Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

moddedbear.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 865 posts

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#651

Post by josephg »

c16 wrote: post #639
cadamsdotcom wrote: post #327

Looking for your alternative? Let me give you some (non financially motivated) praise for Fastmail. It has everything Gmail has - even app passwords, hide my email, and ios integration. The only criticism is the calendar doesn’t autocomplete addresses so that’s a bit more typing than I would like. But everything you do in Fastmail is instant . They live up to the name! Once you try it and go back, you’ll be shocked -…

A big +1 for fastmail, but their official ios app is 0/10 the last time I used it. Not a big problem if you use mail.app or their website on desktop. Something I've done and which has been a big quality of life improvement is to set up a folder with 30 day retention, then an email rule to move any emails with `+` or apple relay there. Those are legitimate emails I want to read such as online order status, but I don't…

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

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

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#652

Post by sebastiennight »

monegator wrote: post #468
cadamsdotcom wrote: post #327

Looking for your alternative? Let me give you some (non financially motivated) praise for Fastmail. It has everything Gmail has - even app passwords, hide my email, and ios integration. The only criticism is the calendar doesn’t autocomplete addresses so that’s a bit more typing than I would like. But everything you do in Fastmail is instant . They live up to the name! Once you try it and go back, you’ll be shocked -…

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

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

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

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#653

Post by rb666 »

vachina wrote: post #454
sshine wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 When I migrated from Gmail to Fastmail years ago, I thought Fastmail felt... less featureful. When I rarely visit my abandoned Gmail, I can't believe I put up with the clunkiness. Lean software stands the test of time. Fastmail hasn't had a noteworthy UI change ever. Minor annoyances: - Clicking an iPhone notification opens the app, but never brings me to the actual email - It is difficult to unfold the full exten…

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

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

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#654

Post by cadamsdotcom »

nopurpose wrote: post #625
cadamsdotcom wrote: post #327

Looking for your alternative? Let me give you some (non financially motivated) praise for Fastmail. It has everything Gmail has - even app passwords, hide my email, and ios integration. The only criticism is the calendar doesn’t autocomplete addresses so that’s a bit more typing than I would like. But everything you do in Fastmail is instant . They live up to the name! Once you try it and go back, you’ll be shocked -…

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

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

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

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#655

Post by GoblinSlayer »

Gigachad wrote: post #597
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>so many glaring issues like what?

From memory, there are no bulk actions, so if you want to say select all emails and delete you have to send thousands of requests. If you want to rename a folder you have to send a request for every email in the folder. There is no way to set up filters that run server side, there is no way to get push notifications. And probably a million other things that don’t hold up today.

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

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

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#656

Post by sebastiennight »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #508
teekert wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

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

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#657

Post by pixelesque »

nopurpose wrote: post #629
pixelesque wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#658

Post by vladgur »

jorisw wrote: post #608
tpm wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#659

Post by katsura »

noduerme wrote: post #572
frereubu wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#660

Post by LinXitoW »

sebmellen wrote: post #169
why_at wrote: post #151

I can appreciate LLMs for some use cases, but writing emails for the user is the one that really baffles me. It's one thing if you don't speak English well and could use some help making yourself understood, but the amount of native speakers using this is so strange to me. How does this help you? If you can write to the LLM telling it what kind of email to write, you might as well just write the email.

The most frustrating thing to me is to receive a 5-paragraph-plus email that was clearly written with some AI that filled in the email with vapid and useless talking points, like "Let me know if you need any other blah blah blah; While there is clearly a need for system improvement, we are working hard to address the underlying and fundamental issue; This is a lesson that it's not just a feature, it's a critical path…

Well, business english IS annoyingly verbose and full of empty phrases. It would be cool if we could dispense with vapid pleasantries.

I'm certainly not going to be the first to stake my job or my promotion on that particular hill. So I can fully understand why people will still turn "We need the database changes ASAP, you promised they'd be done. Get it done!" into half a page of drivel.

Post reply on HN