The Case Against Gmail

stry_cat writes "Ed Bot makes the case against Gmail: 'Gmail was a breath of fresh air when it debuted. But this onetime alternative is showing signs that it's past its prime, especially if you want to use the service with a third-party client. That's the way Google wants it, which is why I've given up on Gmail after almost a decade.' Personally, I've always thought it odd that no other email provider ever adopted Gmails "search not sort" mentality. I've been a Gmail user since you needed an invitation to get an account. However Gmail has been steadily moving towards a more traditional email experience. Plus there's the iGoogle disaster that got me looking into alternatives to everything Google."

Comments

iGoogle Disaster

[stewsters]

The iGoogleocolypse?

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[mythosaz]

My 70 year old mother lamented iGoogle going away too. Take that for whatever it's worth.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

stry_cat knows hyperbole. "Disaster"? Seriously? I used iGoogle for years. Then Google said "it'll be going away in year." So, I found an alternative. Disaster averted.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[CastrTroy]

This and Google Reader. When Google Reader was cancelled, I switched to Tiny TIny RSS, and I have to say that I find it as good, if not better than Google Reader. Except that I mostly only use it on my phone. The web UI is great, but I find it quite slow, and that detracts from it's usefulness. If there's a good free alternative to Google Reader that you can host yourself, I haven't found it yet. I think GMail is the only cloud service that I really depend on for anything remotely important. Most of the stuff that the web hosting companies offer, like SquirrelMail is just atrocious. My provider (dreamhost) actually recommends that you use GMail for domains, because the other options are so deplorable.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Penguinisto]

The iGoogleocolypse?

It's Ed Bott - what else did you expect? I don't even have to RTFA, and I can tell you that he's likely pimping Outlook.com in that same article as hard as he friggin' can. It's not so much a critical review of GMail, as it is a webvertisement for Outlook.com disguised as a critical review.

GMail isn't exactly sliced bread (I use it POP3-style mostly), but it isn't as horrid as he makes it out to be, either. Think about this for a moment: MSFT's lead professional knob-slobberer badmouths a MSFT product's biggest competitor - so why is this even news?

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[mspohr]

I, too, am lamenting the coming demise of iGoogle and I am only 65!
However, I don't consider it a disaster... more like a shoulder shrug.
I think I can survive without it.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Beardo the Bearded]

Yes, it's totally bullshit that you would want to have a single page with all your email, news, weather, and everything else, launching from the start of your browser session. It's idiocy only pursued by the elderly to want to look at one page to get instantly up to date on everything.

I'm sorry that iGoogle was your singularity.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out http://www.ighome.com/
I'm not affiliated with them at all. It's the closest thing to an actual substitute that I've seen so far.
They even let you import your old settings from iGoogle.

Just a thought.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[MozeeToby]

I apparently don't pay as much attention to specific writers as you do, maybe other people don't either? For what it's worth, from the article:

Over the past couple of years, though, as Microsoft improved its once-neglected Hotmail service, I moved back. First to an @live.com address, then to an @outlook.com address, and finally to a custom domain that's attached to the Outlook.com servers. (See this post for instructions on how to add your own custom domain to Outlook.com for free.)

Your prediction bearing out so perfectly actually gave me a bit of a chuckle (assuming it was a prediction of course).

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about this for a moment: MSFT's lead professional knob-slobberer badmouths a MSFT product's biggest competitor - so why is this even news?

Because people like you can't resist clicking "Read more..." to come and post about it, driving up Slashdot's page views. That's why.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[kav2k]

Very relevant: http://xkcd.com/1172/

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[poetmatt]

No, it's called "the irrelevance".
As in, why does anyone care?
This is as stupid an article as the comments themselves.

Email is as standard as it has always been. Nobody should be using or relying on email.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[crunchygranola]

Google is being helpful in training/educating us not to rely on their free products for anything important.

Google DeskTop search? Downloads were disabled with only a days warning. No really adequate replacement has really come forward since (I would guess Recoll is the best of the lot). The "rationale" offered seems to be white-wash for a decision to "encourage" us to store our data in their cloud.

Then iGoogle. Is so expensive for Google to run iGoogle servers? Really?

All the other services they have turned off are perhaps less significant due to smaller user bases, but they teach their lessons to users also.

Before becoming dependent on a Google service, you need to keep a back-out strategy in your pocket.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

What alternative? All the similar ones I don't really trust with my account information.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[icebike]

Yes, Bott is hopeless.

But still Gmail violates so many standards for email, that unless you buy into the whole Google World View, its hard to swallow some of the stuff it does.

It goes out of its way to make it very very difficult to actually delete mail. Even if you pop it, it copies it to their own trash bin. There is no way to expunge with Pop. With Imap, you can expunge, but not with the default setup.

Without retaining your mail, they can't scan it to send you advertising. Since they don't do that in real-time, they need to hang on to it for as long as they can.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[epyT-R]

Maybe, but also a bit fallacious. There's a trend today towards removing long running 'advanced' functionality in order to give the appearance of simplicity.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[LordLimecat]

AFAIK they do the scanning via JS in the gmail web client.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[steveg]

I set my mom up at ighome. She depended on iGoogle. Doesn't like ighome as well, but she's coping.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

But still Gmail violates so many standards for email, that unless you buy into the whole Google World View, its hard to swallow some of the stuff it does.

Note to anyone who might take parent post seriously, read icebike's posting history.

If Bott is MSFT's lead professional knob-slobberer, icebike is his Slashdot apprentice/sockpuppet.

He may not "swallow some of the stuff" from Google, but he'll gulp it down from Microsoft/Ballmer.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the article before reading the byline. You have absolutely nailed it without reading it

The article - (it sounds like it is the first one in a series!) - is about how Ed Bott moved from gmail to Outlook.com!

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[whoever57]

It's Ed Bott - what else did you expect? I don't even have to RTFA, and I can tell you that he's likely pimping Outlook.com in that same article as hard as he friggin' can. It's not so much a critical review of GMail, as it is a webvertisement for Outlook.com disguised as a critical review.

Exactly. His slant can easily be determined from his comments about using calendars in Outlook: he complains that Outlook can only open gmail calendars in read-only mode. But this appears to be a limitation of Outlook -- my Thunderbird client (with the appropriate calendar plugins) can update gmail's calendar, so why can't Outlook?

He then parrots the "scroogled" talking points.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 8's Metro screen can do this, as would Android set up with widgets.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[aztracker1]

The free live mail for domains is pretty decent... I've switched a few to it, same caveats as google wrt privacy though, and it's an MS thing. But you do get up to 50 mail accounts for free on a domain. I find the outlook interface a little more to my liking, but ymmv. Still use gmail for my primary email...

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

People were actually using iGoogle?

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[aztracker1]

I have a domain on ms's hosting and it works okay.. I actually like the outlook style interface a little more than gmail.. though I use my gmail account a lot more via web than I do my personal account (mostly use that through the generic mail app on my phone). That said, I really don't trust google, microsoft or apple all that much, they've all done things counter to their user's interests. I have my own email server for my other domains, but getting tired of maintaining it, so a freely hosted solution is the best option for me as long as I can use a regular mail client. MS is the best of those options currently. I have another year on my business connection, and my plan is to have it all on hosted services by the end of the year. I'll still play around with my own stuff, it's just more than I have the time and interest to do these days.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[aztracker1]

same here.. it's not as good, but it is the closest option I've found.. it works well enough.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[PeerPressure]

I found it really useful. Everything I wanted in one place. And then got spammed!!! Fix it - don't retire it!

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[icebike]

They may do it there, but they also do it in the background.
You never have to actually open the web client and you will start seeing targeted ads show up on various web pages.

I recently had occasion to email Chrysler, (using Thunderbird), and after several exchanges via email, I noticed that
Chrysler ads were showing up on dozens of different web pages that had nothing to do with cars.

Re: iGoogle Disaster

[kbg]

And how does that help with Windows 7, Linux, or basically any other OS or browser? The good thing about iGoogle is that it was not OS dependent.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

The killer for me is a minor feature that I can't live without - the ability to click to expand without leaving iGoogle. This give me the choice of looking at the headline only, expanding for the summary or clicking to go to the site. I've tried most of the alternatives and it's missing from all of them. I will probably settle with Netvibes (or maybe protopages).

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[ffflala]

It's Ed Bott - what else did you expect? I don't even have to RTFA, and I can tell you that he's likely pimping Outlook.com in that same article as hard as he friggin' can. It's not so much a critical review of GMail, as it is a webvertisement for Outlook.com disguised as a critical review.

That's uncanny. I'd never heard of the guy before and actually RTFA... and your blind summary is spot-on. Here's a bit of the end of the article:

For the past two years, I've been forwarding my Gmail address to an Outlook.com account, which has a great web interface and syncs effortlessly with Outlook...

Re: iGoogle Disaster

[biojayc]

This is probably because you viewed Chryslers homepage sometime during the interaction rather than due to gmail. Pretty sure your emails do not affect ads on webpages.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Beardo the Bearded]

Awesome, that is totally the fix that would help my work computer that runs Win7, my home computer that runs Win7, my netbook that runs Ubuntu, or my cell (CM SIII) that has a 200MB data plan.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[farble1670]

But still Gmail violates so many standards for email, that unless you buy into the whole Google World View, its hard to swallow some of the stuff it does.

they give you POP / IMAP access asa token gesture. i'm sure they'd rather you not use it, so don't expect too much.

Without retaining your mail, they can't scan it to send you advertising. Since they don't do that in real-time, they need to hang on to it for as long as they can.

what makes you think that when (your view) of an email "goes away", they haven't retained it, or the important bits of it, somewhere else?

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[farble1670]

Then iGoogle. Is so expensive for Google to run iGoogle servers? Really?

i'm almost certain it's greater than zero. google isn't a charity.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Dr. Eggman]

Aw, yeah! You've done it again, Slashdot! Thanks, I've been putting off finding a decent iGoogle replacement. This will do quite nicely. Kind of wish I could find out more about the company behind it, though... Not quite ready to trust them enough to log in to gmail through their widget.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[icebike]

what makes you think that when (your view) of an email "goes away", they haven't retained it, or the important bits of it, somewhere else?(/quote>

I don't remember saying that.
Google has already stated it could take as long as 6 months for backups that include your mail to cycle out of existence.
Then, if you got your gmail via your company or school, they may be using Google Vault, in which case it could be even longer.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[bhhenry]

After much searching, I found a good replacement for the basic rss part: http://rssdashboard.appspot.com/.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[farble1670]

I don't remember saying that.

you said this,

Without retaining your mail, they can't scan it to send you advertising. Since they don't do that in real-time, they need to hang on to it for as long as they can.

by saying "hang on to for as long as they they can", you imply that they don't hang on to it forever. welcome to english.
 

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

Mine is 74 and pissed that her home page is being shutdown - she's been getting notices everytime she loads firefox about it for the entire month.

I hate to say it but we're seriously looking at moving to an MS solution since the calendar app is integrated with her email client (Live Mail) as it was with Outlook when she used it. No journal and such but she never used it or the to-do list anyhow.

Myself, even with a Google tablet (Nexus 7 by Asus), I'm reaching the point that the damn thing is simply useless when not connected to the mothership. Hell I may as well look into a Win8 tablet and be done with it as almost all of my current Windows software will run on it. Depends on how much space but hell with a flash drive (32GB) there's no lack of external storage capacity.

Fast Turtle

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[icebike]

Hang on to it as long as they can does in no way imply forever.

They still have to confirm to their publicly stated policy.

They have already published their retention policy which says it will be gone from their servers in 30 days, and cycled out of their backup "tapes" in 60 days. Google has been pretty up front about their privacy policy, even turning themselves into the feds when they find that they violated it.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[modmans2ndcoming]

I moved my dad over to Google+. I hooked him into his news sources and showed him how to check his e-mail quickly. He is happy.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[MightyYar]

I think that all of those have some kind of a Widget/Dashboard/etc thing. I know that when I want weather on my Mac, I don't fire up Safari on Firefox - I just hit the Dashboard button (F4). On my Windows 7 machine, I have "Gadgets" (though I confess to not really using them much... it's not my primary computer). You can reveal them by just showing the Desktop. Android and Linux have bazillions of ways to set up a dashboard. My phone has weather on the lockscreen, my calendar is a right swipe on the lockscreen, and my email is a bottom swipe. It may very be that the reason iGoogle lost favor was that it was entirely redundant.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[jbolden]

Not really. There is a trend towards removing legacy interface elements whose use cases evolved from ANSI terminals and dual floppies and instead rethinking them completely for today's hardware.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[MightyYar]

I have to wonder about anyone who recommends Outlook with the ribbon interface. I mean, I hate the ribbon in general, but it is a particular disaster in Outlook where each freaking window type gets its own version of the ribbon.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[readacc]

I apparently don't pay as much attention to specific writers as you do, maybe other people don't either?

Some writers are well known for being very opinionated, or fanboyish, or flat out wrong but still employed for some reason. People then mention said writers in articles such as this, and passive readers like myself eventually learn the names of these writer due to exposure, even though I've only read maybe one or two of his articles in full (and yes he's a complete Microsoft fanboy, which makes it very easy to expose the various holes and hypocrisies of his articles, but that's an exercise for the bored).

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[iMadeGhostzilla]

That's absolutely true. I blame the influence of Apple.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Memroid]

In honor of Harry Randall Truman, I will scoff at this impending iGoogleocolypse which some claim will take my home. Despite this 2 day countdown, I don't have any idea whether it will cease to show. Ain't gonna hurt me... boy.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

When the 1st comment is this moronic, you know it's time to get your info elsewhere.

Ron Paul was right.

We are, basically, what the Nazis always wanted to be. We even have a concentration camp (gitmo) that the press won't dare call it by what is is.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[RoboJ1M]

He's also lying, unless my knowledge is wildly out of date.

For a very long time my fat-client email provider (Evolution) has supported GMail Mail, Contacts and Calendar.
You even just select "Add Google Account" and it does all the tricky stuff for you.

But I stopped using a fat client a long time ago, because why the hell would you even bother?
That's just my IMO of course.

So what's he going on about "no longer working with 3rd party clients well"
Does he just mean Outlook and EAS?

Oh and the IMAP folders/labels dichotomy.
Yes, you'll end up with multiple headers coming down.
But deleting, copying and moving just gets translated into label actions.
Again, just IMO, does does this really matter?

The guys entitled to his opinion but this one seems a bit stretched.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[NJRoadfan]

But I stopped using a fat client a long time ago, because why the hell would you even bother? That's just my IMO of course.

Ever had to check multiple e-mail boxes? Not everyone can forward their mail to one account. Logging in and out of multiple web interfaces is a PITA, one click and all my accounts are available via IMAP.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[MMC Monster]

I started migrating to protopage.com about 1-2 months ago. Took me an hour to get all the RSS feeds in correctly (could have probably done it quicker if I had exported from iGoogle). Took me another hour to get the color scheme to something close to iGoogle.

Now I have more flexibility than I ever did with iGoogle. My only complaint is that the protopage Google Calendar widget only shows a single calendar, while I like to show all my calendars. But I'm an outlier - I have 8-9 active calendars to keep things separate in work and home lives.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[CheeseyDJ]

There's a trend today towards removing long running 'advanced' functionality in order to give the appearance of simplicity.

Very true. Google Maps on Android is a prime example.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[jeffmflanagan]

It is a bummer though. I've been using iGoogle as my start page for many years. It looks much cleaner than the alternatives I've seen.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[recoiledsnake]

Well, at least he doesn't straight out lie like the anti-Microsoft Google shill SJVN who claims Chromebooks are selling 25% of all computers.

http://www.zdnet.com/intel-the-year-of-the-linux-desktop-is-here-7000020849/

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[jeffmflanagan]

Replying to myself because I just discovered that igHome.com now looks much better than it did when it was first released as an iGoogle alternative, so I'm fine with the loss of iGoogle now.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[pscottdv]

Bingo!

Microsoft cripples its own product to make a competing service that less useful than their own. It's like Windows vs. Dr. DOS all over again. Microsoft hasn't changed their play book in 25 years.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's totally bullshit that you would want to have a single page with all your email, news, weather, and everything else, launching from the start of your browser session. It's idiocy only pursued by the elderly to want to look at one page to get instantly up to date on everything.

I'm sorry that iGoogle was your singularity.

What's with the ageist crack? The elderly (now) were the first users (then) of the internet, email, linux, google, gmail.... We love minimalist efficiency and fastloading websites. This little old lady doesn't care for a lot of google's approaches, but I most assuredly do not like or use bloated, cluttered, networky web interfaces, and I hate touchscreens (except for my smartphone).

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[oreiasecaman]

Ever heard of adblock? You don't have to see ads if you don't want to

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[mcgrew]

I got a yahoo mail address a decade ago because I was tired of changing email addresses every time I changed ISPs, and kept it for the same reason I got it, I hate changing email addresses. If you send mail to my mcgrewbooks.com domain, it gets forwarded to my regular email (or will, it's a new domain and I haven't set up mail forwarding yet).

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Grishnakh]

Why can't you forward your email to one account? I do it with GMail and it works fine; it's easy to apply different labels to mails coming from different accounts, and then set up different sections in the Priority Inbox to show them separately if you want. And it'll even forward outgoing emails through any account you wish (normally you'd set it up so when you respond, it goes from the account it came through).

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Grishnakh]

No, but they had millions of users who liked and used the product (apparently some competing service had several million new users sign up all of a sudden when iGoogle shut down), which means there's positive revenue there. If you're making money with a product (and it's profitable, obviously), it's pretty stupid to give up on that product. You don't have to concentrate on it that much if you don't want, but you can at least assign a bare minimum of resources to it to keep it alive if customers like it that much. A large company like Google should have no problem with that.

At this point, Google has made such a bad reputation for itself by killing off so many products that people liked that anyone who's been around a while will be very wary of relying on Google for anything at all besides their most core products, and even there they need to be extremely wary (look how much Google has fucked up the GMail UI). This isn't a good reputation to have. No, it's probably not a good idea to spread yourself too thin either, but Google's strategy of "throw all kinds of shit on the wall, see what sticks and becomes massively profitable, and shitcan everything else even if it's fairly popular" isn't a good way to build a brand either.

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[cffrost]

That was hilarious; thank you. :o)

Re:iGoogle Disaster

[Keybounce]

Emacs can be told to monitor CPU temperature?

Can it turn the kitchen sink on and off as well?

So why *don't* other mail readers use labels?

[mrchaotica]

And why hasn't IMAP been extended to support them properly?

Re:So why *don't* other mail readers use labels?

[icebike]

Interesting question.

Imap has always been folders based, but there is no technical reason it need be, when each "folder" could just
be a list of pointers to individual messages in any sort of back end storage you may choose.

The penalty is a double hit, (read a pointer, then read the file), but seriously, there is a great deal of flexibility offered
by multiple simple indexes pointing to the same mail heap. In any Nix file
system it could be done with nothing but soft links, thereby eliminating any double hit penalty.

Re:So why *don't* other mail readers use labels?

[MrEricSir]

A better question is why Google is using IMAP folders as labels instead of using IMAP labels as labels.

Re:So why *don't* other mail readers use labels?

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess: most IMAP clients support IMAP labels poorly or not at all.

Re:So why *don't* other mail readers use labels?

[flimflammer]

Because most clients actually handle folders well.

Re:So why *don't* other mail readers use labels?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many IMAP servers already do this. Dovecot backed by Maildir++, for example, is happy to make hard links instead of copies (specifically not symlinks because those both require a second dereference and more importantly require you to care about which file is the "original"). Other storage implementations put messages into a flat database and simply maintain an index of the "folder" placement(s) of each message. The IMAP protocol actually has a number of requirements supporting exactly that sort of implementation.

Re:So why *don't* other mail readers use labels?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because IMAP doesn't need to. Just don't subscribe to "All Messages" folder and you won't get any duplicates. Duh.

Has worked fine for Thunderbird with the H.Ogi's Google Contacts add-on on Windows, Linux and OSX for like eva.

And what's the crap in the article about EAS not working any more? Every single iDevice uses it just fine for Mail, Contacts and Calendar support.

Re:So why *don't* other mail readers use labels?

[Eythian]

A quick skim of the IMAP RFC doesn't mention anything obvious about labels, but there are flags which seem like they could serve a similar purpose. However, I'd expect that no clients support this (of course, if gmail implemented it, they probably would before long.)

Though, it looks like they do something sorta similar.

Re:So why *don't* other mail readers use labels?

[MrEricSir]

But no existing clients at the time Gmail came out were capable of dealing with messages that were in multiple folders, nor were they designed to deal with conversations that spanned multiple folders.

Since many existing clients had to be rewritten to support Gmail, it would have been better in the long run if Google hadn't tried to shoehorn their new email system to fit a legacy protocol.

Re:So why *don't* other mail readers use labels?

[MrEricSir]

You're right, it's called "flags" in the IMAP RFCs. But it's the same idea; there's a few flags that are official (the "seen" flag, for example, always indicates that the message was read) but users are free to create their own.

Re:So why *don't* other mail readers use labels?

[Xipher]

Did some searching today, and it seems Google has actually defined some extensions to add IMAP commands to support labels so clients could use them. This is the same thing I'm looking for in any replacement, because the concept of labels is the one of the biggest draws to Gmail for me, along with it's message filtering capabilities and spam filtering.

Re:So why *don't* other mail readers use labels?

[zmughal]

You could also use the X-Label header like I did with a IMAP proxy I wrote for Gmail.

Another way of doing things is notmuch.

Re:So why *don't* other mail readers use labels?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because there's no such thing *now* as IMAP labels in the IMAP protocol. It would need extending to support them, and then no existing clients would support that extension yet.

Re:So why *don't* other mail readers use labels?

[Anonymous Coward]

Soft links? Hard links eliminate the double hit penalty, soft links require two reads from disk.

What?

[lesincompetent]

Difficult to use with a third-party client? Really??? Please be more specific and elaborate cause i always had the opposite impression!

Re:What?

[alen]

no more activesync support on ios and the ios gmail app doesn't share contacts with the rest of the iphone as far as i can tell

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Difficult to use with a third-party client? Really??? Please be more specific and elaborate cause i always had the opposite impression!

Yup - and to back that up - you can use Thunderbird.
I use an old version of Thunderbird at that - version 2.0.0.24 to be exact.

Works very very well.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah... I'm currently getting all of my gmail through outlook. It doesn't get much more 3rd party than that.

Re:What?

[slaker]

I don't understand the problem either. Gmail works fine with any IMAP client I care to configure. IMAP itself has some weirdness around how clients interact with various folders, but that's not Gmail's fault.

I really don't like Gmail because of a distaste for threaded comment view (yes, I know I can turn it off on the web, but not in the Android client), but as someone who has every non-spam e-mail I've received since 1993 sitting in my inbox I can say that it performs just fine in spite of that and I can access it anywhere, which is the biggest single reason to stick with it.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only difficulty I had when attempting to use Gmail with a third party client is that there are simply no third party clients which can properly handle the sheer volume of mail in my inbox. That isn't exactly Google's fault.

Also, all the stuff Google shut down was rubbish and deserved it.

Re:What?

[Defenestrar]

Well, IMAP lacks some of the features you find in Exchange (but picks up a few over POP3), but that's not client side. I remember Pine worked okay with IMAP and I suspect that any clients developed later than that should be able to handle it fine (i.e. anything that's a viable client).

Re:What?

[armanox]

Indeed. I've got gmail connected to pine running on IRIX 6.5.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a problem with ios....

Re:What?

[CanHasDIY]

Difficult to use with a third-party client? Really??? Please be more specific and elaborate cause i always had the opposite impression!

Yea, this.

Thunderbird on my PCs, K9 Mail on my Android machines. Nary a problem to be found.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds more like an iOS problem than a GMail problem

Re:What?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I don't understand his problem either. I recently upgraded to Mavericks and haven't noticed any issue with iCal or Apple Mail using my GMail account.

Re:What?

[interkin3tic]

In the summary? Because TFA was.

Despite Google's lofty rhetoric about open standards, the Gmail protocols are undocumented and not available for licensing. Apps can perform a limited set of interactions with Gmail via its API, but if you want to build a communications app that connects directly to Gmail, you have to use either IMAP or (shudder) POP. Either way, you get a severely compromised experience. And neither configuration gives you access to calendars and contacts.

I've never tried to build yet another e-mail program using Gmail, but there are at least dozens out there for iOS and android, the ones I've used seem to work just great, so I'm inclined to think this is an overstatement.

Also

The biggest problem with getting Gmail to work with third-party clients is that it doesn't use the same filing system they do.

I'm guessing you can actually configure gmail to work that way. I'm also skeptical that there aren't clients out there that work with one of the most popular e-mail services out there. Specifically because I use some of them and they do actually work fine.

He tries to generalize it, but it seems like he's talking about outlook specifically not working with gmail. Maybe he should try not using outlook? I dunno. Maybe that's just me. I hate outlook, but my work seems to love it. I have to forward my work e-mail to a gmail account to use it on anything besides outlook.

Re:What?

[slaker]

There's an official Gmail client for iOS if you really, REALLY need push updates.
Does the iOS mail client not do IMAP push?

Re:What?

[Penguinisto]

no more activesync support on ios

Wait, wait, wait... let me see if I understand you here:

Are you saying that you cannot get your inbound (or outbound) GMail pushed through an exchange server to/from GMail and your iPhone?

May want to be a bit more specific, boyo. :)

Re:What?

[Albanach]

Don't you feel that you're taking the Google boycott a bit far if you won't even search for how to sync contacts.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gmail works great as a mail server for Thunderbird, I just dislike ever having to use Gmail's web interface when I'm away from my computers.

Re:What?

[vux984]

Difficult to use with a third-party client? Really??? Please be more specific and elaborate cause i always had the opposite impression!

Outlook 2013 with Google Apps Sync is now a royal PITA. It works fine with the VLA office edition, but not the Click-to-Run. (which is how the majority of small business and soho's get outlook). The work around is is to install the VLA (technet or torrent etc), install google apps sync and setup the profile, install click to run, remove the vla version, possibly repair the click-to-run version, and then activate the click-to-run version.

Its unclear to me why it can't work with office 2013 home and business etc, without jumping through those hoops.

As for IMAP, I know people who run into the imap connection limit pretty quickly with gmail ... between desktop, laptop, tablet, and smartphone. That gets them the too many simultaneous connections error, and then it fails. I know with apple mail, for example, instead of reporting a proper error it gives some generic login error message and prompts for the gmail password when this happens -- which is worse by far than just not getting the mail for a bit. Quitting mail, waiting a while and then trying again is a very UGLY workaround.

I'm not sure if the maximum IMAP connections a given client uses is easily configured.

As for pop3... its pop3... few people really want to use it. Local stored mail, with no sync is an ugly mess. And even grandma who only uses mail from one desktop is better off without pop3 because at least with imap she doesn't lose her mail when the computer inevitably dies.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

You cannot use their SMTP without two factor authentication, in which case you need to give them your phone number, and that is a show stopper. I did not try so I do not know how it works, but I do no see how to teach a text-mode SMTP client to submit the code at the "login". It must be a browser thing but then does it work on a server without graphical interface? Even if it does with links/elinks/lynx if I have to do manual login everytime the IP changes, or after a month of inactivity, then it's not viable either.

Re:What?

[certain death]

Just out of curiosity...why would you ever do that? Does that have something to do with your signature?

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you feel that you're taking the Google boycott a bit far if you won't even search for how to sync contacts.

Not far enough when you think about it. I mean he's already got Google.com right in front of him and didn't think to do that. Think about that for a moment. He's the kind of user who is a support nightmare and potentially the cause of many antidepressant prescrptions among front-end tech-support staff who have to talk to people like him. By "boycotting" Google users like him are doing them a huge favor and sparing them much time and expense.

You ever see those users who do deeply involved non-trivial damage to a computer, and when you ask them what happened, they tell you something like "all I did was open Notepad and all of this just happened!" Yeah. Providing support for people like that costs you more than you could ever hope to regain. That's just a business reality, I won't go into my personal feelings about it.

Re:What?

[causality]

it performs just fine in spite of that and I can access it anywhere, which is the biggest single reason to stick with it.

I don't understand what you mean here. I can access my isp-privided pop3/imap mail server from anywhere. I can also SSH into my main desktop from anywhere and do it that way. What is Gmail providing that these cannot accomplish (other than targeted marketing)?

Re:What?

[CanHasDIY]

Outlook... is... a royal PITA.

FTFY.

Really, every version of Outlook, ever? So, when adding my gmail account for the first time, You really need to try and download every one of the 5,000+ emails I've gotten over the past decade before letting me choose how far back to sync?

Re:What?

[slaker]

OK actually he's right that different IMAP clients interact with different IMAP servers when displaying folder structures. Gmail isn't the end all and be-all of IMAP and I don't think every IMAP client should just standardize on the way Google does something, but you really can run in to issues where three different clients name or use certain folders on the same server differently.

Re:What?

[hobarrera]

- Their IMAP support is broken (as they themselves have documented; you can google that).
  - If you use the webmail view, and real IMAP folders, you'll end up with a mess on both sides.
  - There's no way to manage filters from a third party cliente (eg: via Sieve).

Re:What?

[hobarrera]

I've never used activesync in my life, and yet have not had issues with my email providers. Maybe iOS needs IMAP support? You know, the standard protocol that almost everybody supports (I'm sure there are exceptions).

Also, Contacts != Mail.

Re:What?

[hobarrera]

I don't understand the problem either. Gmail works fine with any IMAP client I care to configure. IMAP itself has some weirdness around how clients interact with various folders, but that's not Gmail's fault.

Yes they are, they decided to implement their IMAP support in a non-standard way.
Also, plenty of other issues ARE their fault.

Re:What?

[ericloewe]

Google doesn't support IMAP push. Neat, huh?

Re:What?

[ericloewe]

Exchange is just the protocol, nothing stops Google from implementing it, allowing for easy data and mail syncing with support for pretty much everything you'd need on a phone. They did this until recently, when they decided they'd pull the plug (which effectively pulled the plug on WP8 contacts and calendar syncing with Google until GDR2 came out - and we still don't have push mail) and make it a premium-only feature.

There is no middleman, Google's servers are (or rather were) the exchange servers.

Re:What?

[ericloewe]

Google does not support IMAP push, while they did support push e-mail with exchange, so it's a step back in any case.

Re:What?

[lesincompetent]

I have Android and it does. Good luck with that iOS thingy!

Re:What?

[icebike]

Difficult to use with a third-party client? Really??? Please be more specific and elaborate cause i always had the opposite impression!

Yeah, its not difficult to use with any third party client that supports pop or imap. (Being the 800 pound gorilla, most clients support Gmail automatically).

What can be difficult is getting Gmail to NOT retain your mail. When you "delete" it, it really just goes to Gmail trash, where it sits for another month. If you move it to local (on device/computer) folders, again it goes to Gmail Trash. You can't avoid this with pop. You can avoid it with imap, but not with the standard settings of gmail. You have to fiddle with some uncleanly worded setting to achieve instant delete).

Normal users will find stuff they thought they deleted sitting in All Mail for years after, because delete has some rather nebulous meaning in Gmail.

Re:What?

[dugancent]

It's a problem by google. The options are there but google disabled them.

Re:What?

[BradMajors]

Gmail provides better spam filtering.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you count the NSA, then it's a foursome.

Re:What?

[icebike]

I don't understand the problem either. Gmail works fine with any IMAP client I care to configure. IMAP itself has some weirdness around how clients interact with various folders, but that's not Gmail's fault.

Well, yes, it is Gmail's fault.

Gmail doesn't really have Folders, because its just a mail heap with pointers (labels) to simulate folders.
So if Gmail has a non-standard implementation, its up to them to go the extra mile to make it work with Imap.

Their current implementation is needlessly complex, to the point that anyone actually using much more than the default Inbox (a shifting target of late) has to have a pretty good understanding of both the folder concept AND the label concept to get things to work right.

Re:What?

[icebike]

I've never known any third party client that COULDN'T handle the volume.

Why do you keep all that mail in your inbox? That's what archive is for.

Re:What?

[whoever57]

Google does not support IMAP push, while they did support push e-mail with exchange, so it's a step back in any case.

It's only a step back if you don't care about battery life. IMAP push requires a persistent connection which sucks the life out of cellphone batteries.

Re:What?

[ericloewe]

How useful! Google's e-mail service works perfectly with other Google products! Nothing like proprietary solutions to problems with standard solutions... /s

And it's not iOS, it's WP8 - but it applies to pretty much every OS out there that does not involve a lot of Google.

Re:What?

[exomondo]

That still shits me that I can't get push gmail on my iphone in a normal email client anymore, worse there is a loyal base of google apologists that defend their removal of features (and making them paid) like this.

Re:What?

[causality]

Gmail provides better spam filtering.

I have no complaints with SpamAssassin running on my Linux host.

Re:What?

[vux984]

Gmail has a 15 imap connection limit. Some clients use multiple imap connections. I know someone with an iphone, ipad, and laptop (mac using Apple Mail), and they run into the limit all the time.

Worse, apple mail doesn't merely just quietly 'fail' to sync until the connetions become available, it gives a general error message and prompts for username/password.

Re-Entering it doesn't help of course, because that's not the problem at all.

You have to quit apple mail, and wait a while.

Re:What?

[whoever57]

Since it is possible (by jumping through hoops) to use Outlook, clearly the issue (the need to jump through hoops) exists in Outlook. So dump the root cause of the problem (Outlook).

Re:What?

[whoever57]

Exchange is just the protocol

Nothing but money, that is. Why exactly should Google pay Microsoft so that it can use a proprietary protocol with non-paying clients, when there are perfectly adequate open protocols available?

Re:What?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I'm blessed since I haven't ran into that. I have noticed that I'm no longer able to move events between calendars anymore or at least as easily as before. I've noticed this on Google Calendar for Android too.

Re:What?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Never mind I just found it. You have to right click the event in the calendar itself, but you can't change it within the info/edit box (where you would likely like to make the change).

Re:What?

[peragrin]

Actually threaded view is the one thing I wish every client had.

But every implementation of threaded view sucks. The ability to add, or remove messages from a given thread must be allow and no one does it.

Then again I can be in 6 different conversations with the 4-8 people each referencing the same 6 different projects. I use folders, labels categories, and anything else I can, but those 6 projects last a week, and then 6 new ones come up. the email subjects can vary which breaks every conversation (threaded) view.

In outlook(work's choice) I resort to using folders and then categories(numbered 1-9) to at least partially tie them together. At home I just shrug.

The other thing I do with gmail is once a month download all emails via pop and archive them. sure gmail still has them in storage. but I have several backups of everything incase I really need to move.

Re:What?

[vux984]

Since it is possible (by jumping through hoops) to use Outlook, clearly the issue (the need to jump through hoops) exists in Outlook. So dump the root cause of the problem (Outlook).

One could just as easily argue that its possible without jumping through hoops to use Outlook with any other provider. Jumping through hoops is required only for Google. So clearly the issue, (the need to jump through hoops) exists with google. So dump the root cause of the problem (Google).

What's the difference?

In any case, the issue is known to be related to the difference between the click-to-run deployment vs the old 'traditional' deployment. Google's plugin is only able to detect/cope with the old style deployment -- and it seems probable to me at least, that the onus to fix is on google here.

Dumping outlook is not always desirable. The seamless calendar / contact / email sync is preferable to mail only imap options, and many users prefer Outlook to the alternatives.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can access my isp-privided pop3/imap mail server from anywhere. I can also SSH into my main desktop from anywhere and do it that way. What is Gmail providing that these cannot accomplish (other than targeted marketing)?

You're bound to your ISP.
The biggest reason to move to an independent mail-service is to be independent of an ISP change.
If you have the luxury (boring...) of staying in the same place your whole life maybe you can avoid that need, if your ISP stays around for that time as well.

Re:What?

[whoever57]

One could just as easily argue that its possible without jumping through hoops to use Outlook with any other provider. Jumping through hoops is required only for Google. So clearly the issue, (the need to jump through hoops) exists with google.

Really? OK, then, how about this:
1: the jumping through hoops is not required when using VLA version of Outlook (according to the GGP post) -- so it is a problem imposed by Outlook
2.: the jumping through hoops is not required for other clients.

I think that either of those statements shows quite clearly where the problem lies. Together they paint a clear picture that the issue exists in Outlook.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes they do but it'll cost you $5/mo or $50/yr.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they should standardize on RFC 3501 (Internet Message Access Protocol—version 4, revision 1) because that is the standard and has been since 2003 (but version 4 was first standardized in 1994). Gmail's version of IMAP is just a bastardized kludge whose job it is to speak RFC3501 well enough not to break other people's work (i.e. the clients' performance). Google accomplishes this by providing an IMAP interface on the client-facing end, and then silently changing shit around (like folders turning into labels) on Google's own backend. On the other hand, they don't do some IMAP stuff like the IMAP4 extension called the IDLE command (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2177) at all, but that's okay, because it's not part of RFC 3501, which is the standard.

It's Google's job to implement the standard that's been around since 1994, not the rest of the world's duty to bend over for Google.

Re:What?

[flimflammer]

That must be great for you.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google doesn't support IMAP push. Neat, huh?

Sure they do, I'm using it in K-9 Mail on my Nexus 4 right now. They don't support Exchange Active Sync anymore unless you're paying for Google Apps, but push email with IMAP works beautifully (though not with the AOSP "Email" app unfortunately).

Re:What?

[armanox]

Actually, no, it doesn't. I have an SGI Octane sitting at home that I ran into the issue of 'Now what do I do with it?' after I got it up and running. After a few ideas bounced around with my friends, I posted a screenshot of gmail in pine and said 'I figured it out! Email over SSH!'

So really, I did it out of boredom.

Re:What?

[profplump]

Many IMAP servers don't really have folders. The IMAP protocol is specifically designed to support that sort of storage implementation. Gmail might have folder issues, but they aren't caused by the "just a mail heap with pointers" storage implementation.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

This. I hate IMAP. It's so often implemented poorly (Apple Mail ). I just don't use it, and use POP on my computer. The Gmail client on Android is fine to see what messages I'm getting. My computer is for archiving.

Re:What?

[couchslug]

I've used Thunderbird with gmail for a few years with zero problems on both Windows and Linux. (The Portable version is a great way to back up your email and the program in one shot by burning to DVD, which being read-only won't lose data to a future sync.)

I have no reason to use or care about Outlook.

Re:What?

[scdeimos]

Don't tell all my iOS devices that then because they must have missed the memo. They're still using ActiveSync successfully to this very day ... and on *free* Gmail accounts.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Outlook 2013 made a lot of weird changes like that, and I'm inclined to place the blame with MS in that instance. Kerio Connect, which is an Exchange alternative, flat out wasn't recognized earlier this year when 2013 released, despite it working when they were testing and developing their latest plugin. Turns out that, like you mentions, there are some differences between the VLA software and the click-to-run software taking place behind the scenes. A workaround was figured out, that basically involved copying files from one directory to another in order to get Outlook to display the "other" category for choosing your email type, but it was still a pain in the ass.

And one that was completely at the feet of MS.

Re:What?

[bemymonkey]

Are you sure about that? When I get an e-mail on my Gmail account, Thunderbird has it about half a second after my phone (Android with the official GMail app) beeps.

Re:What?

[NJRoadfan]

IHe tries to generalize it, but it seems like he's talking about outlook specifically not working with gmail. Maybe he should try not using outlook? I dunno. Maybe that's just me. I hate outlook, but my work seems to love it. I have to forward my work e-mail to a gmail account to use it on anything besides outlook.

If you have access to your Exchange server's web interface, try this.

Re:What?

[hobarrera]

Yes they do, they support IMAP IDLE perfectly fine. Some of the references to this are 6 years old. IDLE is about 16yo, and supported by most email clients.

Re:What?

[HappyPsycho]

All I can see from the article and comments is that as no standard exists for this type of interaction (the whole labels instead of folders thing) google chose to implement it their own way.

From the article the actual mail standards IMAP or "(shudder POP)", shouldn't be used as "you get a severely compromised experience". Instead google should reverse it's decision to drop active directory support for free users. This seems to be mainly driven by the fact that the mail standards can't handle your contacts or calendars and that they are not "instant" (saw something about PUSH notifications from the server that you got new mail), only folks I know that "need" to get e-mails that fast are businesses (if my family needs my attention that fast I get a call not an e-mail).

This also gets to the paid vs free users, author writes "Google had licensed EAS in 2009 because its enterprise customers demanded it." followed by "Outlook on Windows and on the Mac still has to connect to Gmail via IMAP, and there's no way (short of buying a third-party add-on or paying $50 a year for a Google Apps for Business account) to get all of your Gmail/Google Apps data into Outlook.". Maybe I'm overlooking something but this seems like simple business sense to me, why pay another company to cover your entire user base for a feature that a particular segment of your user base wants? If recieving your e-mail 5 minutes later will cost you that much then spending less than $5 a month sounds like a cheap sacrifice.

I don't particularly care for the current state of affairs, but I find it hard to blame google in this case. They should have gotten their modifications to IMAP standardized, Am I going to hold that against them? Not really, a standard takes allot of time to get finalized and at the end of the day they are a business that needs to keep running in the mean time. Also I find it odd that one one hand the author is bashing google about open standards yet pushing active directory's sync. I'll end with this question, instead of creating active directory sync why didn't microsoft extend IMAP and build a better standard that we could all use?

Re:What?

[vux984]

1: the jumping through hoops is not required when using VLA version of Outlook (according to the GGP post) -- so it is a problem imposed by Outlook

Because click-to-run is a different deployment mode, it supports streaming download install and update, and uses a virtual filesystem, etc. Its different, not broken.

GoogleSync only appears to look for the outlook footprint the MSI installer leaves, so it doesn't 'see' outlook deployed via click-to-run. The "Installing the VLA version first" work around works, because then google sees it and allows itself to be installed. (Otherwise it just says it can't find outlook and aborts).

The defect is clearly with Google.

Re:What?

[Samizdata]

Or with Geary on Linux and Inky on Windows. All lovely all the way around.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

>activesync

Umm... this is ActiveSync: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActiveSync

ActiveSync never supported iOS. It didn't support anything past XP. I think you're thinking of something else.

one more thing..

[Anonymous Coward]

you forgot the US Government spying. until our IT giants tell the US government that they are leaving the united states if they don't stop, there is no reason to continue to freely use their service when an alternative is available.

Re:one more thing..

[ackthpt]

you forgot the US Government spying. until our IT giants tell the US government that they are leaving the united states if they don't stop, there is no reason to continue to freely use their service when an alternative is available.

It seems to me one can disguise their communication with the proper subterfuge, using an unpredictable, distinctive language to code missives. Ahem. Designating enclosed journal attribution! For only one binary arranged requirement! HOYVEN GLAYVEN! mm.. yes..

Re:one more thing..

[0racle]

The writer likes Outlook.com, clearly government spying is not a problem to them.

Re:one more thing..

[rst123]

you forgot the US Government spying. until our IT giants tell the US government that they are leaving the united states if they don't stop, there is no reason to continue to freely use their service when an alternative is available.

What alternative? You have to assume any US based email provider is the same when it comes to spying. The big guys in other countries may be safer if:
1) their NSA equivalent isn't doing the same thing.
2) Their spy agency isn't cooperating with/owned by the NSA.
3) the NSA ( and their spy agencies.) can't just tap into the lines that all your email go over.

The small players (in any country) might be safer if they can stay under the radar, but they will *probably* give in faster. I would imagine that Google/Microsoft etc. have bigger legal departments than many small to medium businesses have staff.

I suspect your only option is end to end encryption with the server running on your hardware in your home or office. And hope that you stay unnoticed so that no one sends out the cops on a trumped up weapons warrant, who just happen to decide that your email server looks interesting.

Paranoid, maybe, but a $3 wrench trumps most kinds of security. (allusions intenionaly not linked)

Re:one more thing..

[Mister Liberty]

You're a dumb schmuck. Get educated, or in touch with a clue bat.
Whatever other 'spy agency' (you got that wrong) is colluding with
chip maker Intel, to name one thing?
A sucker born every minute, and here's one.
Enjoy.

Re:one more thing..

[jeff4747]

So your plan is to go from the place where you actually have some protection from the NSA (they have to steal your data from foreign locations) and instead move all your data to foreign locations where the NSA doesn't have that pesky step.

Excellent plan. I eagerly await your plan to destroy McDonalds by eating there regularly.

Re:one more thing..

[Anonymous Coward]

If you thought your E-Mail was secure w/o encryption in storage then that's your fault.

Re:one more thing..

[rst123]

What?
I'm talking about tapping communications, and seizing hardware. What ISP does Intel run?

Re:one more thing..

[Anonymous Coward]

you forgot the US Government spying.

So did you. Offshore your email, and you have zero protection. The NSA's entire existence is justified by breaking and entering on foreign shores.

Not that you have any protection in the US, of course - but at least here you can wring your hands and cry out about how you've been wronged. Do that when ObnoxiousForeignerMail gets owned, and you'll be laughed at, and rightly so.

who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Optimizing my email experience is near the bottom of my priority list these days. Just give me something that is good enough. There is no need to build a complex personal philosophy on the subject.

Re:who cares?

[duke_cheetah2003]

Optimizing my email experience is near the bottom of my priority list these days. Just give me something that is good enough. There is no need to build a complex personal philosophy on the subject.

Yeah I'm with you. People still use email for anything other than verifying forum accounts and retrieving forgotten passwords? There are so many faster and easier ways to communicate. Can't say I trust the security of most of these non-email methods, but that's a different subject.

I couldn't even tell you the last time I received an email from a PERSON, pretty much everything in my inbox was generated by another computer.

Quickly on the iGoogle thing: iGoogle taught me something: Do not rely on any Google service, gimmick or application. Except maybe their search engine. Google is becoming notorious for yanking the rug out from under people relying on their stuff. I'll pass on that, I'll just find alternatives that seem to like sticking around.

Re:who cares?

[Penguinisto]

Yeah I'm with you. People still use email for anything other than verifying forum accounts and retrieving forgotten passwords? There are so many faster and easier ways to communicate.

Unfortunately, it's still the # thing at work... but then, if your company is using only public GMail accounts for work, there's something distinctly wrong with your company.

Can't say I trust the security of most of these non-email methods, but that's a different subject.

Heh - SMTP ain't so secure either.

(...yes, I know about TLS and various 3rd-party SecureMail methods, but they're either unused or hellishly clumsy when communicating with external entities - you pick.)

Re:who cares?

[lgw]

I use email for a lot of stuff (I avoid "social" sites entirely), and I hate continuing "improvements" to email clients - both web and otherwise. I loved gmail when it was new, and had the same "simple, clean" UI approach as the search page. Now it's such a mess that I'm moving to outlook.com, which I've been quite surprised to discover is, well, clean and simple.

Re:who cares?

[slaker]

People still use email for anything other than verifying forum accounts and retrieving forgotten passwords? There are so many faster and easier ways to communicate

That's possibly generational. I don't like to send SMSes because of the character limit and the idea that it's at least nominally tied to one device. I don't use any social networking services because I've actually read their terms of service. I think phone conversations are intrusive and damaging to my concentration, so I prefer not to talk on the phone, and many slow typists I know dislike any sort of realtime IM system.

Most of the people I know who dislike E-mail don't like the "formality" of having to write complete sentences or are paranoid about the possibility of some kind of record being kept of the exchange, but to me it's clearly the best general-purpose communication tool available most of the time. The haters tend to be young and want to conduct as much communication as possible through either Facebook or SMS.

I don't know if that's you or not, but I will say that E-mail isn't going away any time soon regardless of your wishes to the contrary.

Re:who cares?

[Voyager529]

Most of the people I know who dislike E-mail don't like the "formality" of having to write complete sentences

I think this is basically it. With e-mail, it's still the digital analogue of a handwritten letter. Punctuation and sentence structure still counts. The amount of grammatical mistakes that my friends make on Facebook and via SMS is outright annoying most times; it's almost as if they willingly ignore things they were taught in third grade in the name of their own convenience. This is normal via SMS and Facebook, but not so much via e-mail.

The thing I dislike is when people have mile-long e-mail signatures that no one in the history of humanity has ever bothered to read.

Re:who cares?

[Tassach]

The amount of grammatical mistakes that my friends make on Facebook and via SMS is outright annoying most times

Grammatical mistakes, like disagreement in plurality or using the wrong word, are very annoying.

Re:who cares?

[bemymonkey]

You must not work... or at least not in a place where you use computers at all.

Re:who cares?

[Godwin O'Hitler]

Well you might argue that it should be number instead of amount, but in either case it's clearly the quantity that is annoying rather than the mistakes considered individually.

Re:who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

The amount of grammatical mistakes that my friends make on Facebook and via SMS is outright annoying most times

Grammatical mistakes, like disagreement in plurality or using the wrong word, are very annoying.

Especially when you're correcting others.

[The number] noun [of grammatical mistakes that my friends make on Facebook and via SMS] prepositional phrase modifying The number [is] verb [very] adjective modifying annoying [annoying] gerund of the verb To annoy

Re:who cares?

[mcgrew]

That's possibly generational.

I think you nailed it, the OP is probably in his twenties or younger -- the MyFaceBook generation. For me, email is the handiest method of communication (yes, I still use the phone as a phone, too). My youngest daughter (26) emails me almost exclusively (becuse I'm not on FaceBook) and my older daughter (28) Textes me... when she knows I'm asleep or when I'm otherwise not answering my phone. When I get a text or email, the phone beeps. I seldom return texts because I hate typing on a touch screen; if I get an email the phone beeps, I read the message and respond when I can get on a device with a real keyboard, or just call.

"But with facebook I can talk to everybody at once!"

Talk to ME, kid. Fuck facebook.

Re:who cares?

[Samizdata]

Sorry. I use email a lot for communication with other people because it is asynchronous. I need to tell you something, but I am not sure where you are? Email. You will get it when you are available.

Re:who cares?

[Samizdata]

And I hate SMS since I am completely unable to use SMS slang in any way, shape, or form. That makes composing them on a phone a serious pain. As for the few people I know that insist on SMS, I use email/SMS gateways.

Re:who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I never understand why people want to talk on facebook, and not even in the private IMs but for the whole damn world to see.
I'm supposed to belong in this new generation of facebook people, but I hate it all the same.
The only reason I keep the account is because people don't answer their damn email anymore.

Re:who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you even have a job?
I get about 5 to 10 emails per day from real people and that's not a lot of emails by most standards.
Or do you add all your colleagues on friendface and chat with them there?

Past it? Long past it.

[ackthpt]

Honestly, I've had email systems were far more flexible (Lotus) easier to search (Groupwise) and my email client on my desktop makes GMail look like a laughable cartoon. As far as a free email drop goes, it's fine. As for an enterprise or for managing email, it's not even in the minor league.

Re:Past it? Long past it.

[mwvdlee]

How well does Lotus or Groupwise work on your mobile phone? BYOD is the reality of business email these days.

Re:Past it? Long past it.

[Penguinisto]

TBH, a public GMail account is not exactly what you'd want for a professional outfit anyway. Nor would you want a public Outlook.com, Yahoo, or any such other account. I can see (and do see) it being used by individual contractors or freelancers, but otherwise it wasn't really built for the full-blown no-shit enterprise world in the first place.

Re:Past it? Long past it.

[CanHasDIY]

How well does Lotus or Groupwise work on your mobile phone? BYOD is the reality of business email these days.

Lotus does have mobile clients that work just as well as their desktop one.

Of course, I fucking hate their desktop client, so...

Re:Past it? Long past it.

[kaiser423]

Anyone acting like Lotus is better than any other email client at anything is just incorrect. We actually have people switching to Linux and the running a Windows VM to do their actual work just so that they can use a Thunderbird or similar for email versus Lotus Notes. It's that bad. Earlier today I waited 35 minutes for my Inbox view to refresh so that I could actually see my inbox with only ~100 emails in it. We have a STOPNOTES.exe put on everyone's desktop by IT and that's the first thing they ask us to run if we call with a Lotus Notes problem. If by flexible you mean broke into a million pieces so technically you can make it any shape you want, then you would be correct.

Re:Past it? Long past it.

[Anonymous Coward]

How well does Lotus or Groupwise work on your mobile phone? BYOD is the reality of business email these days.

As well as a dynamically adapting mobile web interface, GroupWise offers an ActiveSync component called DataSync server. It works great with most phones and tablets. There are also several apps that use the native HTTP/SOAP interface for mailbox access.

Results form full text searches of million message mailboxes are near instant. The downside is that the indexes for those same mailboxes take hours(!) to rebuild if they break. As a user GroupWise search is awesome, but as an administrator, I hate GroupWise search.

Re:Past it? Long past it.

[lgw]

Well, both companies offer their mail services with your company's URL (I don't know about Yahoo). On the MS side, there's little difference between outlook talking to exchange and outlook talking to O365 in the cloud, other than latency. You can't really tell the difference in the web clients. I haven't seen gmail used for company email yet, but I assume you'd choose that because you liked the web client in the first place.

Re:Past it? Long past it.

[Anonymous Coward]

How well does Lotus or Groupwise work on your mobile phone? BYOD is the reality of business email these days.

Perfectly, Lotus Traveler

Re:Past it? Long past it.

[NJRoadfan]

Lotus Notes.... *shiver*. That client screams 1995. It still uses .INI files for its configuration the last time I set it up for a family member (they since switched to an Exchange server). The setup sheet the IT dept gave her for the client was 3 pages long and very technical.

MORE SPAM ON GMAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

In the last two months or so, I am getting about a dozen target spams per day. It used to be that the best thing about Google was the spam control. Not anymore.

Re:MORE SPAM ON GMAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

With your ALL CAPS subjects, it probably just thinks the spam is from your people. ;p

Re:MORE SPAM ON GMAIL

[duke_cheetah2003]

Just a dozen? At the height of one of my email accounts receiving spam, it was upwards of 500 messages a day. I finally just disabled that account, thought maybe if I left it disabled so everything bounces for a few months, they'd stop. Wrong, even today if I enable that account, it gets hammered.

My other accounts still receive substantial amounts of spam (more then a dozen a day, I think you're getting off pretty lightly!) But, I rarely ever see it. Thankfully popfile is really effective, no matter what they try.

Re:MORE SPAM ON GMAIL

[tgd]

Just a dozen? At the height of one of my email accounts receiving spam, it was upwards of 500 messages a day. I finally just disabled that account, thought maybe if I left it disabled so everything bounces for a few months, they'd stop. Wrong, even today if I enable that account, it gets hammered.

My other accounts still receive substantial amounts of spam (more then a dozen a day, I think you're getting off pretty lightly!) But, I rarely ever see it. Thankfully popfile is really effective, no matter what they try.

I get about 2k a day on my gmail account -- but what the GP may mean (and I've noticed, too) is that a LOT more are getting through to the inbox. I used to rarely get any, and in the last few months it probably averages about 40/day. Something has definitely change with their SPAM handling -- either its regressed, or it hasn't kept up with the spammers. (I suspect the former, because I can mark a given e-mail sender as SPAM a hundred times and Google doesn't take the hint...)

Re:MORE SPAM ON GMAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, one or two a week get through to my Inbox. And every so often I get a false positive and a legit email lands in the spam folder – thus I feel compelled to monitor it – just in case – rather than ignore it.

The real icing that has me ready to quit is they keep blocking email from my domain MX, claiming they get too much UCE from it. Four times in the last two months, requiring me to grovel to be added (back on) to their whitelist. My spamassassin plus two dnsbl blocks about 99.8% (and has never had a false positive) so honestly, it's just not true that they get too much spam via my MX.

What I can't figure out is what's so hard about keeping me on the whitelist? And why is it a prob in the first place? The amount of spam they get via my MX is a drop in the ocean compared to what they must get and a drop in the bucket compared to what they let through to my spam folder.

IMAP is supported though?

[Anonymous Coward]

So I can use a third-party client (Mozilla Thunderbird for one) with my Gmail via IMAP.

Re:IMAP is supported though?

[scdeimos]

Yes, Thunderbird + Google Contacts add-on is the duck's nuts.

I'm weaning myself off of Gmail and Google

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't like how I've entrusted one company with so much of my data. I don't have a facebook account either.

Going back to using my own hosted mail solution and I'm entirely fine with that.

Re:I'm weaning myself off of Gmail and Google

[Defenestrar]

And how much work is keeping your own host updated and spam filtered? I've thought about doing it before on several occasions (the Raspberry Pi seems like a cheap solution), but I've heard that keeping things smooth for a single account is generally more trouble than it's worth. How much time would you say it takes?

Re:I'm weaning myself off of Gmail and Google

[JMJimmy]

Buy domain
Get cheap hosting solution or email only solution
Setup clients and forget about it

That said, it doesn't matter since email is rarely done via PGP and PGP isn't overly secure either (nothing is these days). Honestly, for now, it's a losing battle. Until the email standard is completely re-written and secured properly it won't matter.

Re:I'm weaning myself off of Gmail and Google

[JackieBrown]

I thought about that too. But then decided it was not worth it since everyone I email still uses gmail and - as a result - Google would still get their copy.

Re:I'm weaning myself off of Gmail and Google

[Pentium100]

I want to do that too, however, I can't find a Web mail reader that has threads (conversations) like Gmail does. Roundcube kinda has them, but not fully. There is a plugin for Thunderbird that is almost as good as Gmail, but I do not want to keep a copy of my email on every computer I use to read mail.

Re:I'm weaning myself off of Gmail and Google

[cl0secall]

This is essentially my stance as well, except I only ended up creating a gmail account in the first place because you're required to have one for (at the time) Android Market. I'm still running a mail server that I originally set up around 2000. I still have some mail from that far back as well. Although I get a moderate amount of spam the vast majority of it that I get either goes to a known "promiscuous" email address (e.g. git@mydomain) and is funneled to a separate mailbox or doesn't get past the spamassassin that I installed from my distro's package manager. YMMV.

I am in the process of switching to a more robust backend/edge system with postfix, mysql, amavis, dovecot, sieve, and some other bits all managed by modoboa. That project is currently in the prototype stage.

Re:I'm weaning myself off of Gmail and Google

[SgtAaron]

And how much work is keeping your own host updated and spam filtered? I've thought about doing it before on several occasions (the Raspberry Pi seems like a cheap solution), but I've heard that keeping things smooth for a single account is generally more trouble than it's worth. How much time would you say it takes?

You could install spamassassin and procmail. If procmail sees X-Spam-Flag: YES in the headers, plop it into your spam folder
or whatever. We use spamassassin on our incoming email servers and I very rarely get spam in my inbox. I receive more than 100
spams a day. We're an ISP and I very rarely have to muck around with with tweaking rules, etc.

After installing spamassassin, a cron job should be set up to run sa-update daily to update the filter rules.

Re:I'm weaning myself off of Gmail and Google

[AntiSol]

Updating is the easy part - assuming you go for a debian-based server, keeping it up to date is exactly this hard:

1. log in every now and then (once per week is more than enough)
2. type 'sudo apt-get update'
3. type in your password
4. press Y

It usually takes me about 40 seconds. You can even set up a cron job to do it automatically if that's too much work. Setting it up properly isn't as easy as some make it sound though - if you don't know about things like Mail Transfer Agents and such it may take you a day or 2 of messing about, but the documentation is out there and it's not rocket science. If you do go with yout own box, you'll also want to set up SPF and DKIM so that google doesn't put everything you send to gmail users into spam.

Re:I'm weaning myself off of Gmail and Google

[Defenestrar]

Thanks.

Re:I'm weaning myself off of Gmail and Google

[Defenestrar]

Thanks, I've had work servers run spamassassin and it's generally been pretty good regarding both false positives and negatives.

cya

[donnyspi]

kbai!

I'm confused.

[patchouly]

I use Outlook to check my Gmail account (among others). I've never had any issues with it in the past nor currently. Pop in the info and it sets it up automatically. Same thing goes with my iPad, Samsung Aceii Phone and my old Blackberry. Never any issues at all. As with the OP, I've had Gmail since the beginning and I haven't noticed any changes (to be fair, I never check my email with my browser so changes there would have gone unnoticed). I have to wonder what sort of third part programs the author was having trouble with.

Slower loading times lately

[sandytaru]

Perhaps I've been spoiled by the speed of most Google apps and such, but Gmail has been very slow compared to its peppy-ness just a few months ago. I'll mark stuff in my Junk/Ads folder as read, then want to move on to my Spam folder to delete the stuff, but the app will stop me because it still has "pending requests" on the server. Gmail was a lot more tolerant of me being click-happy before. I'm not sure what changed.

Re:Slower loading times lately

[Anonymous Coward]

Over the years they've added tons of extra crap to the experience: GoogleTalk, G+, tabs and now a pointless minimized editing window

When it started it was very minimal features but those features were solid, and searching mail was easy and just worked. Then they started lumping junk into the mix, then more junk, then re-skinning the junk to make it look like shiny happy junk.

They haven't really taken features away but the bury the experience through relentless tinkering.

Why does it take multiple clicks to log out? Why can't I have full screen edit? Why is the mobile version SO BAD?

The worst part is trying to voice concerns with the dev team through the support forums, once you get past the Google fluffer brigade you end up being stonewalled by a developer telling you that's how the feature is supposed to work this conversation is over.

The worst part, and the real threat Google presents on the whole as a monopolistic entity is that there aren't a whole lot of options I would use so we're stuck with each other (and I suspect they know it)

Other good paid email providers?

[SuperKendall]

I pay Google to host my business email accounts. I have been thinking there has to be some better alternative - does anyone know of an email provider that would let you have several accounts across a number of domains for a reasonable fee?

This is probably better off as an Ask Slashdot question but I figured as long as people were in the mood to bitch about GMail I would see what other people are using.

Re:Other good paid email providers?

[mu51c10rd]

I'll probably get slapped for this...but there is Office365. If you are a bit smaller, perhaps Zoho would work for you?

Re:Other good paid email providers?

[jkflying]

I've used FastMail - it was bought by Opera, then sold again to the FastMail employees. They have a free version with 25MB space, no spam filter and ads, or you can pay to get decent space, remove the ads and add spam filters.

Re:Other good paid email providers?

[Gunnut1124]

My company (~750 email users) bought in to the Office 365 hype while negotiating our MS licensing. We got it super cheap and thought "What the hell, 'free' DR and a cloud service to offer the end users? Why not?"... That was a year ago. In the year since that decision and 8 months in to using the product, I can say without a doubt that Office 365 is the worst email system I've ever used. Hands down, the absolute worst. Spam filtering problems? Yep, had those. Mail delivery problems? Yep, about 3 times a month (on average). Client connectivity issues? Oh yeah. Management site unavailable? It's happened more than once. 4-hour hold for "free" support? Yep, been through that too.

It's bad enough that we're spending the money to move all of our cloud mailboxes back on-prem. I can't expect that ANYONE with an expectation for highly available mail systems would use Office 365. I'll offer further details in a PM if anyone needs it.

Re:Other good paid email providers?

[thatkid_2002]

In the recent buy-back by the employees, it was said that they're looking to improve the offerings in terms of value - because obviously their quotas a quite small. I'm thinking that more details on this should emerge within 6 months.

I have a paid account ($5 a year IIRC) because I need an email account besides that of my self-hosted email so that if my server goes down I can send emails to get it sorted out (or recover passwords that I've forgotten!). I didn't want to be "the product" for some gratis service provider so I decided to pay for service from the best provider I could find (within reason)... I was really surprised that it was hard to find a decent cheap personal email provider. Decent non-gratis email seems to be aimed purely at businesses and never at individuals.

Although I believe the future of email should not lay with providers, I really encourage people to take a look at Fastmail just to see the fact that there are providers besides Google can offer awesome services.

Re:Other good paid email providers?

[SuperKendall]

FastMail sounds tempting but what were some of the business oriented providers you found? I really do want to pay some bit of money for reliability of service (and the ability to have an SMTP server I can talk to to send email outbound from a server).

I'll check out FastMail though...

Re:Other good paid email providers?

[ruir]

Quite interesting comment. Here upper management is looking is buying into Office 365, however a quick look at their downtimes SLAs is just enough to see they are a joke. I would be quite interested in knowing the details of your experience, have a look at email me, or be invited to join my linked.in at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/rui-ribeiro/16/ab8/434

Re:Other good paid email providers?

[thatkid_2002]

I don't have names because I wasn't looking for business providers. Try looking at Zimbra resellers. The company I worked for resold for 01.com - in the year I used them there was never an issue.

Re:Other good paid email providers?

[SuperKendall]

Thanks, also I see PoBox (that I've been using for years only for forwarding) has a storage option as well that is pretty tempting.

I'll look at resellers too.

Re:Other good paid email providers?

[lissnup]

You could check out Zoho Mail [zoho.com] email hosting service for businesses / organizations. afaik, Zoho is India based, and not a US-owned organisation, so potentially less accessible to NSA snoops. Individuals can also create a free @zoho.com email address for personal use.

Re:Other good paid email providers?

[Anonymous Coward]

It really depends on the service provider, doesn't it? Their marketing is ridiculously aggressive though. Trying to buy a simple hosted email product might take a long time after you have cancelled the Office365 bundles of "useful happiness" you were sold. Oh, the seller probably cashed his MS Commission regardless of the actual end result of the sell.

Re:Other good paid email providers?

[SuperKendall]

Thanks, I'll also check out that - though I am not very concerned about NSA access, as I figure it would probably happen somewhere along the line in my path to the server anyway.

I used to use Runbox for mail services but it was not hosted in U.S. and the latency was just a bit too annoying. But still, I may give zoho a try since I can just try a free account first...

Re:Other good paid email providers?

[Samizdata]

LinkedIn? Really?

meh... MS advert...

[Mr Krinkle]

So his main issue with gmail....

"It doesn't work with Exchange Active Sync"

And that's google's fault? My guess is that MS stopped allowing it easy access HOPING people would move over to outlook.com (as he did, because he was "getting scroogled" cause we ALL know MS has NEVER used target advertising. etc etc)

he complains that you should be able to easily access it from a browser, or a native app... Ermmmm... Works just fine for me from a browser and from apps on iOS and Android devices for me... (I don't believe in WinMo.. they sucked, they annoyed me, i'll never trust them again...)
Even works fine on Blackberry....

Soooo... "MOVE TO OUTLOOK.COM Don't get Scroogled...." thanks for the look MS... oh yea, use bing.com, it's AWESOME..

Re:meh... MS advert...

[tgd]

My guess is that MS stopped allowing it easy access HOPING people would move over to outlook.com (as he did, because he was "getting scroogled" cause we ALL know MS has NEVER used target advertising. etc etc

This is the 21st century. You don't need to guess about MS and Google may have respectively done relative to using ActiveSync ... you could look it up.

I assume you're "guessing" because the answer you want it to be is 180 degrees off the actual answer. Amirite?!

Re:meh... MS advert...

[Anonymous Coward]

As somebody who used to use the activesync for google thing, my guess is they got sick of people telling them about all the weird bugs and complaining that it made a beautiful interface (outlook) suck bad.

Re:meh... MS advert...

[exomondo]

So his main issue with gmail....

"It doesn't work with Exchange Active Sync"

And that's google's fault?

Yes, they removed EAS support, you have to buy a Google Apps for Business subscription to get it back.

Re:meh... MS advert...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure, does Microsoft and Yahoo allow you to use third party apps now? Last time I tried, I couldn't figure out how. Perhaps it's not really intuitive.

Re:meh... MS advert...

[Samizdata]

Yeah, because Microsoft is famous for offering easy, open API access to their products.

MS shill does not like anything Google, news at 11

[silviuc]

Ed Bott has been sucking the Microsoft tit for years and he loves it. But don't believe me, go check his articles up on ZDnet and see just how many of them cover all things Microsoft.

In one of his articles he tells us just how much he loves Outlook.com. Link provided for convenience:
http://www.zdnet.com/why-i-use-outlook-com-for-my-custom-email-accounts-and-how-you-can-too-7000015546/

Google's Product

[GrBear]

I've decided to stop being Google's product after deciding I can't trust them any longer with my information.

I opened a VPS to handle my own email services, dumped my Android devices, switched to Bing and block all Google cookie and scripts in my browser.

The only last remnant I'm having a tough time replacing is YouTube for gaming vlog's.

Re:Google's Product

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah because we all know MS won't screw you.

Re:Google's Product

[i kan reed]

Drop bing, go DuckDuckGo.

Re:Google's Product

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you trust Microsoft with your info and not Google?

Re:Google's Product

[Anonymous Coward]

So if you're not using Android, or iFag, or WinFone, then what are you using?

Re:Google's Product

[sacrilicious]

Here here. Aso, have a gander at Google Sharing (plugin for Firefox).

Re:Google's Product

[swillden]

I've decided to stop being Google's product after deciding I can't trust them any longer with my information.

Based on what? All of the people whose data Google has leaked?

Of course you're entitled to whatever opinion you like, but I strongly suspect that your decision here is based on misinformation. If you'd like to chat about it, I'd be happy to clarify things. If not, that's fine, too.

I opened a VPS to handle my own email services

Are you certain your VPS provider has as good a security record and infrastructure as Google? If it's a small company they probably benefit from being a smaller target, though I can just about guarantee they're not as secure.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, as a security engineer focused primarily on protecting user data. I have no qualms about trusting Google's systems with my personal information. Even less since I started working here and got a better perspective.)

Re:Google's Product

[readacc]

Based on what? All of the people whose data Google has leaked?

Google doesn't have to have leaked data for people to be concerned about them. The act of Google building up a profile on someone, pressuring them at every stage into using that stupid Google+ service, not to mention having all that info ready to serve in case someone like the NSA feels noisy enough to request it, makes people feel a bit uncomfortable even if they've been a perfect little saint on the Internet.

Re:Google's Product

[martin-boundary]

Easy! Microsoft are incompetent, so I know that even if they try to use my info, they'll stuff it up.

Whereas I expect Google's engineers to fuck me over from just the implications of the implications of having my info.

Re:Google's Product

[martin-boundary]

I'm sorry, but I have to correct you on your use of the word "secure" (I know, right?). While Google's infrastructure is no doubt secure, the technical security being meant is not the user's. It can't be, when a simple court order (or not even that) can trivially make the information accessible and searchable.

When people talk about wanting security, they don't mean that they want some third party company to securely protect the data it collects and to secure its own continued existence by cooperating with law enforcement agencies. What people mean is that they want their data to be secure against viewing, usage, and modification by all third parties - That includes (but is not limited to) Google and law enforcement.

Re:Google's Product

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Ed, we got it. Blah blah, Google bad, Microsoft good.

Re:Google's Product

[swillden]

While Google's infrastructure is no doubt secure, the technical security being meant is not the user's. It can't be, when a simple court order (or not even that) can trivially make the information accessible and searchable.

Unless the GP's VPS is located outside of the US, and any other governmental jurisdiction that issues search warrants, then that is the same. Also, I take issue with the "not even that" claim. Google has repeatedly stated that they only respond to proper, legal requests, which are narrowly tailored, properly written and very specific. They don't allow government agencies to go in and search. That may or not be the case with some small VPS provider... Google has legal staff to fight overly broad access requests, but small operations don't.

What people mean is that they want their data to be secure against viewing, usage, and modification by all third parties - That includes (but is not limited to) Google and law enforcement.

Google does strictly control access by Google employees. Looking at any user data -- even your own -- without a clear reason (e.g. debugging) is a termination offense. This is explained to all employees in their first orientation system, which is generally their first day of employment.

With respect to law enforcement, no data is safe from that, unless it's locked up inside your head, or falls into one of a very small number of other exceptions (attorney-client privilege, doctor-patient privilege, spousal privilege, confessional, etc.).

Re:Google's Product

[Branciforte]

Did you think that the data on your hard drive is any safer from a "simple court order"? Good luck fighting that.

Search is Google's answer to everything.

[plover]

That's a failing of Google. They're the kings of search, so everything should be searchable, right? So they extended that to everything should be searched - always. Want to know who batted third in the fourth game of the World Series? Search for it. Want to know who sent you that email? Search for them. Want to run a program? Search for it.

What they don't acknowledge is that people grow habits. Once we've learned a thing, we can repeat the thing pretty easily. I don't have to "search" for Excel on my PC, I know that if I click down here, then up and over here, I see the little [X~] icon. I don't open the search bar and type Excel. And I never open the search bar and type Excel.

Microsoft, in their traditionally incompetent fashion of misunderstanding their users, decided to mimic Google's unacknowledged mistakes when they came out with Windows 8. (Unity, of course, had beaten them to the punch in incompetence, as they so often do.) Apple figured it out better when they tied search to the home screen on the iPhones, but wisely kept it out of sight. Most people drag their two-dozen useful icons to the first few pages of their iPhone, and use search only when they've forgotten which folder they hid their AnimeTube player in.

Perhaps the reason GMail (beta) remained beta for so long was that they were running experiments on people. Maybe they wanted to see if people would ever adapt to their notions of "search". And maybe they finally tallied up the results, and recognized how stupid they were to believe it in the first place.

Re:Search is Google's answer to everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

They're the kings of search, and now they are abusing that power. Try searching the app store based on the permissions required by an app. (Really, try it.) Google doesn't want you to search this way. They even blacklisted APEFS, which implemented this functionality.

Re:Search is Google's answer to everything.

[CrankyFool]

Interesting. I pretty much only/always search for applications on my PC -- hitting command-space brings up spotlight and I type 'excel' (or, more often, 'keynote', 'chrome', or 'terminal'). This behavior came over from when I switched from a Windows box, where I did exactly the same thing (hit the shortcut for the start menu, then 'r' for the 'run' option). It's much quicker than finding an icon (even if I were to have the icon of every program I may be interested in at the bottom of my screen).

And in fact, that ends up being something I do quite often with gmail, too (at least the work version, which I access primarily on a browser, rather than my personal version which I access via IMAP).

Re:Search is Google's answer to everything.

[swb]

It's so funny how Microsoft has become kind of a Google wannabe. So many things Google does Microsoft just seems to try copy, even if they were doing it somewhat differently before. They've made Bing a Google search clone. Windows phone. Google Apps? Web based office.

Re:Search is Google's answer to everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

You should try search; it works great. I can hit the Windows key and type excel faster than I can find the icon. The only exceptions are my pinned apps.

Re:Search is Google's answer to everything.

[cjc25]

Woah, interesting. As a counterexample ever since Windows search was introduced I always hit start and type the first several characters I'm interested in:

[win]steam[enter]
[win]chrome[enter]
[win]kmymo[enter] (kmymoney)
etc.

Re:Search is Google's answer to everything.

[plover]

Great point! I agree that I'll happily open a command shell and execute a program, thus allowing it to search my path. But for whatever reason, I'll only do this in the context of running command line programs. When it's a GUI application, my brain has me clicking the Firefox logo, rather than typing Firefox, or Start/Control Panel/Administrative Services instead of typing services.msc. And runas is so damn wordy as to be worthless compared to either sudo or right-click-run-as-administrator. (Do you really intend to type all of: runas /profile /env /user:mymachine\administrator "mmc %windir%\system32\services.msc" ???) When in Windows userland, I guess I do as the sheep do.

Something else I've noticed is that I often need the list. For example, I have no need to remember the name of the program that I use to mount .ISO images, because I simply don't use it that often. When I do, I can't remember nearly enough about it to find it. That's when I need the list of applications to scroll through - aha, it's called MagicDisc, not MountISO like I was thinking. Typing 'ISO' or 'disc' turns up nothing of value, and just finding the often-mismatched folder name in c:\Program Files or c:\Program Files (x86) or d:\Program Files or d:\Program Files (x86) is unhelpful. And no matter how many times I type 'mount', it's still not a UNIX box. :-(

Windows is far from ready for search to be the goto method to launch programs. Ubuntu is not ready for search. iOS might be closest, but surprisingly Apple isn't the one forcing it down my throat.

Re:Search is Google's answer to everything.

[PhrostyMcByte]

"I don't have to "search" for Excel on my PC, I know that if I click down here, then up and over here, I see the little [X~] icon. I don't open the search bar and type Excel. And I never open the search bar and type Excel.

I rarely use Excel, definitely not enough to commit its location in menus to memory. But I can type winkey+e+x+enter in a fraction of the time it takes for you to "click down here, then up and over here" through menus. I'd say using search to launch applications is the right way to do it -- one of the few additions I think they nailed in Vista.

Re:Search is Google's answer to everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

second this. Since I started using command-space, I only click on icons when I have to move files around.
In response to the GP, I think 'search everywhere' works just fine with people's ability of learning habits. I would say that it's a major shift (improvement in my opinion) to change your thinking from folders to tags (or whatever you want to call them). I think the idea of putting files into folders unnecessarily brought along the limitations from the real world, and there is no reason for us to hold on to those limitations anymore. I expect that someday we won't have "folders" on our filesystems at all. It doesn't mean you can't be organized, but the organization will be in the view rather than imposed on some internal state.

Re:Search is Google's answer to everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting. I pretty much only/always search for applications on my PC -- hitting command-space brings up spotlight and I type 'excel' (or, more often, 'keynote', 'chrome', or 'terminal'). This behavior came over from when I switched from a Windows box, where I did exactly the same thing (hit the shortcut for the start menu, then 'r' for the 'run' option). It's much quicker than finding an icon (even if I were to have the icon of every program I may be interested in at the bottom of my screen).

Only works if you know what you want.

There's a reason restaurants give you menus to look at it instead of having you ask the waitress "do you have X" where you try 10 different Xs until you hit something they have that you want.

This isn't such a problem on your own computer, though I do like to look at lists of games to decide which one interests me, but it is a serious problem when dealing with other people's computers. Do they have Acrobat? FoxIt? SumatraPDF? Something else I haven't heard of? 7-zip? Winzip? Winrar?

Re:Search is Google's answer to everything.

[exomondo]

What they don't acknowledge is that people grow habits. Once we've learned a thing, we can repeat the thing pretty easily. I don't have to "search" for Excel on my PC, I know that if I click down here, then up and over here, I see the little [X~] icon. I don't open the search bar and type Excel. And I never open the search bar and type Excel.

I do that most of the time, the reason is it is consistent across systems and even fairly consistent across platforms. I don't have to concern myself with people's choice of where to place, arrange or organize files or icons because on Windows I can just hit the Windows key and start typing (works on the start menu pre-8 and the start screen in 8) or Command+Space on OSX and start typing.

Re:Search is Google's answer to everything.

[Solandri]

Microsoft, in their traditionally incompetent fashion of misunderstanding their users, decided to mimic Google's unacknowledged mistakes when they came out with Windows 8. (Unity, of course, had beaten them to the punch in incompetence, as they so often do.) Apple figured it out better when they tied search to the home screen on the iPhones, but wisely kept it out of sight. Most people drag their two-dozen useful icons to the first few pages of their iPhone, and use search only when they've forgotten which folder they hid their AnimeTube player in.

Thing is, search isn't the only way to find things in GMail. You can tag emails with labels - I have almost 100 filters set up to do just that based on who sent the email. So I can click on a label to see all my Amazon orders, or everything my web hosting service sent me, or email from co-workers. This does the functional equivalent of sorting mails into folders to help you find stuff without searching, except a mail can be in multiple folders simultaneously.

This is also where iOS fails badly. They're still stuck on the 1984 Macintosh paradigm where the object is the object, and is always the one and only object. That's a limitation of physical objects which has been artificially implemented in software. This is the fundamental skeumorphism Apple needed to remove in the iOS update, but didn't. Just like putting mail into folders, this means if you can't remember which folder you put it in or accidentally put it in the wrong folder, you can't find it without a search. On Windows, Unix/Linux, and Android, you can have pointers (references, links, whatever you want to call them) to an object, like GMail's labels. This lets you sort the app icons on your desktop any way you want, while simultaneously keeping a master list of all your apps in the app drawer. You can even put down multiple copies of the app icons if, say, you might need quick access to your address book both in your folder of communications apps and in your folder of navigation apps.

Re:Search is Google's answer to everything.

[Buzer]

(Do you really intend to type all of: runas /profile /env /user:mymachine\administrator "mmc %windir%\system32\services.msc" ???)

No. Almost every program that needs admin permissions will ask for it automatically these days (mmc will ask it when it starts, some will ask it as needed). If it doesn't (like notepad and cmd), I will simply start the program with shift+ctrl+enter and that will make program to run as admin (it doesn't work from run prompt, but it does work from the searchpromptthing).

Re:Search is Google's answer to everything.

[Eythian]

I tend to push the windows key and the unity dash pops up, type a couple of letters in, and whatever I was looking for appears. It's pretty quick and convenient. The ones I use the most are kept on the launcher, but for everything else I go through the dash. None of this having to memorise a fixed layout, or poke through menus to find things.

I think perhaps you are misunderstanding, and just aren't willing to change. Which is fine, but it's not their fault that's the case.

Re:Search is Google's answer to everything.

[Theaetetus]

That's a failing of Google. They're the kings of search, so everything should be searchable, right? So they extended that to everything should be searched - always. Want to know who batted third in the fourth game of the World Series? Search for it. Want to know who sent you that email? Search for them. Want to run a program? Search for it.

What they don't acknowledge is that people grow habits. Once we've learned a thing, we can repeat the thing pretty easily. I don't have to "search" for Excel on my PC, I know that if I click down here, then up and over here, I see the little [X~] icon. I don't open the search bar and type Excel. And I never open the search bar and type Excel.

You should try a Mac. I hit command-space and type "exc" and hit return and Excel launches. With Spotlight indexing the drive, why bother actually trying to click through folders if I know the name of what I'm looking for, or even a word in the file?

Re:Search is Google's answer to everything.

[Samizdata]

Copying people has always been Microsoft's forte, even if they tend to do it poorly and late after the fact. Their days of innovation are mostly over, IMO.

It's a freaking email

[oldhack]

What do you want, a blowjob?

Re:It's a freaking email

[Ravaldy]

Are you offering?

Re:It's a freaking email

[Bucc5062]

and your asking from a poster named "oldhack"? Desperate times my friend, desperate times.

Re:It's a freaking email

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are the best email clients...often called the "the secretary" though i think the name "personal assistant" is becoming more common.

they will often even automatically print out important emails on flattened dead trees, to make them seem even more important!

Re:It's a freaking email

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you want, a blowjob?

Judging by the fact his primary bitch is about MS Active Sync, I'm guessing he's hoping someone will saunter up and take him from behind. Dry and rough.

Re:It's a freaking email

[Ravaldy]

I'm not picky.

What problem?

[formfeed]

I've been using gmail with imap for quite a while, and there really isn't a problem at all.

When you use IMAP, those labels are translated into folders. If you used multiple labels for a message, most clients will create multiple copies, and trying to keep things in sync is tricky.

It hurts when you do this? Well, don't do it then. The problem is not with gmail here. Gmail labels simply don't translate to imap. Decide whether you want to use multiple labels with gmail, or stay with your imap client and use one label only. You can do copies for other folders, or use your email client's labeling system. It would be nice to have a client that recognizes all the labels and then lets you choose which label should correspond to a certain folder, a certain color, etc.. - but that's the client's problem

Re:What problem?

[Ravaldy]

I agree. Although I'm more of an MS product user, I don't see the problem with Gmail. My gmail account works fine and it's free. Who cares if they get access to my personal info. In the end whether it be MS or Google, they can't do this for free forever so they tailor it to be lucrative. As a customer if you want to pay there are plenty of choices but when you try to get what you want in a free product tailored for the masses your reaching to people who don't care about your unique needs.

Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at

[rudy_wayne]

Ed Bott has been sucking the Microsoft tit for years and he loves it.

I've been using Gmail since the old days when you had to have an invitation, and I've always used a third party email client because Gmail's web-based interface is stupid and pointless. Ed Bott is an idiot and I don't understand how he ever got a job writing for any computer/tech related magazine or website.

iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[ScottCooperDotNet]

I knew exactly one person who used it, it simply wasn't a popular feature, even if it was the homepage on some Gateway PCs.

Sadly, many people don't realize that just because a web feature exists and works now, doesn't mean that it can be considered permanent. Auditing for security, proper functioning in the latest browsers, and other general maintenance still cost money. Google at least gives some notice, not all providers can do so.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[Anonymous Coward]

Google at least gives some notice, not all providers care about their users enough to bother finding out how easy a little planning can be.

Fixed that for you.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[icebike]

But as you pointed out, it was nothing but a web page, feeding on a bunch of parameters held somewhere.
Seriously, how expensive is that to maintain?

Write Once, it should work for ever, or until significant portions of the html spec are deprecated.
But web standards are typically expanded and enhanced without dropping completely what existed before.

I suspect it was so shoddily written, by a summer intern who has moved on, and no one can figure out
how it works, and it wasn't worth the time to make it monetize-able.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[Sarten-X]

Write Once, it should work for ever...

Until a hard disk dies, or a UPS battery won't hold a charge, or until the virtual machine gets in the way of somebody doing something, or until a subtle back-end architecture change suddenly allows everyone to log in as everyone else, or myriad other problems that weren't foreseen years ahead of time.

It's safer just to sunset the whole thing when it's clear it will never be used enough to justify its (albeit low) maintenance.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[PRMan]

I used it. I switched to ustart.org which imported the whole thing flawlessly.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[icebike]

A hard disk fail? Google?
A hard disk fails every minute of the day on Google's system. They have a bazillion of them.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[thetoadwarrior]

I suspect more people used it than you think but it's a person thing. People don't talk about it much. iGoogle clearly conflicted with G+ which means Google wasn't going to let it live even if everyone used it. Just like Google reader, if it's not going to help Google take on FB then it goes. There's a whole market now of apps and sites that act as a feed manager. It's certainly popular enough for people to invest their money into entering the market.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[Aryden]

wrote my own.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[PopeRatzo]

I suspect it was so shoddily written, by a summer intern who has moved on, and no one can figure out
how it works, and it wasn't worth the time to make it monetize-able.

Nonsense. If the people at ighome.com and netvibes.com and protopage.com igoogleportal.com can figure it out, I'm pretty sure someone at Google can figure out how iGoogle works.

Unfortunately, none of those alternatives are nearly as well-designed or refined. I'm gonna miss it. I had my RSS reader, my inbox, my weather, calendar, phases of the moon, task list and XKCD, plus a bunch of bookmarks all on one portal page. It was what I saw when I started a browser and it has worked perfectly for me for years. I'm pissed enough about Google dropping it that I've changed my search engine and rooted my Nexus 7.

I really don't care if I'm just one of a very few who rely on iGoogle. I'm just not gonna support a company that takes away a product I like a lot and would have happily paid a few bucks a month for. Fuck Google.

But at least it's a reminder that you can't get too dependent on these big corporations, because it gives them the power to fuck with you if they so desire.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[farble1670]

Write Once, it should work for ever, or until significant portions of the html spec are deprecated.

time to get back to your job at the pet store.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[serviscope_minor]

t wasn't worth the time to make it monetize-able.

I think they are making a fundemental mistake here.

There a quite a lot of services brutlly cut because they weren't profitable enough. Sounds sensible.

Big problem though is that it raises huge doubts about whether it's ever worth investing time in a new service. Since they are so keen on cutting, I'm not going to expand my usage of services beyond what I currently use, because basically I don't trust them to keep it up and running.

Cutting niche services hampers the abilitiy to make non-niche ones.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[icebike]

I couldn't agree more.

There are several interesting things Google is offering (Google KEEP being the last one I noticed) that I simply refuse to get involved with. There are other syncing notebook managers that have this as their only business, and they will be around long after google dumps Keep.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[s.petry]

By pet store do you mean cleaning the bird shit off the windshields before using the squeegee?

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[Anonymous Coward]

I never considered the point you make but I wouldn't be suprised if that's exactly why they killed it. It made a nice landing page for my homepage and allowed me immediate access to shit like my calendar and weather. I simply didn't have anything else loaded. Clean an minimal ads but I also used it to search frequently as I don't use the search box in Firefox (why when I've already got Google Loaded?) and it worked nicely with IE for when I simply had to run it.

As far as G+ goes, I'm seriously considering dumping it because I don't give a damn for all the shit I have to wade through just to see posts from family. I may as well call em up and talk to them instead of giving any information to Google as to what we find interesting. Can you spell "Profiling?" Sure can and it's so nice for the Government to get such psych profiles on anyone using Google.

Fast Turtle

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[Curate]

HAD a bazillion. Now they have a bazillion minus 1. And just wait a minute.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[Anonymous Coward]

Look how big my dick is!

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[Runaway1956]

Ditto, mostly. Well - I didn't have the same stuff you did on iGoogle, but ditto that I collected all the stuff that I, personally, considered to be worthy of space on a home page. Eventually, I'll settle on an alternative. Today, I'm still experimenting with the many alternatives.

Changing my search engine? I'm not quite ready for that - but the motivation to do so grows stronger with time. I'm mostly waiting for a real competitor that isn't owned, operated, or affiliated with Microsoft. If Bing didn't help to enrich Microsoft, I might reconsider them. Might. I guess they are mostly satisfactory, I just don't like them.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[Anonymous Coward]

The APIs it used changed often though, therefore that needed to be periodically updated too.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[jafiwam]

While I didn't use it to the extent you did, I used it as my "common home page" across the several computers I use. Having access to bookmarks and other localized stuff, notes, and so on was very useful. I switched over to a company called Netvibes that has a free tool that is very similar to iGoogle. It's slower of course, and a little harder to use, but it's still there.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[jafiwam]

The insistence on using real names was what turned me completely off on G+

It was an obvious attempt to monetize my information to the point that they were getting more out of it than I would. Heck, Facebook while basically a cesspool at least uses "enticement" to get the information instead of "forced". While they gather what they can, they don't force me to participate. (I have massive ad-block capabilities so I don't worry about Facebook much.

That, and Google hooked it up with Youtube, forever linking what you watch and what you post with your real name, you CANNOT dissasociate them once Google has done that. And now you've got a company handing over your real name to the company that decides to have a copyright shit fit over the background music that happened to be playing on the radio while I filmed my cat getting it's head stuck in a watermelon and uploaded it to Youtube. G+ is downright DANGEROUS to privacy if you care about that.

I don't need that shit in my life, and if Google insists on it, I don't need Google in my life either.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[lorenlal]

Funny... Quick search for ustart.org... Looks like these guys work with virus authors and distributors to redirect people to their site. Classy.

I liked iGoogle, but I'm thinking that most of us should find a site that isn't ustart.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[PopeRatzo]

Changing my search engine?

I use startpage.com. While it uses results from other engines, including google, supposedly it protects privacy.

So my hope is to deprive google of the integrated personal data and preferences that is their stock and trade. So far, I'm very happy with startpage, and am trying to use protopage as my portal. It's not as nice, but I don't have too much of a choice. I just want some nice RSS readers and maybe weather and if possible, an email inbox preview widget. The phases of the moon and XKCD and google calendar I could maybe live without.

Re: iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been using qrobe.it for a while now. pretty much the same as startpage. i very rarely go to google anymore.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[oreiasecaman]

Ever thought of having a separate account for those things you don't want associated with you? Since it's free to make one, I don't get why people get so pissed by things like this.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[Aighearach]

So small and cowardly, I can't even see it.

Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[Pentavirate]

iGoogle was already monetized. The whole purpose of iGoogle was to make sure that when you opened a browser, you saw Google. If you first see Google and you need to search for something, you'll use Google's search engine. That's it. It was meant to drive people to continue to use Google Search instead of another search engine.

Outlook.com SMTP servers do not offer SSL/TLS

[Anonymous Coward]

Use checktls.com to verify that outlook.com, hotmail.com, live.com, yahoo.com, etc. do not have SSL. Any messages sent to or from theses systems cross the wires in plain text for NSA to capture. This is reason enough to not use any of these services. At least gmail offers SSL/TLS with PFS algorithm on their SMTP servers.

Re:Outlook.com SMTP servers do not offer SSL/TLS

[jafiwam]

Use checktls.com to verify that outlook.com, hotmail.com, live.com, yahoo.com, etc. do not have SSL. Any messages sent to or from theses systems cross the wires in plain text for NSA to capture. This is reason enough to not use any of these services. At least gmail offers SSL/TLS with PFS algorithm on their SMTP servers.

NSA can get copies of the certificates used.

MOST email providers don't run SMTP securely. How would those services communicate with the run of the mill ISP if they forced secured mode.

Look, ya moron, email isn't secure, it never was, and won't be, unless you are personally trading private keys with the people you correspond with.

By Ed Bott for The Ed Bott Report

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at this guy's column, it's all Microsoft articles.

At the end of TFA:
"Anyway, I've now set up a permanent forwarder on my @gmail.com address, so that any incoming messages go immediately to my new preferred address, at a custom domain hosted on Outlook.com."

I don't suppose he wrote TFA with any sort of bias towards Microsoft's GMail alternative.

Ed Bott is a clueless dolt

[rudy_wayne]

I've always thought it odd that no other email provider ever adopted Gmails "search not sort" mentality.

Because it's stupid. If you have to constantly search for things it means you are a lazy disorganized slob. The number of times I've had to search for an email can be counted on one hand because I have things organized so that I know where they are.

Re:Ed Bott is a clueless dolt

[slaker]

I keep every single message I've gotten since 1993 in the same inbox with perhaps a half dozen total messages segregated into a different folder. That's around 300,000 emails. I have a very good memory so I seldom need to search, but when I do, I've never found a weakness in the search component of any mail client I care to name, even going back to elm or pine.
The greatest degree of flexibility comes with having all my messages in the same directory; over the last 20 years I've treated it as a quasi-journal and usually if I go back to read a message or two for a given date I can give a pretty accurate summation of everything else I did on that day, so as an organizational structure I'd say it works just fine.

Re:Ed Bott is a clueless dolt

[aardvarkjoe]

Because it's stupid. If you have to constantly search for things it means you are a lazy disorganized slob. The number of times I've had to search for an email can be counted on one hand because I have things organized so that I know where they are.

Why should I waste time manually organizing my e-mails when I can just search for them when I want to read them later? Computers exist to do menial work for me, so I don't have to do it myself.

Re:Ed Bott is a clueless dolt

[Whorhay]

I'd bet that you've "searched" for an email on far more occasions than that, at least if you actually use email as a regular form of communication. I tend to keep things pretty organized but folders and sub folders start to fill up after a couple weeks and eventually when I click on a folder that I know contains the email I want I still have to visually search through it's contents, which sometimes contain thousands of emails. That is at work where I have to use outlook. At home I use gmail and I can use the search feature there to find any email far more rapidly than I could click through a series of folders and locate it in a list. You might as well argue against electric calculators because we already have slide rules and the abucus.

I have other complaints about GMail and Google but the search instead of folders definitely isn't one of them.

Re:Ed Bott is a clueless dolt

[dubbreak]

Just because you aren't using a search bar doesn't mean you aren't searching. Any time you look for an email you are searching, whether that be a quick visual scan of a folder you know it's in (after finding the folder) or what have you. You may consider your method superior, but it takes more effort to organize. If I can find an email as quickly as you using the gmail search, then my overall effort is lower, meaning I'm wasting less time on email and spending more time in the real world.

Maybe you use all automated organizing, but manual organizing seems pointless in 2013. I used to manually organize my MP3s.. in the 90s. I used to manually organize my email in the 00s. Now I don't have to do either and my life is better for it.

Re:Ed Bott is a clueless dolt

[Grave]

I would argue the exact opposite. You seem to be conflating "search for things" in gmail as somehow being the same as searching for a piece of paper on a desk with thousands of papers. In general, I type what I'm looking for into the search bar and have the result I need. That's faster for me than going through folders. I can find what I need very quickly. The time spent doing the initial organization with folders is time wasted in my view. Not everyone is the same, of course, and for some people, search is not efficient (typically because they don't know what they're looking for).

Re:Ed Bott is a clueless dolt

[Finallyjoined!!!]

Apart from your appalling grammar:

I keep every single message I've gotten since 1993

I've kept every single message I've received since 1993

Your bald statement that you have a good memory so I seldom need to search is just utter, utter bollocks.
I'm sure I sent you an email back in 1994 calling you a cunt, can you remember that message?, my address at the time was 10285.1061@compuserve.com, but surely you remember that. You, Sir, are full of shit.

Re:Ed Bott is a clueless dolt

[Finallyjoined!!!]

Spot on mush!

These, supposedly, IT literate commentards, who should know that computers are very, very, very good at automating/indexing/searching things; are obviously still much less able than a fat US basement slob.

Re:Ed Bott is a clueless dolt

[slaker]

Since no one has ever called me that in an email message, I'm sure that I would remember.
I'm not saying I can remember the exact shuffle order from a deck of cards, but I definitely don't have a problem with names, dates or phone numbers.

Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at

[Anonymous Coward]

Ed Bott is an idiot and I don't understand how he ever got a job writing for any computer/tech related magazine or website.

We are talking about ZDNet right?

Don't forget "labels"

[Anonymous Coward]

Bloody 'orrible things. Many people prefer folders/dirs for organization for a reason, they work.

Disagree completely.

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the poster I've been using it since private beta. I used it natively via the browser and loved it. Now an authorised reseller Ive deployed gmail to many business who predominantly use it with 3rd party clients such as mac mail and outlook. I now use it with mac mail. Using IMAP it works flawlessly. My only criticism is the lack of drag and drop via browser but I'm sure that will come. Agree regarding the igoogle disappointment and I too have stopped putting all my eggs in goggles basket. Too many services I came to depend on have been killed off!

Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at

[i kan reed]

To be fair, I think a lot of us have been getting increasingly dissatisfied with google. I don't like Microsoft, especially since windows 8, and its "we know better than the user" attitude, so I'd rather find another party, but Google has been less and less appealing as a source for anything for years now.

The Case Against Email

[Skapare]

IMHO, the whole Email thing is past its time. Letting just anyone send means spammers will. When people ask me for my email, I now give out a website where they can set me a message ... after they login. But I don't give them an access name/password unless they ask for one (and no one knows to do that).

Re:The Case Against Email

[Voyager529]

IMHO, the whole Email thing is past its time. Letting just anyone send means spammers will. When people ask me for my email, I now give out a website where they can set me a message ... after they login. But I don't give them an access name/password unless they ask for one (and no one knows to do that).

So by your very definition, few people, if any, contact you. The concept of human contact, even through digital means, will never be "past its time". Does E-mail have its issues? Of course it does. So does the phone. So does texting. So does BBM. So does postal mail. So does Facebook. The question is which set of pros and cons are enough to warrant the use of a particular means of communication. E-mail's strength is its sheer ubiquity and openness. Its weakness is its inability to intelligently determine desired communication and undesired communication. For most people, this is far more acceptable than a system that requires someone to contact you in order to have them contact you.

Re:The Case Against Email

[Eythian]

IMHO, the whole Email thing is past its time. Letting just anyone send means spammers will. When people ask me for my email, I now give out a website where they can set me a message ... after they login. But I don't give them an access name/password unless they ask for one (and no one knows to do that).

That sounds like a terrible idea. As soon as I saw the login form, I'd go away. That might be my loss, it might be yours, but neither of us will know as you have a too-high barrier of entry.

Re:The Case Against Email

[Skapare]

Many people contact me. It's not by email. It's also not by Facebook walls.

Re:The Case Against Email

[Skapare]

It's there as a high barrier of entry. Email is too low.

Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at

[Anonymous Coward]

Should've realized that when I saw this was posted by timothy...

Google's lost the plot

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest annoyance about Google at the moment is that bl**dy 1Mbyte plus full window advert picture sequence you get every time when trying to log in.

Oh, and the fact the bl**dy sign in button doesn't work on Firefox on Linux. A workaround for that BTW is to click the sign in button with the middle mouse button to open the sign in window in a new Firefox tab.

Also, if the HTML interface had a "delete all" option in the Bin window like the Javascript version does, I would be happy with the HTML interface as it's quick and far less bloated than the Javascript interface has become.

Works fine in Thunderbird

[ClassicASP]

I gots no complaints. Works fine for me in Thunderbird.

Re:Works fine in Thunderbird

[Finallyjoined!!!]

Very pleased for you, cleaning my bronze golf clubs in Cola works for me, now fuck off until you have a relevant comment.

Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait... Microsoft has tits? WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN?

Of course, with Microsoft's track record, they'll be square, hard, and require special lips in order to interface with their nonstandard nipples. Also, they won't have milk, just raspberry jam, with all of the complications its viscosity would imply.

OK, I've taken this one far enough...

Why Is This News?

[snookerdoodle]

I am serious. Why does /. consider an article by a Microsoft shill bashing Google and recommending Microsoft's product to be worthy of our time?

Thank you in advance for any serious answers.

Re:Why Is This News?

[Finallyjoined!!!]

Simple: Clickbait.

Re:Why Is This News?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am serious. Why does /. consider an article by a Microsoft shill bashing Google and recommending Microsoft's product to be worthy of our time?

Thank you in advance for any serious answers.

Controversial stories get promoted because they promote discussion. Controversial first/early posts also get promoted. Anything to keep the discussion going.

Re:Why Is This News?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because someone at Slashdot is whoring the website out to Microsoft in the hope of getting "invited to speak" at one of the Microsoft conferences, no doubt. That's how those criminals at Microsoft slip money under the table to their shameless shills and FUDsters. They can always falsely claim to have used the conference as a forum to deny any connection while at the same time rewarding the despicable whoring being perpetrated in the first place.

Re:Why Is This News?

[Anonymous Coward]

submitter should know we like our shills from google and apple.

better than the new Yahoo mail

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

After Yahoo recently changed its mail format, Gmail is beginning to look pretty good again.

I don't understand how most people don't get it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like with Facebook, in GMail you are the product.
 
The same people who won't use Facebook, cawwing on that old familiar tune, should abandon Google/GMail/Android for the same reasons.

Thunderbird reads Gmail just fine . . .

[DutchUncle]

. . . and what's wrong with IMAP and POP? They're called "standards" because they're "standard" and consistent and don't change every day like some people's menu bars and web interfaces. My wife can read her Gmail from her iPhone, too. Neither of us is confused by their interface . . . In fact I don't know what this article is complaining about other than "MICROSOFT IS NONSTANDARD" which is not exactly a shock, but he's saying it as if everyone else in the world is supposed to conform to Microsoft's standards. Um m m m m , no.

If you're worried about privacy: I pay for Verizon FIOS. That includes email. I *pay* for this, it's *mine*, they're not supposed to be making money off it . . . except I know from other evidence that they are scanning the email just like Google does, especially when I'm looking at it with the webmail interface rather than Thunderbird. So I don't think you can trust paid services either. And I'll bet dollars to donuts that if you run your own server, someone is scanning things to the SMTP port. If you don't control the wires end-to-end, then you don't have control, period.

For the ultra-cool folks who ask "who uses a client" and "who uses email anymore" . . . what are you doing reading such an ancient site as Slashdot? Go read something that nobody else knows about yet, and let us dinosaurs roam in peace.

Re:Thunderbird reads Gmail just fine . . .

[hobarrera]

Sure, they're standard, and it's cool if gmail implemented them compeltely

Re:Thunderbird reads Gmail just fine . . .

[Mr. McGibby]

Please explain how any of those missing features affect more than a handful of people.

Re:Thunderbird reads Gmail just fine . . .

[Chemisor]

> . . . and what's wrong with IMAP and POP?

They don't support calendaring. For the manager types, life revolves around meetings and conversation, so mail and calendaring are pretty much the same thing. There ought to be a separate protocols for the calendar and contacts.

Re:Thunderbird reads Gmail just fine . . .

[Skapare]

I'd rather have the calendaring separate, either as its own app, or a web page service (ala, Jira, Trac, etc).

Re:Thunderbird reads Gmail just fine . . .

[hobarrera]

1) The \Recent flag is used by plenty of mail clients.
2) Substring searches are used for, uhm, searches.
3) Sieve equals filters. Plenty of users out there use filters. If you say "you can create them from the gmail interface", then you're only proving that third party clients aren't compatible.
4) The \Answered flag is pretty hand since most clients will properly detonate when a mail has been replied to (or not). The tag being lost is pretty bad, since it will just confuse the user.

Use your own

[Animats]

Thunderbird as a client, IMAP server on a hosting account with spam filtering. No problems, no ads, no worrying about what will Google/Yahoo/Microsoft screw up next.

"Free" is too expensive.

By coincidence, I logged out of Gmail this week

[GodfatherofSoul]

...and started using Outlook for mail again. Firstly, I don't like all of these mail client upgrades (including Yahoo's). Second, I just hated the idea of being logged in to Google while browsing on the web. Tie that in with Google's viral attempts to trick me into using Google+ and trying to assign my real name to my YouTube posts.

Re:By coincidence, I logged out of Gmail this week

[Virtucon]

Yeah I had to log into my account this week as well and unfortunately the Google+ thing is annoying as hell. Not to mention the fact that now more info on how they're mining the e-mails has made me pretty much not use them or their services any longer. About three months ago I went with an offshore, EU based E-Mail provider. Yeah it's money but a) They don't mine my e-mails 2) It's outside the US so screw the FISA court trying to dig into it. 3) It's not Google, Facebook, Microsoft or any other scumbag company trying to mine my information..

Unfortunately I have a Android Phone and Tablet so I'm exploring how to De-Google myself on those devices as well to get rid of the tracking and the advertising and the scumbag shit they're doing.

Re:By coincidence, I logged out of Gmail this week

[Mister Liberty]

Sounds all like the predicament I'm into, including the pissed-off-ness you're portraying.
And the wanting to degoogle myself from my tablet. Can't be done I'd say -- I don't have
time to really dig into this myself.

Re:By coincidence, I logged out of Gmail this week

[Virtucon]

Well I have a dev android phone so I'm going to start by yanking as much of the Google App crap out of it I can and start from there.

Also, this popped up today in the headlines regarding more NSA BS in terms of project MUSCULAR? Really who comes up with this crappy names but it's just another reason to get Google out of my life, permanently. Don't get me wrong, I like Android, I like the openness of it and the fact that I can at least use another Store framework is appealing as hell but the tracking the incessant shit for pushing me onto Google+ is a non start for me.

Re:By coincidence, I logged out of Gmail this week

[Mister Liberty]

I'm an /exclusive/ Linux user since 1991. So Android, yeah I rooted for that, and still do.
But what with Google being totally agnostic of Open Document Format (came across
another shame-story about that past week) I have come to the rather obvious conclusion
that not so much the open-ness was a motivation but the availability of a free OS.

I have wanted to buy a RPi from day one, but over here in The Netherlands to my surprise
and sadness it proved very hard to pre-order. Now that it has been out for about a year, the
urge in that seems to have waned. Still, I may get my sights on it one of these days.

Thanks for your feedback.

it's the best around

[cod3r_]

3rd party clients SUCCCCKKk.. Gmail is the best there is. It's fast, you can do it from anywhere w/out a dumb bulky client. The messages are stored remotely.. It's intuitive and simple.. Sorry but no case can be made against it. As far as advertisements and all that who cares.. NSA is reading everything we write so fuck it.

Re:it's the best around

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize your mail are stored remotely even if you are using a proper client, right?

Re:it's the best around

[Anonymous Coward]

3rd party clients SUCCCCKKk.. Gmail is the best there is. It's fast, you can do it from anywhere w/out a dumb bulky client. The messages are stored remotely.. It's intuitive and simple.. Sorry but no case can be made against it. As far as advertisements and all that who cares.. NSA is reading everything we write so fuck it.

I much prefer the built in iPhone Apple Mail app over Google's iPhone mail app. Wouldn't be surprised if that is the norm. Google does search well, and Google Groups well, but most other things they do are pretty mediocre.

Only downside...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Gmail for years and the only annoyance I've had with it is Google pestering me to link other accounts. "No Google, I don't want a Google+ page" "No Google, I don't want to use my real name for my youtube account" "God damnit Google, why did you make my youtube page a Google+ account?!"

Re:Only downside...

[Mister Liberty]

One of two things will happen:

a. In time you will be enlightened and won't paraphrase this as just 'annoyance' anymore
b. You will finally submit to Google and their tie-ins with their Cyberwarfare client NSA.

Sorry, no other options.
Google/NSA knows that as well, even without supposing you had a mind and free will their
chances are at least 50%.

Running your own server

[bromoseltzer]

I just replaced my Google Mail account with a Raspberry Pi running Postfix and Dovecot. It does the job, if you don't get more than a few messages per minute. My motivation is to reduce my Internet Data Footprint -- the amount of stuff that is available to Google, NSA, et al to paw through. It uses trivial power, so there's no issue running 24/7. (If you're thinking about this, I'd recommend the BeagleBone Black - a lot faster for $10 more.)

The worst downside (besides having to set up and manage the thing) is spam control. Gmail is excellent at this, and Postfix/Amavis/Spamassassin only catches a fraction of the incoming bad stuff. There are cloud services for spam filtering, but they seem expensive for a single user.

Re:Running your own server

[Anonymous Coward]

You should check out greylisting

Re:Running your own server

[PRMan]

That's really it. The spam filtering on GMail is so far ahead of everyone else in the world it's really hard to beat. I actually had my first false positive (had to retrieve it from the spam folder) in over 2 years of use! That's amazing! I'll keep using it, even though I miss iGoogle (switched to ustart.org which imported everything from iGoogle painlessly).

Re:Running your own server

[Mister Liberty]

Thanks for taking the time to tell us about your setup and solution.
From reading this thread it appears the majority of people here are
quite content with Google. Shouldn't surprise use -- after all, what
is the uproar in the US over NSA making a laughing stock of the
law, the land and the people. None.

Re:Running your own server

[Mister Liberty]

It is a corrollary of their knowing the veins in your butt cheeks better
than you yourself do. Go figure.

Re:Running your own server

[afxgrin]

Is it really now? Why do the Full Disclosure mailing list messages periodically end up in my spam folder? I clearly have hundreds of them in my inbox, yet a percentage of them end up in spam.

I think the spam filtering effectiveness comes down to one basic reason: Spamhaus

Re:Running your own server

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you considered routing your email through gmail and back to your Pi to filter out the spam, and deleting your gmail copies? Or would people be worried that gmail keeps the deleted messages for too long?

Re: Running your own server

[bromoseltzer]

There are at least 2 issues with cloud mail like gmail -- having GBs of mail archive sitting there (the static problem) and you have email coming & going over SMTP (dynamic). Got to deal with both. Unfortunately, you probably do need a first class (authenticated) SMTP relay for reliable outgoing mail. Tanstaafl!

2 More days of iGoogle

[ninjacheeseburger]

Since I started using the internet Google was my home page, then I started using iGoogle (I came to this article from an RSS feed on iGoogle). When its shut I will be switching to http://www.netvibes.com/ .

One thing that does make Google stand out is the fact that they make it really easy for you to download your data and I was able to get all my feeds into netvibes with just a couple of clicks.

So do mutt and pine.

[Anonymous Coward]

. . . and what's wrong with IMAP and POP? They're called "standards" because they're "standard" and consistent and don't change every day like some people's menu bars and web interfaces.

This.

mutt -f imaps://(youraddress)@gmail.com@imap.gmail.com

Combined with some .muttrc settings, worked. On windows/Cygwin, I have to point "sendmail" to "/usr/sbin/msmtp" with a few flags/settings in .msmtprc to point the account to smtp.gmail.com and port 587, but it works fine.

I wonder how far back we can go with this? Does anyone have gmail working with elm? On multiple accounts? (I think the hardest thing with getting it to work on a Cygwin box with elm would be getting elm to talk to msmtp...)

TFA makes no sense

[sl4shd0rk]

IMAP? Presumably TFA has taken issue with cleartext, which is understandable, but IMAPS or TLS+IMAP is about as good as you can get. Even Exchange is basically an M$ regurgitated IMAP protocol.

Re:TFA makes no sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Ignorance is a choice

taken up by Muslims

Keep Gmail, but drop the other Google stuff (?)

[tutufan]

I recently needed to change my Gmail account, which basically involves creating a new one and trying to migrate one's stuff across. While doing this, I realized that they other non-Google stuff (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) was extremely easy to move: Switch email address and you're done. For Google stuff (e.g., Google+, Drive, etc.) the story is a lot more complicated, since each of these services is integrated into the Google universe, and in its own special way. For some, it's not clear that migration is practical, so I'll probably be spread across two accounts indefinitely. Word to the wise.

He did, he did!

[hackshack]

Penguinisto, he mentioned Outlook 11 times in his last 3 paragraphs.

Re:First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

To summarize the fine article:

Ed Bott
I write stuff. Mostly about Windows. Sometimes I get paid for it,

http://www.edbott.com/

Full Disclosure

[drakaan]

(From the "full disclosure" link at the bottom of TFA):

Ed Bott is a freelance technical journalist and book author. All work that Ed does is on a contractual basis.Since 1994, Ed has written more than 25 books about Microsoft Windows and Office. Along with various co-authors, Ed is completely responsible for the content of the books he writes. As a key part of his contractual relationship with publishers, he gives them permission to print and distribute the content he writes and to pay him a royalty based on the actual sales of those books. Ed's books have been distributed under several imprints: Que Publishing (a division of Pearson Education); Microsoft Press (with production and distribution by O'Reilly), and Fair Trade Digital Exchange, where he was briefly a partner. On occasion, Ed accepts consulting assignments. In recent years, he has worked as an expert witness in cases where his experience and knowledge of Microsoft and Microsoft Windows have been useful. In each such case, his compensation is on an hourly basis, and he is hired as a witness, not an advocate. Ed sometimes receive fees and/or travel expenses for live speeches and webinars from companies and organizations. Acceptance of these fees does not constitute an endorsement of the company's products. Ed does not own stock or have any other financial interest in Microsoft or any other software company. He owns 500 shares of stock in EMC Corporation, which was purchased before the company's acquisition of VMware. In addition, he owns 350 shares of stock in Intel Corporation, purchased more than seven years ago. All stocks are held in retirement accounts for long-term growth. Ed does not accept gifts from companies he covers. All hardware products he writes about are purchased with his own funds or are review units covered under formal loan agreements and are returned after the review is complete.

Re:Full Disclosure

[Anonymous Coward]

So fucking what? The fact that you have to attempt to attack the person because you can't refute the article demonstrates it probably has merit.

Re:Full Disclosure

[AK Marc]

The fact he is a paid contractor for the "enemy" of an opinion piece, indicates it might not even be worth the attention required to refute it.

It's an opinion piece, not full of fact and research. There's nothing to refute, unless you have a mind reading machine to see if he's expressing his true opinions.

Re:Full Disclosure

[drakaan]

I'm not attacking anyone. I am only pointing out that an article pointing out things about Google not having APIs that work for him, that pushing him to switch to outlook.com (and explaining to everyone else how and why they should) might not be completely unbiased.

Re:Full Disclosure

[Anonymous Coward]

, that pushing him to switch to outlook.com

OH wow.. so he used Gmail for a decade, because secretly he knew outlook.com would be launching in 10 years and then he could write an article bashing Google. Yes! I get it now ! Evil Microsoft !!!

might not be completely unbiased

Which is something you could say about ANYONE for ANYTHING. You haven't actually said anything worthwhile. Just tried so sling mud. But hey, anti-ms trolls are known for that anyway...

Re:Full Disclosure

[gl4ss]

it's just an opinion piece... one that could be written about hotmail by just changing the fucking word with a search and replace.

it isn't the first from him, you see. there is no news there, just trolling for publicity and google pagerank.

Re:Full Disclosure

[drakaan]

I'm not anti-MS. I quite enjoy programming in C# and using visual studio for a living. I even think Windows 8 works pretty well (split personality disorder aside).

You *could* say I'm a masochist for carrying on this type of a discussion with an AC (troll? not sure yet), but *I'm* not trolling. Outlook/Live/hotmail isn't bad. I think the author makes a good case for why google would be wise to make better APIs for gmail. His opinion being agreed upon by others doesn't mean that I think he's impartial...the two things are unrelated.

"might not be completely unbiased" was a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that there is ample *room* for bias, if not proof of it.

You're right, you can say that about anyone for anything. You haven't said anything more worthwhile than I have. Just tried to accuse me of slinging mud (even though all I did was highlight the author's own disclosure statement). I'm known for taking pretty much everything with a grain of salt...I just enjoy the role of devil's advocate.

The Case Against

[SpaghettiPattern]

Why would you go through the effort of making a (half arsed and unspecific) case against an application? Move away and hold your peace. Or be bloody clear about your grudge.
Hell, every time I use the mail client at work it makes me cringe and I don't suspect Gmail being even 1/10 as shit as the vile application they make me use.
Now be a good lad. Cover up your vagina and soldier on by pushing your head harder against the grindstone like we all do.

Add Mail Recall as a feature

[unixisc]

One feature that Google could get (from Outlook/Exchange) is the mail recall feature. You send a mail, either to the wrong recipient, or with the wrong content, and wish you never had. Under Outlook/Exchange, there was the facility to recall the mail if done b4 the mail had been opened at the other end.

Gmail really could use this, particularly given that a lot of organizations use Gmail to host their e-mail services. If the shortcomings are in the SMTP server, work w/ the standards body to get that added, so that mails can be recalled. If used w/ Outlook or any other client that supports mail recall, this feature can be used, and Google could even have it implemented in their browser mail service - the UI that they keep changing. Here's some real useful stuff they could add, other than just make it shinier

Re:Add Mail Recall as a feature

[Todd Knarr]

Unfortunately that functionality requires support from the recipient's systems. My mail server doesn't understand the concept of a recall notice, it's just another message in my mailbox. My client doesn't understand them either, so I just see a strange message that does nothing. And frankly I like it that way. I don't want someone else pulling things out of my mailbox, I want a nice clear unaltered record of what was sent to me when. I don't ever want to be in a situation where someone can show me a copy of a message that was clearly sent to me that I had no clue about because I never saw it in my inbox and I have no record of it and no way to prove I didn't receive it.

Re:Add Mail Recall as a feature

[Finallyjoined!!!]

As a prisoner of corporate Exchange, I can tell you that the one massive failure of exchange is the "recall mail":

a) It Doesn't recall
b) See a.

Re:Add Mail Recall as a feature

[Anonymous Coward]

They have something similar already... Labs->Undo Send. It's saved my butt on more than one occasion.

Re:Add Mail Recall as a feature

[Lumpy]

I had a script that broke that. I wanted a copy of everything sent to me no matter what, recall all you want if my workstation was on, I had a copy made for later blackmail uses

Re:Add Mail Recall as a feature

[unixisc]

In my case, it usually did. The times it failed was if the recipient was already logged in and had instantly read your message the moment he received it. Otherwise, the mail would get successfully recalled.

Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... I've been using Gmail since the old days when you had to have an invitation, and I used a third party email client early on but eventually switched to the web-based interface entirely. I love having the consistent look and feel on any computer that I use to check email, and I understand why people complain (I just struggled helping somebody attempt to forward multiple emails at the same time), but in my opinion, having a usable web interface is far from "stupid and pointless"

Limited 3rd party support?

[mprindle]

I use K9 on my older Android phone and it works great with my Gmail accounts. I use Thunderbird at home and it also works just as well. I have no issues with the way Gmail "Labels" messages. K9 and Thunderbird treat them as folders and shows me the messages I have flagged.

People still use mail outside business???

[Anonymous Coward]

And third party client? Ed Bott clearly means Outlook then. The biggest pile of bloatware a mail client can be.

Come on. Step into the next century...

Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at

[fermion]

Google shill has to defend Google, and all the other fake Google users have to mod him up.

I have been using Gmail a long time as well, and every few months something seemed to break in my third party setup. I just don't mess with it anymore. My Gmail accounts are for spam purposes anyway. We have heard enough about or losing accounts by signing up for Google+ that no one who cares about data integrity should be using it. I may be an iTool but I have not lost mail.

The question I have to ask is why should I have to setup my third party client every few months because Google wants to bork it's end users. The answer is that Google want traffic to it's site and just mining out email for data is not profitable enough. I know it is a free service, and you get what you pay for, which is why I pay for my mail.

I can confirm problems using external apps an IMAP

[caseih]

I have used IMAP and thunderbird exclusively to access my Gmail e-mail for many years. There are certainly issues. It does mostly work, but the mapping between folders and labels on Google's end is not perfect.

Another issue is that IMAP is just dog slow on gmail. I've tried disabling IDLE, but that does not help. Tried all kinds of other tweaks too.

Also IMAP and Gmail for mailing lists has a horrible, long-standing bug that Google refuses to fix. That is if you post to a mailing list from Thunderbird, your own messages to the list are silently discarded by Gmail when they come in. When using their proprietary web interface that's not a big deal since Gmail places messages from the Sent folder into the conversation. But on IMAP this does not occur. So you'll never see anything you post to a list when using any real e-mail client and Gmail.

Don't even get me started about Google's 1-dimensional conversation view... No it's not threaded; it's merely chronological. Please google, give me threaded messages. Google Wave once did it, so I know you know what threaded means! Conversation view only works with two people in a conversation. Some of the threads I've followed on mailing lists lately would be a hopeless jumble in Google's conversation view, with many twists and turns and dozens of people involved.

Re:Search is Google's answer - and it works

[Chemisor]

Let's not forget the most important advantage GMail has over all other providers: spam filtering. Nobody else comes close in this area, and it is pretty much the only reason I still have a gmail account - as a pure forwarder, to filter spam from email addresses I have to make available publicly. Good search capability is what makes this possible.

"more traditional email experience"

[Dracos]

Hardly. Every time they change the UI it feels less like email, and more like a strange conglomeration of email, social media, and instant messaging, where email always loses importance. I personally find the whack-a-mole buttons annoying as hell, especially since the one I use second most ("mark as read") is buried under "More".

And I'm sure anyone here who has tried to deal with Gmail as an IMAP server has yanked out at least one fistful of their own hair.

Re:"more traditional email experience"

[nedlohs]

shift-i

Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at

[s.petry]

I see what you did there! Someone says "Microsoft Shill" and provides evidence, so you say "Google Shill" with no evidence and that makes the first one vanish! What an amazing work of rhetoric, nobody will catch on to it!

Google have turned DO NO EVIL into an imperative

[Mister Liberty]

So this guy may be a slimeball by vote. I believe you.

But Google certainly cannot even themselves project themselves as DO NO EVIL
anymore. Their whole strive towards non-anonimity is all at the least playing into
the hands of the NSA.
And from that we may (Chomsky anyone?) conclude that it is INTENDED with that
purpose in mind. <Profanity here>

The interface F*CKING SUCKS: no news here

[vinn]

I've been a Gmail user since about June 21, 2004 (that's when my first sent message shows). For personal use I always thought Gmail was just sufficient. The labels were a bit annoying and I have found the tabs a big improvement. The storage is great and I haven't deleted an email since I started using it. I'm primarily a searcher not a sorter, so in many ways that's a good fit for my personal use.

BUT....

A month ago I started my own consulting business. While it's getting off the ground, I've been using the Gmail account for work related reasons. Coming from the standard Outlook world (as well as Thunderbird and other clients), I find Gmail SUCKS GIANT F*CKING DONKEY BALLS to get work done. It's impossible to manage any kind of sane workflow with it. As of this morning, I think I've officially given up.

The new tabs idea would almost work for me - to manage my workflow I figure I need 8 tabs total. In their infinite wisdom, they've limited the new tabs idea to 5. Why 5? I have no idea. I do enjoy the fact that it's reasonably intelligent, so it does figure out automatically how to filter things. However, I really need the ability to add my own tab for work reasons. You know, the one that's labeled "EVERY EMAIL FROM KEVIN BECAUSE THIS IS THE GUY THAT'S PAYING ME AND I DAMN WELL BETTER NOT MISS A MESSAGE FROM HIM".

Like I mentioned, I'm primarily a searcher, however some stuff is so important that you really need to be able to sort it. When you get hundreds of messages a day, the last thing you want is something scrolling off the first page of the browser window. Oh, and why the hell can't I have that first page show 1000 different threads rather than just, say, the 100 it has?

I hate to admit it, but I see a hosted Exchange account in my future.

Re:The interface F*CKING SUCKS: no news here

[Solandri]

The new tabs idea would almost work for me - to manage my workflow I figure I need 8 tabs total. In their infinite wisdom, they've limited the new tabs idea to 5. Why 5? I have no idea. I do enjoy the fact that it's reasonably intelligent, so it does figure out automatically how to filter things. However, I really need the ability to add my own tab for work reasons. You know, the one that's labeled "EVERY EMAIL FROM KEVIN BECAUSE THIS IS THE GUY THAT'S PAYING ME AND I DAMN WELL BETTER NOT MISS A MESSAGE FROM HIM".

Just create a label for Kevin, and a filter so all his mails automatically get that label and the Important label (starred too if you want). His mails will show up on the left in the Inbox, in the Important box, in the Kevin box, and (if you also starred it) in the Starred box.

The tabs are more for broad, generic, automated categorizations. If you want to do something specific like what you've described, you need to use the label and filter tools.

Re:The interface F*CKING SUCKS: no news here

[swillden]

For work, I suggest you dump the tabs.

The Gmail interface is tuned and honed by Google employees, and Google runs on e-mail, in a way that few other companies do. I get hundreds of e-mails per day from dozens of mailing lists and automated systems (no, I don't read them all); the Gmail UI makes it manageable. Labels, filters, searching and -- most of all -- the priority inbox are the keys. I could do most of what I do with a mail client like Thunderbird, but Thunderbird tends to bog down when you get huge amounts of mail in your mailbox, and any solution that is pinned to one particular machine isn't going to work well.

Oh, you should also invest a little time in learning the keyboard shortcuts. You can plow through a lot of e-mail very quickly if you don't have to keep wiggling the mouse around.

I think Gmail UI is very productive.

(Disclaimer: I'm a Google software engineer, though my interaction with Gmail is as a power user, not an engineer.)

Re:The interface F*CKING SUCKS: no news here

[Anonymous Coward]

a zarafa server works well for me. I'm using Outlook 2003 with the zarafa client. No issues for the past 2 months I've been using this solution.
Zarafa had a migration tool and the webmail interfaces (both the old one and the rewrite) are very good.

Yeah, fuck the new gmail interface. When I started missing the "from:" field (hidden) for my work email, when I tried to revert to basic html where the from field is missing, that's when I told myself "you fuck me? no, I fuck you!" and gave up on gmail after I had been using it since about 2004/2005.

Cheers!

Re:The interface F*CKING SUCKS: no news here

[Lumpy]

"I hate to admit it, but I see a hosted Exchange account in my future."

And an epic amount of spam that you never knew you were not getting because Google has been blocking most of it.

Please buy an exchange host elsewhere, you really need to see what it's like running a naked email server in the wild west of the internet. Hope you don't have clients that get upset when your server spams the hell out of them.

If there is one thing I do not miss doing, it's managing an email server let alone an Exchange server. I'll work at subway making sandwiches before I go back to dealing with email servers...

Re:The interface F*CKING SUCKS: no news here

[vinn]

There's some good hosted Exchange systems out there. I'm probably going to move to Intermedia. Will there be spam? It won't be as good as gmail, but there will be surprisingly less than you'd think. intermedia.net has worked well for people I've known in the past.

Re:The interface F*CKING SUCKS: no news here

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know you can also set filters to tag certain senders and then using priority inbox have these stay at the top of your inbox. Might not work for you buts its rather handy. I use it all the time

Re:The interface F*CKING SUCKS: no news here

[vinn]

So here's more detail on the work flow I need.

First, I'm subscribed to multiple open source mailing lists. Ok, awesome, I filtered those into the "Forums" tab so I don't have look at those emails, like, pretty much ever. (I read them about twice a week these days since I'm not as active with those projects any more.) That works.

I get all the usual promo emails. There's a few, like Brad's List that I actually like as well as my Skymiles emails, ok, awesome, I filter those to the Promo tab so I never have to see them.

Then, I'm on my local city council. So I have a bunch of email that spills in related to that. Those just get dumped directly into my inbox because there's no easy way to filter them since I have no idea where they're coming from. Those are tough. And I have to keep them/archive them since it's official business.

My new work related emails I've attempted to apply filters to since I mostly know the domains they originate from. But the label that's applied is gray, and my normal inbox has a gray background. I don't know how to change that color and it makes it pretty useless to have a label. Now, I can click on the Label in the left nav, however it's normally hidden because Gmail insists on showing hangout information at the bottom and it clutters the labels list.

And we haven't gotten how to manage the rest of my personal email.

What sucks is all of that shows up all in one puked up blah of a Primary mailbox. Those are three radically different areas of my life and it looks like a trainwreck to my brain because when I'm thinking of work, the past thing I was to see is an email from my mother with the subject line of, "Did you get the cookies yet?" Then I'm completely distracted thinking about a) going to the post office and b) cookies.

I think the simple paradigm here is, I want my inbox to be "Everything Else" but instead it's "Everything".

Re:The interface F*CKING SUCKS: no news here

[swillden]

Hmm. I'd suggest not mixing your personal and business e-mail in the same account. For many reasons.

Re:The interface F*CKING SUCKS: no news here

[ChoGGi]

My new work related emails I've attempted to apply filters to since I mostly know the domains they originate from. But the label that's applied is gray, and my normal inbox has a gray background. I don't know how to change that color and it makes it pretty useless to have a label. Now, I can click on the Label in the left nav, however it's normally hidden because Gmail insists on showing hangout information at the bottom and it clutters the labels list.

in the left nav: instead of clicking the label, click the little colour box to the right of it to change the label colour

Re:The interface F*CKING SUCKS: no news here

[Anonymous Coward]

So search for "Kevin." It will show every email by him in reverse chronological order, which is the exact same thing.

Re:The interface F*CKING SUCKS: no news here

[Anonymous Coward]

The most frustrating thing about Gmail interface is that it seems to change every few months. For the worse.

What is easier, a ribbon on the top with words describing each product as a link, or a dropdown icon in the corner with more icons representing the same thing, and not even as many listed?

What is easier, a button that says forward or one of several arrows in a dropdown that represents forward?

They are making email for the illiterate, which makes absolutely no sense since it is email ffs.

Re:The interface F*CKING SUCKS: no news here

[sudon't]

Why not just use an email client? I could never use webmail, simply because I have more than one email address, but you also have a lot more control (and consistency) with an email client. I've used Mail.app for many years, (my earliest stored email is from '98, but those first couple of years may have been transferred from Outlook), and it works for me. Rule sets, smart folders, and that sort of thing. Has its own excellent spam filter, so I can turn off gmail's filter, knowing nothing will get lost. Mail.app works well with PGP, too. Of course there are other email clients, and for all platforms. I've probably used gmail's web interface two or three times, at most.

Re:The interface F*CKING SUCKS: no news here

[Samizdata]

You know, the few times I hit the Gmail web interface (primarily for old mail searching), I haven't seen said tabs. What am I missing out here?

Re:The interface F*CKING SUCKS: no news here

[swillden]

You know, the few times I hit the Gmail web interface (primarily for old mail searching), I haven't seen said tabs. What am I missing out here?

I don't use them so I actually don't know a lot about them, but if you go look in settings you can turn on the new interface. It automatically sorts your mail into five categories, each with a separate tab. I know a lot of people who really like it, but I'm not a fan.

Re:The interface F*CKING SUCKS: no news here

[Samizdata]

I jacked around and found it. So THAT'S what they were talking about... I just figured like most GMail web interface changes, it would have just showed up, or I would see a notification or something. Cheers!

Best decision i took in my online life..

[shadowmas]

.. Is to buy my own domain to host email off of. I'm not dependent on any providers whims or fancies. I still don't understand why people don't do it. Host your email anywhere you wish but get your own domain. It means you never have to worry about changing providers since all your contacts and services can still use the same address.

Re:Best decision i took in my online life..

[the eric conspiracy]

Host it in a closet and you never have to worry about some LEO doing an end run around the 4th amendment to access your email.

Re:Best decision i took in my online life..

[Rich0]

.. Is to buy my own domain to host email off of. I'm not dependent on any providers whims or fancies. I still don't understand why people don't do it. Host your email anywhere you wish but get your own domain. It means you never have to worry about changing providers since all your contacts and services can still use the same address.

I do all that. And every message I get is forwarded to a gmail account, which I basically use as my MUA.

I've yet to find an FOSS solution that matches it. I've yet to find an IMAP solution that supports tag-based email, and I've yet to find a decent web-based MUA. To be decent at least next, previous, delete, spam, and archive must have keyboard shortcuts. I can't describe how much time that saves over having to click on buttons in something like squirrelmail/roundcube.

Just give me those features and a decent Android MUA as well (those are easier to find) and I'll be more than happy to ditch gmail.

Re:Best decision i took in my online life..

[Anonymous Coward]

It's quite inexpensive as well, even if you use hosted mail with rented dns services.

Re:Best decision i took in my online life..

[SonicSpike]

I did that too until my registrar www.DirectNIC.com started getting blacklisted.... all of the sudden I wasn't receiving e-mails because of it since the relay at the registrar level wasn't able to forward e-mails to my ISP client grrr

Re:I can confirm problems using external apps an I

[Mister Liberty]

The bugs you mention are features to Google.
Think about it.

Re:First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

I've still got lots of invites left. Post your email here and I'll send you a gmail invite.

Just switch then

[ant_eater_palooza]

If you don't like Gmail then have it forward all your mail to another service that works the way you want (cough) Outlook.com (cough). Plenty of other email services allow you to forw... oh, wait.

Re:Google have turned DO NO EVIL into an imperativ

[penguinstorm]

Old theory on Google: the engineering team believes in Do No Evil, the marketing teams believes in Make More Money.

I think there's a kernel of truth to this, but I also think that the line between the two becomes blurred as Google's services mature. I haven't used my gmail address in years at this point: it's forwarded, but I believe you get what you pay for so I pay for a hosting account and (several) domains and use those instead.

I'm one of the admins for a Google Apps for Business account at work. The only thing I have good to say about it is that I'm not going to have a server die. Drive is a nightmare, Calendar unreliable and flaky and the Docs apps aren't that useful unless you "go all in Google."

That last part could be true of the entire experience, really, save Drive which sorely lacks in many storage use cases that are essential to running a business. It's really focused on personal, not common files.

Google is doing a lot of evil right now, and I'd be hard pressed to recommend many of the core products.

Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at

[Anonymous Coward]

I see what you did there! Someone says "Microsoft Shill" and provides evidence, so you say "Google Shill" with no evidence and that makes the first one vanish! What an amazing work of rhetoric, nobody will catch on to it!

The evidence is in the fact that the go-to response of people like you is to attack the author rather than the article. When the message is valid but you don't like it you instead attack the messenger, that's the most obvious sign of a shill or just blatant fanboy.

Obnoxious

[dutchwhizzman]

Google is getting pretty obnoxious. They want you to use your real name, merge all your accounts, get google+ and "add accounts" to gmail in the web interface. Really, if I wanted to do that, I'd do it myself. I can't switch it off and instead of just fast and easy access to the application I am/was used to I keep on getting confronted with constantly changing interfaces, nags about merging stuff, getting accounts on stuff I refuse to use and whatnot. Handing over your mail so they could profile you is bad enough, but at least you got a relatively trouble free service for it in return. They've turned into the thing that made people flee to them, and people will flee away. Once I get proper backups sorted, I'll run my mail on my own servers again and use a bunch of sock puppet accounts to do my searching and all that. Screw you Google, I'm going home.

I actually had to read the article...

[Chubby_C]

Since the summary was kinda useless.

I'm not quite sure that this sentence below works to provide the perspective he wanted to convey

To put its age into perspective: Gmail is older today than Hotmail was when Gmail made its debut a decade ago.

So, Hotmail was less than 10 years old, 10 years ago...?

Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, theres always Zoho Mail, if you're looking for a gmail-like interface.

Feature Poor

[jweller13]

Gmail is the most feature poor email system I have ever used.

Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at

[fermion]

So i post for real. You did not answer the quuestion. What is the value in gmail when 1) I have to fix it every quarter, 2) I can get kicked off if I violate the google+ terms of service and 3) if I lose data I have no recourse. Other than it is a free service, of course. My presumption is that data is worth $50 a year to protect.

Yeah I don't like them

[Greyfox]

But running my on mail domain I go back to having to intercepting spam on my own. That's why I quit, about a decade ago. Still, being out in the internet ghettos without a static IP of my own is starting to wear thin, too. Maybe it's time to dust off the ol' Linux box and get shit rolling again. Last time I was on undernet's #linux IRC channel, there were nothing but spider webs and dusty skeletons left :-(

Whut?

[wonkey_monkey]

But this onetime alternative is showing signs that it's past its prime, especially if you want to use the service with a third-party client.

However Gmail has been steadily moving towards a more traditional email experience.

Maybe this just means I'm old, but I thought using a third-party client was the traditional email experience.

Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at

[s.petry]

I did not bother to answer your question. I pointed to the fact that you claimed that the person making a claim that the author was a MS shill was a Google shill. Further, you claimed that anyone that modded them positive was also a Google shill. They presented evidence, you presented no evidence. Your question is not evidence that the person you claimed is a shill, is in fact a shill.

As to your question, take it up with Google support! It's quite possible that you are simply using it wrong. I have had GMail since day 1 of public release and don't have problems. I use it as an email service with no frills, no forwarding, no odd routing, no plugins, etc.. It has worked just fine as a regular mail account for me since the first day I used it. I use the web interface, which has recently gotten better with tab integration.

And no, I'm not a Google shill. I speak out on their violations of privacy, and don't trust them as far as I can spit. But that trust goes to all "free" services who all are pulling the same shit with customer data. I take the "Free" email for what it is, which is "free fucking email". I manage mail servers to perform tasks that I don't trust or expect of a "free" email service.

Calendar access: Yes you can

[helixcode123]

TFA's statement "And neither configuration gives you access to calendars and contacts." is just wrong, or at least misleading. While it's true that you can't access calendar info through IMAP, there is an entire Google calendar API for event manipulation (I use in my Sig webapp).

Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at

[s.petry]

the go-to response of people like you is to attack the author rather than the article

You should learn to read the "by" mention for each post AC, lest you look like an illiterate dumbass. I didn't attack the author or the article, I attacked the person making a piss poor shill call on someone else.

Webmail can't be secured

[Anonymous Coward]

The main case against webmail is that it's hard to decrypt messages on your computer. IMAP doesn't have the problem.

A Giant "DUH" to the rest of us.

[Lumpy]

If you want full control then you run your own server and maintain it. Everyone knows that.

but I can tell you that Gmail works great with Lookout and other 3rd party clients in fact it works as good as an Exchange server. and many smaller businesses use them for the company email because it's dramatically cheaper to pay $25 a year each user for 100 users than it is to even pay for the electricity for running your own exchange server. let alone maintain, hardware upkeep subscriptions to anti spam, paying for someone to maintain it, etc... In fact it scales up to 1000 users and is still dramatically cheaper than running your own exchange server.

Google's name holds more weight with businesses than Microsoft does.

Re:A Giant "DUH" to the rest of us.

[Anonymous Coward]

That Snowden Event made all your arguments (once mine) null and void.

The future of freedom is based on a little computer running in your own house. Google is as modern as Gogol, the russian czyrist gov inspector.

Re:A Giant "DUH" to the rest of us.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are silly.

Come on back when you prove to me your little PC in your home is not compromised at the install by the NSA.

It's called

[kilodelta]

IMAP. They use it for a reason. I never logon to gmail on the web. Instead I use Thunderbird. Works beautifully.

Re:First Post

[Sattwic]

bbsmonster@prodigy.net
76342,56@compuserve.net

Re:Google have turned DO NO EVIL into an imperativ

[cavreader]

Google is just upset that the government didn't pay them for the data. Google sales all kinds of information and analytics for profit. A very large part of their revenue stream is generated from advertising and marketing. It's why they can afford to offer their services for free to the average user. After all Google is not a non-profit corporation.

The problem isn't gmail - it's email

[Anonymous Coward]

Email is still fundamentally based around SMTP, one of the oldest protocols on the internet. And, beyond that, email itself has not gotten measurably better since the 90s, and even in the 80s, on my sun X windows station, I could do almost all the things I actually do daily.

The simple fact that spam is possible is an example of the flawed technology. That we seem to have turned the tide against spam is okay, but the price is that we're paying for it with ads. In a sense, google now has a monopoly on unsolicited commercial email.

Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at

[Anonymous Coward]

The "We know better than the user" attitude is shared between Microsoft, Google, and Apple.

Yandex vs. Mail.ru vs. ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see several people on the web recommending Yandex mail for users within the USA. They believe because it is based in Russia, it is safe. Surprise, Yandex has an office in the USA, so you can probably forget Yandex.

Mail.ru, however, seems entirely based in Russia.

Other choices exist, but they either require money for the service, are filled with advertisements, of questionable ownership, or in an entirely different language making it difficult to sign up unless you use an on line translation service to sign up - and hope they work with Thunderbird or a similar mail client.

But, rumor has it, using an exotic e-mail based overseas makes your communications more interesting and more open to monitoring.

OP is asking wrong questions.

[beachdog]

I have been thinking about pushing Gmail aside if I could find a better replacement. No outlook for me! Lets think: about a better Internet future.

Need a secure email. Suppose instead of me talking about encryption schemes, suppose we say we want an email where the computational price for any snooper to read the mesage is 10^5 or 10^6 more than the sender and receiver pay. The computer time required to snoop is sufficient to cause snoopers to snoop only on valuable targets.

Need a mail system that supports machine-to-machine exchanges with a new level of clarity and authenticity. Microsoft spoiled the entire field of email exchanges with the easily hacked html files and worse that launched spy programs on client computers. I still get the creeps when I see an Internet Explorer web browser start running. Has anybody got a redesign of multipurpose mail extensions (MIME) available? The stability and clarity of double entry accounting money management still has not reached the Internet.

The original post was talking about little tiny errors and omissions from Gmail. Gmail email is a success because it is simple and stable in appearance. Beyond email I would say are still are a few good open source ideas and implementations waiting to be released.

Re:First Post

[rjr3]

It is a web mail client. I know that.

And the things on my feet are called "shoes". I can't cut bread with them and I should know better than to try.
I want a web mail client. I want it on my phone, my laptop, my ipad, my desktop, my powerbook, my .. .whatever ...
And no, I don't want outlook - I use that at work and its "just" a smart imap-like tool with integrated IM.

Re: gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

As cloud email provider, gmail is working great. ok, there are issues with privacy, the quality of spam increased though the quantity is down. I feel that means something.

From this week, their gmail home page is too graphical. Expected better from Google. Don't know whether these directions are going to extend in future and it will be good. Am getting a bad sense from that. Google used to keep it pretty simple; when they go bloat, it looks bad and give a hint on future of things.

GMail With Third Party Clients?

[Scarletdown]

What problem would he be having using a third party client with GMail? All of my GMail accounts are accessed through Thunderbird. And it was painlessly easy to set up. Sure beats having to log out and back in each time I want to check an account's mail.

Leaving GMail a bit at a time

[Pope]

I'm moving lots of stuff off my Gmail account bit by bit. Clearing out Calendar first, then moving accounts that I've signed up with GMail over to other accounts. With smartphones & data plans, plus hosting having webmail, I don't find too much need for routing lots of stuff through Gmail anymore.

It's still useful as hell, but I'm relying on it less and less.

Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at

[drinkypoo]

I've been using Gmail since the old days when you had to have an invitation, and I've always used a third party email client because Gmail's web-based interface is stupid and pointless.

I've been using email since before I was using GUIs, and I use gmail because their web-based interface is the best that I've yet seen and I can access it from about anything. I've run my own webmail servers, none of the free/open clients are half as good as gmail.

Fastmail

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been a user of fastmail.fm for a long time. They started out by offering huge (100MB) mail quotas, IMAP, support for custom CSS skinning, and a lightweight web interface that felt old school when every other webmail provider was trying to make their interface work like a thick client.

Eventually Fastmail introduced a "new" interface and deprecated their "classic" interface. Last month I tried out the new interface for a week and was like "They're copying Gmail. Blechhh!"

So I feel like Gmail's problems are not just limited to Gmail's interface, but creeping into all other interfaces which see Gmail as some sort of gold standard.

Different reality?

[djyrn3715]

Trying to read his article while ignoring the MS connection, I struggle with what's written. It just doesn't square with my reality. The only place I can connect his assertions with experience is with Outlook, everything else: browser access, Mac (yes Maverick), iOS, Android, et al I've not had any issues. I'm not genius, but his assertions either make me think he's incompetent or just making stuff up.

Re: Google have turned DO NO EVIL into an imperati

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, for the record Googles motto is Don't be evil. Doctors take an oath to Do no harm.

Personal Preference and the Outside/Outlook World

[Anonymous Coward]

Problems with Gmail's Search not Sort approach? Then why the hell is he using Gmail? Did he expect Google to change their basic approach to retain Outlook users?
I think Ed Bott's view is an example of what can happen when people don't understand how their personal preferences cloud their understanding of the external world. That, and very slow news day.

G+ real names - Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately, they've since mostly stopped with the requiring real names stuff.

Re:I can confirm problems using external apps an I

[Samizdata]

Ummmmm, no. I post to several mailing lists using both Geary and Inky with IMAP and I see my posts.