Not yet ready for a switch? There is still a simple, clean, basic Gmail https://mail.google.com/mail/h/ For more light weighted https://mail.google.com/mail/x/
Thanks. I didn't know /x/ existed until now.
Goodbye Gmail
51–60 of 105 posts
Re: Goodbye Gmail
#52Using the "Why is X" Google autosuggest as proof is meaningless, no one searches for "why is gmail so great" and the same suggestions come up for all popular products and services.
Yea you're right - it's definitely a biased sample but still shows others are experiencing it to some degree. I do the same check for "why is fastmail" and get "why is fastmail down" - I suppose slow is better than down.
It also can show that billions of gmail accounts exist and there are so many middle reasons your mail can be down, besides the actual source. I bash google all the time, but the gmail is legit so far in my book.
Re: Goodbye Gmail
#53Well if we're offering our suggestions for alternatives, I'll throw Outlook.com in the hat. I use it daily and find it as easy to use as Gmail, if not easier. Perhaps it's missing a few features that Gmail's got going for it like the tabs - but that doesn't bother me that much.
I snatched up an @outlook.com address back when they were still rolling it out, mostly to use as another junk email account. It sat for a while; but over the past few months, I find myself using Outlook.com more (for business) and Gmail less. The Outlook interface is a pleasure to use.
Re: Goodbye Gmail
#54It's a good idea to set up a forward to another account just for redundancy. I forward all my email to Yahoo just in case Gmail has an extended outage, accidentally rm -rf's my account, etc.
Re: Goodbye Gmail
#55I have recently made the switch from Gmail to Fastmail as well, and I couldn't be happier. They don't have all the features (calendars are coming soon!), but they also don't have Google+. In my experience it's a lot faster, both web and IMAP are extremely fast. While the storage is smaller than Gmail I don't find this an issue. I haven't used the XMPP servers yet, but it seems to have the same features as non-hangout…
How are they with spam? I'd just run my own mail, but I can't beat Google's spam filtering. (They have millions of email accounts, real time, as a data source.)
Re: Goodbye Gmail
#56Gmail has definitely gotten... 'heavy'... over the years. I clocked it at about 6 seconds to load my inbox with just 8 messages in it (Firefox 28 on a decently fast machine on a 100MB/5MB connection with low latency). And that's before the pause and the load of the Hangouts widget. Loading the /h/ variant of email is under 2 seconds. My Rackspace mail webmail comes up in about 3.
All that said, I use Thunderbird with IMAP as my primary to all those accounts because a real email client is faster than webmail.
Re: Goodbye Gmail
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everyone leaves their browsers open when they're at the computer. I don't, and on a 100/100 connection, from click to inbox open it takes me almost 7 seconds. I tried it twice on all 3 of my gmail accounts with varying results, but none faster than 5.
Not everyone, but I would wager that most do: Many office desktops went from having an instance of Outlook.exe open 24 hours a day, to a couple of tabs in Chrome. Which is exactly why Google made it a rich, all-encompassing platform (calendars, contacts, instant messaging) -- it's a conversation dashboard that is intended to sit resident. This whole discussion sounds like some sort of Fastmail astroturfing campaign.…
I have a account on both gmail and fastmail. If we are just concerned about speed fastmail wins for me. And there is that whole tracking thing that bugs me so that is another win for fastmail. I just use gmail for signing up on websites I will most likely only visit one.
Re: Goodbye Gmail
#58slightly off topic but I'm looking to move away from Thunderbird as a mail client. I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions. I use gmail but not online but without updates to tbird, thats becoming the bottleneck
Re: Goodbye Gmail
#59I have recently made the switch from Gmail to Fastmail as well, and I couldn't be happier. They don't have all the features (calendars are coming soon!), but they also don't have Google+. In my experience it's a lot faster, both web and IMAP are extremely fast. While the storage is smaller than Gmail I don't find this an issue. I haven't used the XMPP servers yet, but it seems to have the same features as non-hangout…
Also important to note: Fastmail has been rock solid for me (and I should know - over 10 years there). Gmail outages seem frequent compared to the number of times I remember FM going down.
Re: Goodbye Gmail
#60This article is misleading on several accounts (as others of its type often are).
- Yes, initial payload size matters. But where's the true comparison about what each app is loading? How are the features and the UX? Would a power user be satisfied with Fastmail (e.g. search, filters, etc.)? (It looks nice, but none of this was discussed at all).
- The disparate email count comparison is excused way too quickly. Have you done a similar test with a brand new Gmail account?
- Anecdata. I've never had the page load problems as bad as described. 2-3 seconds, and I reload once every week or less. "Sluggish" is a weasel word -- what is sluggish? Searches return in ~1 second for me (~7000 emails, I'm not a saver.)
- You can turn off chat.
- Switching is never as simple as described, and forwarding is a fairly messy solution (and will only get messy as the author creates new login accounts and further forks his usage).
- Ugh, the "Google suggest" argument. For the record, the only suggestion for Fastmail is "Why is Fastmail down"
I clicked on "Goodbye Gmail" hoping for some substance or an interesting story but instead got feelings, anecdata and glossing over the problems of a real migration or search for a qualified alternative.