Don't underestimate search though. Being able to quickly find information (content, contacts, etc.) from years of unstructured eMail communication with a simple search box is very powerful. At work I have to use Lotus Notes and Outlook and compared to Gmail they really seem stone age when it comes to find information in the archive.

Very true. Gmail does that very well, but that's not something you cannot solve if you are very disciplined on how you use, store and archive emails. Gmail makes it frictionless, and that's probably one of its biggest assets, but in some workplaces, as you mentioned, people are forced to use Notes or Outlook and you learn to live with it. It's not always as frustrating as you might think. For example, I am certainly much more "messy" in the way i use email with Gmail since I know I can find things easily, but that may be a disservice to act this way in the end. You form bad habits.

I may be an outlier, but I like GMail first and foremost for its interface. Ever since I started using conversation view, it's just seemed like the obvious way to show e-mail. Nothing else really matches it, although Geary is trying now.

I've found Fastmail to be really good (although I haven't been able to figure out some of the anti-spam stuff so far).

Fastmail is nice. I'd love to host my email on my home server, but from what I can tell, to send SMTP I either need to get a static IP (costly / impossible) or use some smpt routing service, in which case not that much is gained from self-hosting.

I wrote about how I use Google-alternatives here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5718126 An addendum to that, since the article mentioned Music and OwnCloud: I use Subsonic to stream my music collection, the Android app is very nice in how it caches so I always feel like I have full access to my complete collection without getting huge mobile data bills; I don't think OwnCloud's music app can match Subsonic quite yet.

Thanks from FastMail for the kind words too :) Quite agree about keeping outbound SMTP working. We spend quite a lot of time and effort in both keeping our outbound email relatively clean to stay off blocking lists, and making sure we support all the latest signing, DNS magic, whatever antispam tricks are in existence to improve the reputation of our IPs.

ownCloud designer here, thank you for the kind words! Two things you might like:

* We’re reworking the Music app this summer, see http://kabum.github.io/2013/06/20/GSoC-First-report/

* There is a stable News app to read RSS feeds: http://algorithmsforthekitchen.com/blog/?p=580

Cheers!

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