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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."
The iGoogleocolypse?
And why hasn't IMAP been extended to support them properly?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Difficult to use with a third-party client? Really??? Please be more specific and elaborate cause i always had the opposite impression!
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.
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..
I am 31337 or something.
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/
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.
John
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.
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.
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.
. . . 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.
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.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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.
America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, badass speed. -Eleanor Roosevelt, 1936
Penguinisto, he mentioned Outlook 11 times in his last 3 paragraphs.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
Ed Bott
I write stuff. Mostly about Windows. Sometimes I get paid for it,
http://www.edbott.com/
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
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.
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.
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.
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.
----- obSig
.. 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've still got lots of invites left. Post your email here and I'll send you a gmail invite.
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).
In a band? Use WheresTheGig for free.