any number of clients to access your email.

Because the UX of most email clients is extremely bad when compared with the webui of these email providers.

It's also IMAP is an awful protocol with so many glaring issues its impossible for a modern client to paper over them. Fastmail invented JMAP but it doesn't seem to have taken off with any other providers.

>so many glaring issues

like what?

From memory, there are no bulk actions, so if you want to say select all emails and delete you have to send thousands of requests. If you want to rename a folder you have to send a request for every email in the folder. There is no way to set up filters that run server side, there is no way to get push notifications.

And probably a million other things that don’t hold up today.

Deletion is done by marking messages with deleted flag and then expunge to delete flagged messages. AIU rename exists: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3501#section-6.3.5

Push notifications: https://github.com/freswa/dovecot-xaps-plugin

Sending those thousands of requests is something your mail client does for you. Deleting 5000 emails takes a few minutes, but how often do you do that? I can select a bunch of emails in Thunderbird and just do stuff with it just fine.

For server side filters I just set them up in Fastmail using the web UI. That's the type of action I do once or twice a year, so totally OK to hop on over to the web app for just that.

I have no idea what you mean by 'push notifications'. I have Thunderbird open on my desktop, and it shows me when there is email. I have K9 on my smartphone, and it shows me when there is email (I don't have it set up to display notifications, but that seems possible). That's basically all I need to do email.

Try Mailspring. I’m a huge fan: https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring

That's an electron app. What does it offer that Thunderbird doesn't?

I would go further and ask what do electron apps offer in the way of improvements that WebApps don't.

In mobile, webview-based apps exist mostly because they provide more ways to gather data on users.

> I would go further and ask what do electron apps offer in the way of improvements that WebApps don't.

If there was a way to run Mailspring on the web, I’d switch in a minute! I’ve tried to port it one time, but it got a bit tricky.

Mailspring uses a native module for syncing the mail, which would have to run either on a server somewhere or in a web worker. I think the web worker makes more sense nowadays, and would make it an offline-first app, but there’s a catch: how do you connect to IMAP/SMTP from a web browser?

Running the sync engine on a server is possible, but you have to have a server. It could make sense, though, if you’re running your own email server and want a killer webmail app to go with it.

Thunderbird is great. I’ve been using it a long time, too, and feature-wise, I think Thunderbird is way ahead. I just find Mailspring a bit more... pleasant to use? And I think it’ll be an easier switch for people coming off Gmail Web, which is why I’m recommending it.

(Also... Thunderbird is not that different from an Electron app itself. It uses Gecko instead of Blink, and has a few bits of XUL here and there, but the core premise is the same. Though it doesn’t use React at least!)

Every desktop mail client is bad in its own way. And then I have to set it up on all computers I use. Web UI just works.

Guess you've tried every desktop mail client?

I only use one computer and my local mail app (macOS's in my case) just works. I can't imagine trading it for visiting some web site to read my email.

macOS mail app is a special type of terrible especially if you deal with multiple email accounts. Every os upgrade causes various bugs such as search index all of the sudden not working and you have to reset and reimport all your mailboxes

I've used Mail.app since 2004 and have not had any of those problems except searching using Spotlight have occasionally been broken over the years, but never searching within the app.

And I've had both multiple accounts various servers both private and work. And dozens of work-related role aliases which Mail.app correctly always used when replying. No problems there. Neither I have had to rebuild sqlite mail folder db, but did have some quirks first when work emails were transferred to Office365 which wanted to rename folders etc. nuisance, 2FA worked also worked fine since IIRC Mojave. I've had some addons MacGPG, sorting and maintenance scripts too. MacGPG does need some attention when upgrading though besides paying for subscription it moved time ago.

I've used also Thunderbird, mostly with linux. And used and tested whole lot of various clients since Elm was a thing -80's, then Pine, mutt etc.

The macOS Mail.app is fast reliable in my opinion, but sure there are things in its UX it could be yet improved. But still it's been long time among best and never broken or let me down over 20 years, both work and private use.

I agree. Mail.app is one of the buggiest pieces of software I have ever used. It has some nice features as well, especially the editor. But some of the bugs I have experienced were catastrophic, such as silently failing exports that appeared to have completed successfully (this was recently fixed after years).

Good for you. I've tried a few during the last 30 years and once Web UIs started being usable (after gmail), I use them if possible.

Because it is really nice. I prefer it to thunderbird/(apple) Mail.

I get the same interface on my own computer as when I go on some other machine.

This is the way. Use a tui client like alpine or mutt, and enjoy managing 100s of thousands of emails in ms. I feel physical pain when I have to see colleagues and acquaintances wait for several seconds in their heavy web interfaces. I can manipulate batches of emails with terminal tools and the power of Maildir.

I do the same, but with mu/mu4e in Emacs. Not having to open a browser to read email also helps with staying focused for me.

Because Fastmail has a fantastic Web UI, have been using it for years.

Nothing is more fantastic(er) than a native application handling multiple e-mail accounts without effort or lag.

Thunderbird and macOS mail are great for that. Supporting everything from GMail to personal mail servers, and everything in between.

What is Thunderbird written in. #lazyweb #nollm ;)

The amount of configuration required to rival what's available out of the box in Web clients (especially indexing, searching, filtering, blocking, etc.) is a bit too much for someone who isn't already interested in it. I tried GNUS in Emacs and a few TUI apps; I do like having all my emails accessible locally, but for day-to-day use, web clients are more convenient. I haven't tried Thunderbird or Outlook (if it still has a local version), though, so maybe I'd have all the conveniences I want there - but since I already have them in Fastmail, I just don't have an incentive to switch.

I migrated from gmail to Migadu. They have a webmail client, but they make a point that they Do Standards.

They also let you host as many domains as you like and the servers are all EU based.

Well I usually already have my browser open, and "Ctrl+T, 'fa', [enter]" loads up my email basically instantly. I don't want email notifications (or any notifications, really) so a local app just seems like it would introduce a lot of clunk for not much benefit.

I like using the webui because my mailbox is too large to pull down locally and it’s easier to handle through the web.

I also have it pulling to local clients that just keep a few messages. Maybe 30% of the time is webui.

Has worked well for me for 30+ years (substituting telneting in and using pine until webuis existed).

“Email in the cloud mainly” is a useful pattern.

>use any number of clients to access your email.

Your car can have any colour, as long as it is black.

All native email clients are stuck in 2005, lack most basic features, and have bugs not fixed in decades. Also, most providers have poor support for new IMAP features, such as NOTIFY.

I loved Mimestream when I worked at a place that was on Google.

https://mimestream.com/

But Mimestream is good specifically because it uses Gmail Sync API, not IMAP/SMTP.

50 dollars for an app on an OS which I don't use, when Telegram is free and works everywhere?

Name one feature (i.e. thing that requires client support, not UI) that's new in email since 2005 and that's also worth having.

JMAP.

Modern authentication.

S/MIME with cryptography that isn’t RSA.

Without IMAP NOTIFY email is almost unusable.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5465.html

It's from 2009.

Without managesieve (2010, https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5804/ ), any decent filtering is impossible. (And no, it's not supported by almost any email client)

JMAP has already been mentioned.

I also don't remember any email clients supporting carddav.

>not UI

Why not UI? UI is very important. Even such a basic thing as muting folders works like cr*ap in k9mail. Is it better in "fairemail"?

I never understood why anyone would want to download an application to do something as simple as checking email.

To have a copy of your emails on your device, for backup, and offline use.

A web UI can do that

The comment I was replying to was wondering why people installed apps to read email instead of using the browser based clients. So I don't understand your point ...?

You can have a copy of your emails for offline use in your browser.

Less so as a reliable backup.

To be clear, a "Web UI" usually refers to a desktop or mobile application whose user-interface is built with web technology (HTML, CSS, JS etc.) that is rendered using a webview component in the application. You don't refer to a website (even if it is a web-based application like GMail) as "Web UI". It is still called a website. And while you are right that browsers today can store data for offline use, nobody considers it good enough for a backup.

A web UI cannot do that. It is simply not possible.

Websites can work offline

Because native apps are faster, work when you aren't online, and are all around more pleasant to use.

> work when you aren't online,

...but why do you need that?

Why does it need to be that fast too?

I guess many more people here are real power-users of email than I would expect for a forum full of engineers lol

> - Clicking an iPhone notification opens the app, but never brings me to the actual email

I've been using fastmail on iOS for years and have never experienced this issue. Clicking from a notification opens up the email. Maybe there's a setting you can adjust?

Fastmail had a UI change a year ago, where they went all "rounded corner" and created unique rows for every message that weren't so easily sorted with Stylus CSS. I emailed them about the changes, and a few weeks later the messages were listed in a way that I could easily apply my own stylesheet again. They also acknowledged on their subreddit the UI change was not incredibly popular (even the CEO was "not enjoying" it) and they took some feedback and provided a few better UX customizations in the options.

At one point, Fastmail had an error parsing Unicode in misconfigured iCal files (Google Calendar showed events correctly) but after a short back-and-forth, they fixed it within a week.

Now, Google Calendar has had a problem with my organization's iCal files for the past four weeks. Submitting a bug report via the help community is very opaque and unhelpful (a la "Have you tried turning if off and on again?"). Fastmail loads the iCal correctly. I have no clue if Google is aware or when they'll ever fix it.

One huge productivity advantage to FM over Gmail? Sort by sender name. (This makes it so easy to bulk apply changes)

Setting up own domain has been straightforward. (It's a bit of work ensuring DNS records have DMARC/DKIM/SPF, but it's all in the FM checklist/documentation.) Setting up Python scripts to auto email me using app passwords has been straightforward. Creating aliases and throwaways is straightforward.

I have not regretted paying for email; specifically, Fastmail.

It's great when the source of revenue for a company is the user, rather than other companies that the user is being sold to. Too bad this is so rare these days.

Fastmail is great. I also use (and really like) Fairemail https://email.faircode.eu/

> Small (<30 MB)

The joy of modern apps...

I been using proton but the UI is just a little bit of a let down. missing things that just were natural on gmail and i never had to think about

dunno ok maybe I'll try fastmail

Agreed. Proton is not up to my personal standard.

That’s ok - they have a wonderful VPN service that I use every day.

I agree, it's one of my best value subscriptions. It's especially good if you host a lot of domains, you can link 100 custom domains to a single Fastmail account.

Fastmail is fast enough and has rich enough keyboard shortcuts that I stopped using mutt for it. It's very good.

my only problem with fastmail is their spam filtering is so bad. they mistake legit emails quite often

That's not exactly a reason to stick with gmail. Gmail will mark anything as spam.

I agree. Their spam filtering is absolute trash. I get 3-4 spam messages a day in my inbox. I file support tickets for it and they always tell me there is nothing they can do.

See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48380983

I disagree. Their spam filtering has been top notch for me. Sometimes spam does get through, but marking that as spam has made sure the next ones of the same are flagged correctly.

Lately LLM generated spam has fooled it more often, though. Let's see if that becomes a problem.

my problem is more like legit emails are marked as spam. which make me nervous if i miss anything in the Spam folder.

It's not. I wrote about this a couple times. Here's how it works: the personal spam filter kicks in after having trained on ~100-200 spam emails. You need to mark them as spam (you might want to use a filter initially if they all have a common pattern) and delete them regularly from the spam folder. Spam training kicks in only when you a spam message is deleted (to avoid training on false positives)

I went through the same phase when I first moved to Fastmail, and this is what customer support explained after some back-and-forth. I don't have spam in my Inbox any more (despite receiving ~20 spam emails per day)

Are you talking about false negatives? The problem I have is with false positives. It regularly throws important legit email into spam.

Just the other day it threw an invoice from AWS into spam! Regularly throws financial docs into spam. Like it’s hard for me to imagine how that happens.

Training a spam filter works both ways. Mark them as ‘not spam’ until it stops happening.

I never got a legit email end up in my Spam folder, so YMMV.

Fastmail also uses global blocklists and reputation scores that can override your training. Could also be the sending IP is shared with bulk senders.

Marking as "not spam" should help over time. If it does not, create a rule to always deliver from that domain. That is the only way to guarantee it never happens again.

Yes literally it threw an invoice from AWS into spam recently. Regularly throws financial docs into spam. Like you, i have a problem with false positives not false negatives.

I brought it up with support once and the domain was failing DMARC. Headers from the AWS email that has a spam score of 9.1! I don’t know much about email but something must be wrong there on Fastmails side.

x-sieve: CMU Sieve 3.0

X-Spam-known-sender: no

X-Spam-sender-reputation: 500 (none)

X-Spam-score: 9.1

X-Spam-hits: DCC_CHECK 1.1, HEADER_FROM_DIFFERENT_DOMAINS 0.249, HTML_MESSAGE 0.001, ME_SENDERREP_NEUTRAL 0.001, MIME_HTML_ONLY 0.1, MPART_ALT_DIFF 0.724, RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE -0.0001, RCVD_IN_MSPIKE_H4 0.001, RCVD_IN_MSPIKE_WL 0.001, SPF_HELO_NONE 0.001, SPF_PASS -0.001, T_REMOTE_IMAGE 0.01, URIBL_DBL_ABUSE_PHISH 7, LANGUAGES en, BAYES_USED none, SA_VERSION 4.0.1

X-Spam-source: IP='54.240.9.110', Host='a9-110.smtp-out.amazonses.com', Country='US', FromHeader='com', MailFrom='com'

X-Spam-charsets: subject='UTF-8', html='UTF-8'

> URIBL_DBL_ABUSE_PHISH 7

Hm...

Are you sure it was a legit invoice?

;-)

Plus one for Fastmail I’ve been using with a custom domain for years now and it’s great. I don’t use Google for anything at this point, though I’m sure they’re still tracking me somehow.

Actually occasionally fastmail initially loading seems to hold up for a while for me for some reason

The author literally mentioned they are in the process of migrating to Fastmail, but it sounds like you’re bringing it up as a new recommendation? Then you restated the reason they are moving away (overbearing AI features in your face) as if it wasn’t the crux of their argument? Then you touted how good Fastmail migration features are after the author stated they actually like the fact they are starting with a clean slate, and are undecided if they even want to migrate? Something smells fishy here my friend

Didn't you consider that the comment you're replying to was for the benefit of other readers not necessarily the OP? I found it useful and yes I did read both.

While GMail is horrible, FastMail is not great either. Their spam filtering is a joke - it was quite a decent on until they ruined it few years ago with some changes.

I have no alternatives to suggest besides doing your own email. It's way better than anything commercial, works the way you want it, and most importantly nowadays, it's not used to train a commercial AI.

I was quite surprised how much better search and spam filters are on fastmail. Both things I did not believe a small company could do better than Google, but I think they did.

I also find the interface better. I was also expecting Google to have resources for optimizing details, that a small company wouldn't get around to.

Fastmail also lets you e-mail a real person for help and they usually take it very seriously - e.g, they go look at logs before following up.

I personally find Fastmail's spam handling a lot worse than GMail's: and I get a lot more spam in my GMail address, due to it being a 22 year old address, which I still use for initial sign-ups, before then changing account emails to my fastmail one after a few months.

Very likely a lot of the difference is the types of email each address is getting.

First time I hear about signing up then change email trick. Does it help reducing spam?

I'd like to think it does, but honestly I have no idea as I have no way of comparing to not doing this.

I am not a Fastmail user but I completely doubt this. I have been using Gmail for 20 years and I have never seen a spam mail land in my inbox which has always impressed me. Everything else I have used from time to time does miss a few, which I guess it might be acceptable if you want to move to another host.

There's like 1 spam message in my Gmail inbox every day. Some of it is so obvious that an LLM running on a Raspberry Pi can correctly classify it. For example car insurance ads.

(My email address is on my home page. It's also my username on over 100 sites that I signed up for over 20 odd years.)

Are you kidding me about the spam? I have 3-4 spam emails land in my inbox every day on Fastmail. It's horrendous.

Doesn't Fastmail provide aliases?

Infinite email masks. Doesn't help much once your real email address is out there though.

Create a rule that moves messages with real email address to spam where they are deleted as soon as needed, then create tmp2026 alias to serve as your new default email address.

I have more than that on gmail and none in Fastmail. My gmail account is way more over the place than my FMs though.

Don’t try Fastmail’s family plan. It’s undercooked. Rest is all greatz

If only it was based in europe. Every few weeks i look into detaching from gmail and wonder if proton is the way to go

I can suggest having a look at Infomaniak: https://www.infomaniak.com/en/ksuite/service-mail

And with the kSuite, you have everything: file storage, chat, emails...

I have no involvement with the company, except as a happy customer for many years

Proton's being a bit slow and weird is totally worth it just for the privacy features. And it's slowly improving with time.

Agreed, I left Fastmail for Proton and am very happy with it. It improves/changes in fits and starts sometimes, but support is always great and overall I am happy with the usability, direction, pricing, etc.

I do wish ProtonMail handled labels/folders as one unified model like GMail does, it's so much simpler and more ergonomic. But I imagine hoping for a data model change like that is probably a pipe dream.

Well you can try Proton for free and see for yourself.

I've noticed that people either care about email being efficient and private, or they care about the comfortable bells and whistles of their existing inbox (and Gmail has many), but you can't really tell which one you are until you test something new for yourself.

I'm happy with tutanota.

It's extremely minimal though. I think it's just mail, contacts and calendar.

I did comparison of Fastmail, Protonmail and Mailfence. Finally, I decided to go ahead with Mailfence due to their end-to-end encryption and stronger privacy focus. I am very happy with Mailfence so far.

Its eating AI pilled companies lunch o clock

I just have to add on about how great Fastmail is. They are completely focused on having a stable product, that is relatively simple and cheap. They are not ambitious as a company at all, in the best possible way. They haven't tried to build an office suite. They don't upsell me on any new features. They just deliver a solid, basic product that has been consistently good for more than a decade now. I wish more software and services were like this, I'm tired of everyone hiring an MBA and following the exact same "maximization" business model.

Just another +1 for fastmail, long time user, really pleased with the service. They do one thing and they do it well, and they charge a fair price for the value delivered.

+1 to Fastmail. Been their happy customer for 5+ years.

I've been very happy with Protonmail, you can even use your old Gmail address from within Protonmail [0]. Although arguable doing that is counter productive, you want receive gmails but reply with you new address -> Yes this is the time to buy a domain and own an address for the rest of your life, so you can move again with little pain in the future ;)

[0] https://proton.me/blog/proton-mail-connect-gmail

My problem with protonmail (and telegram) is that in my country, only scammers use those two services. So when I encounter these, I immediately distrust the person I'm interacting with and assume the worst. Even my one neighbor uses it and I distrust him immensely as he is not tech savvy yet he uses proton... its strange. How does he even know about it? He and his wife are not forth coming about what they do for a living, they seem to be nice people, but they both use proton. In our country its a huge red flag.

Proton isn't used only by scammers.

    site:onlyfans.com "proton"

OH.

I do get that, but that is what you get when you offer strong privacy, it's probably similar with GrapheneOS, and Signal (though there it's much less visible). When I see someone using Proton it's a signal they align with my values regarding privacy. To me it's a good sign, actually, one of the (friend) relations I have, started with "Hey you are also on Proton." Turns out she's a frequenter of hacker festivals etc.

I use Telegram for bots btw, nothing beats the ease of the Botfather.

>How does he even know about it?

Maybe google locked their account.

When people are suspicious of anyone not wanting to be surveiled and spied upon, it says more about the state of the social group that it says about the privacy-minded individual.

And it means it's even more important to move away from that surveilance because it shapes opinions to sustain itself.

I temporarily moved from Fastmail to Proton Mail, but found several downsides:

* Loading mails (especially when going quickly through them) has quite some latency. Possibly due to decrypting.

* Search is pretty bad compared to Fastmail.

* The keyboard shortcuts seem to never work correctly.

So I went back to Fastmail for mail (we still use Proton Drive, which has its own set of warts).

Agreed, there are quirks, and there is also an AI writer, though it never disturbed me and hope it never will.

But generally the UI is clean and they align with my values.

There is a bridge software that bridges Proton and imap so you can use any client. Never used it though, I find the apps pretty good. The latest generation is focussing on off-line use which will hopefully drive down down some of the latency, especially that of the calendar app is pretty bad atm.

My father somehow loves the search, but I myself am also unimpressed tbh. I do like the tagging system.

+ I'll add the obligatory complaint about the lack of Linux Protondrive client.

Yes, I really hope that they'll fill the Linux client gap soon.

I changed from Gmail to proton many years ago.

The only pain point I have is the search. Understandable, the emails are encrypted and search has to be done on the client. That works when using the web hi as you have the option to index all emails.

I do not find this option in the iOS app :(

My notes say: No IMAP or other way to export emails, they're trapped in the service. CEO is a Trump supporter.

You can export mails, but only if you're on a paid plan.

Then you can install Proton Mail Bridge (which exposes a fake IMAP server to your machine) and a mail client (e.g. Thunderbird). Then you move all your mail from Proton to your new service by drag-n-dropping inside of your mail client.

I did it in order to move to Mailbox.org (great service), exactly because I don't want to give money to a company run by a Trump supporter.

Also, get ready to receive replies in which they tell you "Ackchyually he's not a trump supporter!!!1"

> You can export mails, but only if you're on a paid plan.

GDPR to the rescue: You have the right to data portability. All UK/EU email providers offer this (and any that don't may need a polite reminder for them to play ball).

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...

I thought protonmail supports imap. Or was it discontinued?

That's exactly what I wrote in my comment above. You need to install Proton Mail Bridge. But it only works if you're on a paid plan.

There is a local bridge which transparently communicates between Proton’s encrypted servers and offers imap locally. Only on non-mobile OSs afaik. [0]

[0] https://proton.me/mail/bridge

Do you have any proof or are you still referring to that one tweet from very long ago, where he did not praise Trump but some action Trump took that was actually good (I know, when you're polarized enough it's hard to think in such terms).

I'll be the "Ackchyually" person for those who don't know. Proton tweeted support for a _single_ thing the Trump administration did, on a subject that mattered to Proton. Otherwise, they have a strict neutrality position, and their CEO responded to the accusations on Reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_poli...

  > Yes this is the time to buy a domain and own an address for the rest of your life

As someone who does use their own domain to receive mail, I am acutely aware of how diligent I must be to never lose that domain. The chances of someone acquiring access to my Gmail account are far lower than me losing the dotancohen.com domain, especially with the cyber attacks against Israeli assets that have been ongoing incessantly since 2023. One's email is often the gateway to every other online service, via reset password features - losing access is problematic and an attacker getting access is nigh unrecoverable.

Anything can be taken from you at any time. Google can also just delete your account for no obvious reason. I guess that a domain can also be taken away but maybe not that easy. At least you can switch mail providers easily without having to change all your accounts that are based on your mail address.

Google can just block your account for no obvious reason and ask for KYC, which could easily leave you without access to your email for a week.

Hope that's not your case, but seeing how irresponsible Google is in its actions, I couldn't tolerate such risks.

Google can just block your account for no obvious reason and no asking.

I'm less worried about losing access, and more worried about somebody else gaining access.

Yes, but the likelihood of them giving your email address to another person is low. Not so if somebody gets my domain out from under me.

I use a .nl domain for my country, luckily it is governed by a trustworthy party and there are strict rules and convenient systems to move domainnames between providers. Agreed that some tlds may indeed be less ideal in that respect.

I agree. I would never host my mail on those new fancy domains which are controlled by a private company. Only use geographic TLDs run by a trustworthy government.

I use a .com.

Change your password from 123456 to correct horse battery staple and you will be safe from cyberattacks. And use noscript.

There exist no-hacking methods of coersing a domain away.

correct horse battery staple is very good. But for more variation you could ask an LLM

One additional benefit of Fastmail is fast, helpful tech support. The few times i’ve needed them, they’ve answered quickly and given me what i needed in the first response.

Google doesn't have app passwords anymore so plus one for fastmail.

It still does, but the page is hidden and nothing in the UI links to it.

If you still need it, you can find the url by looking at blog guides to setting up calendar integrations.

  > Looking for your alternative? Let me give you some (non financially motivated) praise for Fastmail.

In TFA the author specifically mentions triaging Fastmail. He is happy with it.

I have no idea why people don't just use a standard imap mail client, Thunderbird being the most obvious choice here.

Breaks my heart to see you stuck in your unenlightenment.

If only there was some way to learn the answer to questions.

I would really like to learn the secret secrets to be able to stomach that enlightenment and I am enthused to learn about non-shitty cloud webmail integrations that don't make you want to shoot yourself within minutes.

As a Fastmail user, every time I have to use Gmail for work I'm aggravated by the absolute stupid UX of it which seems to have been thoroughly ruined around the Material Design era; it also seems to be unable to handle basic operations such as mass mark read or delete, or search.

Fastmail handles the same things with aplomb and has much better screen real estate usage, for one.

The only thing I kind of want with Fastmail is if it had some EU-based datacenter.

I went with Fastmail just because it's not hosted in the US (they're in Australia)

All the comfort of the hemisphere least likely to suffer nuclear fallout coupled with the familiar warm embracing hug of the five eyes security panopticon.

Yes

Fastmail is an Australian company, but their servers are located in the US [0]

[0] https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000280221-Ho...

They are hosted in the US, legal entity is in Australia, so nothing was gained.

Unfortunately, I remember reading that Australia now has weak privacy laws:

> The Telecommunications Assistance and Access Bill (TAAB or AssAccess) require technology companies like FastMail, Google, Apple, Cisco to provide Australian law enforcement and security agencies with access to all communications without any judicial oversight, transparency, or reason. The only restrictions offered to protect people’s privacy is the vague terms “reasonable and proportionate.”

Source: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/goodbye-fastmail.html

What issues do you see? I've never had issue with any mass operation there.

Fastmail seems good but there’s some comfort from tutanota/protonmail promising to store my emails e2e encrypted (though they obviously can read them on send/receive). Have you tried them? What was your opinion?

Unless I mistaken there was some inconvenience with protonmail and custom domains/emails.

Switched to Fastmail many years ago and never regretted it. Btw, migration is easy and fast even for a multi GB mailboxes.

Whatever provider you switch to, do use the opportunity to get your own domain so that you won't be locked in in the future.

Just a small note about fastmail: Do not launch a trial with your planned username. Because I have opened up a trial account, it expired and when I decided to reactivate it (with payment in mind) I find myself unable to sign in. I cannot reset my password as it says "Sorry, we canʼt find an account with that username." and it does not let me log in.

Then again I also moved from gmail to mailbox.org and am a happy camper since. I don't know if we are a majority but I find myself cutting all ties with google services (youtube premium, drive, gemini etc.) as they try to force unwanted features and workflows in my daily life.

Ditto: I've also lost my Proton username because my trial account has expired.

I had the same issue, but after contacting support, I was able to re-claim the email address from my trial account and use it as an email alias of my main Fastmail account.

I was curious about whether one could layer email-ids as an interface on top of ATProto, and get all the decentralization benefits of the latter while being easy to move on from the former. A bit of searching threw up Comail [1]. Curious to hear perspectives on Comail / the general idea.

[1] https://comail.at

+1 for Fastmail.

I migrated from Gmail a few years ago. Setting up your own domain is peanuts. Migrating all your mail from Gmail is literally just clicking some buttons in the UI and then it all happens in the background. The interface is fast, robust, and can be configured to have pleasant early '00s levels of contrast.

How good are their spam filters? That's what keeps me coming back to Gmail every time I try something different.

You’re in for a treat. They’re good!

> “try our new AI features!” which never remembers that you dismissed it 50 times in a row.

Ah, the standard Silicon Valley permission request format:

"Would you like us to invade your privacy: 'Yes' Or 'Ask me again later'".

It's like being propositioned by a nutcase who won't take no for an answer.... the ethics and legality of which are obvious for all to see.

How is offline support in their mobile app? I am looking for a protonmail alternative, because it didn't open emails when I really needed while being offline.

It’s good! Works for me when I need it, but you should still save crucial stuff somewhere locally.

Also, I recommend to disable ios Files’ setting to auto-delete at will “because it’s in the cloud!”

A big +1 for fastmail, but their official ios app is 0/10 the last time I used it. Not a big problem if you use mail.app or their website on desktop.

Something I've done and which has been a big quality of life improvement is to set up a folder with 30 day retention, then an email rule to move any emails with `+` or apple relay there. Those are legitimate emails I want to read such as online order status, but I don't need them in my every day email.

Their ios app works ok for me. But I really wish it was fully native, and not just a webview wrapper of their webmail client. They have truly excellent IMAP support though (and JMAP too). So yeah, mail.app works great.

They also support apple's custom XAPPLEPUSH IMAP extension, which means fastmail supports mobile push over IMAP. I think they're the only ones who support it other than apple.

I use infomaniak. Works great, no complaints. The support is based on human beings as well. I like that, and they are polite and helpful too!

Moved to Fastmail from Gmail like 15 years ago and I couldn't be happier.

I started migrating to FastMail years ago, but never got to switch in full yet, because in my case with a public email address, the level of unhandled spam is too high.

Did you meet that issue?

Nope. The spam filtering works fantastically for me. They might’ve improved it - I migrated only a few months ago. So it could be worth another try.

Thanks!

Fastmail is great, their android app is also great except one single thing. They for some obsure reason insist on opening attachments like pdfs inside the app instead of in the default app. But the problem is that they don't support opening password protected pdfs. And they shows an error that they dont support password protected files without providing an option to open in default app. I have to manually click on the file, read the stupid error, click the download button(this is available only in the error page), then use the notification bar to open the damn file on my phone. Everything else is fine. This one sketchy insistance to open every file themselves within the app even if they dont know how to do that is something that annoys me.

Speaking about Gmail->FastMail migration, you might be interested in this ten-years old thread: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12247401)

Another happy Fastmail user here. They have great IMAP support (with app password) so I have a full local copy on my laptop that I can search instantly with notmuch or read/write from Emacs, but lately I've also started using their web UI a lot because it's just so fast and simple and well-thought-out. When they ship new features, it's stuff that makes you think "oh, that's actually a good idea – and they even made a very logical keyboard shortcut for it". And they've been very responsive to the few support requests I've made.

Serious question (for me): How would you rate fastmail strictly in terms of perseverence over time, ie will it still be here a decade from now? Confidence in that alone would move me there.

Fastmail’s been around since 1999. (That’s 5 years older than Gmail…). It’s profitable and employee owned, not VC funded.

The senior staff have all been working on it for over 15 years. Anything can happen of course, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a tech company with more apparent longevity.

(Source: I am one of those senior staff)

Fastmail is indeed great. It’s been a pleasure to use.

You can add multiple domains to your account without making it a feel like an enterprise.

All the features relating to the aliases is available on the ios app. One doesn’t need to jump between the web and the app to do basic things.

I'm not sure if it's still there, but for a long time Gmail offered a lightweight, simple HTML version of their site. Essentially the original UI for it.

It was astounding just how quick it was, which really shows you how little of a damn they seem to give about their users. That's especially weird, given that they dogfood their own products.

Thanks for your note. I’ve wanted to get off gmail for years and your description answered many nagging questions I had been too lazy to look up.

I switched my domain over to fastmail and have been using it for the past hour and seems promising. The interaction with the company is nice too and they seem very much “do one thing well” and doesn’t make me feel scummy like every time I interact with google’s products.

Interestingly I didn’t realize how slow gmail was until switching. Not just the web ui. I use the ios mail app and gmail didn’t support push, only fetch. And the app is 17.8MB (compared to gmail’s 716.7MB). Crazy that it’s 40x smaller.

I would rather invest 10 x 60 Eur = 600 Eur every 10 years into new laptop or bigger RAM rather then trying to switch to non-free email and lose whole Google ecosystem.

Not having much spam is number one priority for me. 50ms delay in refresh rate is OK. In fact I have never noticed and it have never came to my mind that Gmail is slow. Yes, it needs RAM but I was never annoyed by any "slowness".

Losing google ecosystem is a bonus for me and is the main reason I want to leave.

Google has been slowly sucking more and more each year and I have to spend mental energy figuring out how they are trying to screw me over or bill me for something.

It’s worth $50/year to not have that mental stress.

Fastmail is the best and you cannot change my mind ever. I love it.

thanks for the suggestion.. gmail has really been a dog lately so this sounds worth looking at