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Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

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

#731

Post by bfkwlfkjf »

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

I'm happy with tutanota.

It's extremely minimal though. I think it's just mail, contacts and calendar.

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

#732

Post by nvarsj »

Slow_Hand wrote: post #361
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 -…

Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates? Cause that is the single most useful feature offered by Gmail that I have yet to find elsewhere. I'm not talking about manually tagging, setting up, and filtering all incoming email before my inbox can self-organize. I mean automatically. Only show me the true primary items in my inbox from the jump. Everything else can wait…

This is the one great feature about Gmail I think.

But I haven’t touched Gmail in years, been on fastmail for about 6 years now.

I’ve solved this by using the fastmail-mcp plugin and have a skill that organises all my mails for me and highlights high priority ones. Works great - I run it every few days, takes about 5-10 minutes.

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

#734

Post by christoph »

ninkendo wrote: post #707
bayindirh wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to break the search index sometimes, but I experienced it twice at most, and it searches instantly for me, never failed to find an e-mail I was looking for... ...from 5 accounts with at least a decade of history each, incl. my office e-mail.

The problem is the actual architecture Apple uses for search in iOS and macOS. Spotlight powers all of it, and it applications like Mail that need search, do so by donating data to spotlight for indexing. But that means any spotlight bug is a mail search bug, and a settings search bug, and a “just launch this app” search bug, etc etc etc. It also means that any bugs caused by one of these applications end up affectin…

There’s another nasty one I encountered where power loss on a mac mini with 4 external drives connected made one drive refuse to mount on that machine. All recommendations online were to nuke the OS and/or drive to get it to mount there again. It would mount on other machines fine. There’s some cache/index file buried (I think related to spotlight) that got corrupted. Nuked that file, drive mounted instantly again.

These types of things should stand as big massive red flashing warnings with all these locked down systems - as you point out, in certain situations on iOS you’re just stuffed.

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

#735

Post by Tor3 »

ibejoeb wrote: post #183
2sk21 wrote: post #97

You can turn off the "smart" features in the settings page for gmail. I did this and find it to be much more usable!

The author points out that disabling smart features and personalization also disables message categorization, so you wind up with a different inbox, while disabling individual features doesn't disable the most annoying behaviors.

I use filters for categorization, where neeeded. Been doing that for years and it does what I need. I don't see any value in google doing it for me, when I can set the filters just as I want them.

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

#736

Post by eth0up »

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 -…

Serious question (for me): How would you rate fastmail strictly in terms of perseverence over time, ie will it still be here a decade from now? Confidence in that alone would move me there.

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

#737

Post by Tor3 »

sylware wrote: post #716

I left gmail... well, not really, I was kicked out of gmail, because I am a user of noscript/basic HTML browsers and the only way to "revalidate" you account was to use a whatng cartel web engine. I recall the noscript/basic HTML interface of gmail was dropped after a while. At the time I was paying for DNS. Then, most, if not all, DNS registrars which are not requiring a whatng cartel web engine are now gone. The em…

Somewhat off-topic, but also a followup.. I'm worried I'll be "kicked out" of gmail as well, at least on my mobile gmail device.. an Android tablet. I have an old one which doesn't receive Android updates anymore, gmail works perfectly fine in Opera (and Vivaldi). I have a newer Android tablet, I bought it to be ready when the day came that the old one doesn't work for some reason, or an app won't work and can't be updated (due to too old Android - and in fact there are a few of those already).

The problem? The browsers work fine on everything on the new tablet, EXCEPT gmail. Whenever I try gmail, in Opera or Vivaldi (same versions as on the old tablet), I get something along the lines of "the site can't be found". As if wifi was off. (paraphrased, I don't have one in front of me). Been like that forever. It's baffling.

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

#738

Post by ninkendo »

christoph wrote: post #734
ninkendo wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the actual architecture Apple uses for search in iOS and macOS. Spotlight powers all of it, and it applications like Mail that need search, do so by donating data to spotlight for indexing. But that means any spotlight bug is a mail search bug, and a settings search bug, and a “just launch this app” search bug, etc etc etc. It also means that any bugs caused by one of these applications end up affectin…

There’s another nasty one I encountered where power loss on a mac mini with 4 external drives connected made one drive refuse to mount on that machine. All recommendations online were to nuke the OS and/or drive to get it to mount there again. It would mount on other machines fine. There’s some cache/index file buried (I think related to spotlight) that got corrupted. Nuked that file, drive mounted instantly again. T…

The worst is that if you look at Console.app and stream error logs from the system processes, there's hundreds of error logs per minute being dumped out on a brand new system with nothing installed on it yet, including and especially from spotlight. There's bugs all over the place that some engineer at Apple thought enough to emit a log for, and the result is they just ship with the errors anyway. They only seem to care about 100% reproducible bugs, and even then they sometimes ship with them anyway. They don't seem to care about all these little unobservable issues that "only" log errors, even though 9 times out of 10, when a bug does become a reproducible/observable issue, there was an error log that was warning you about it the whole time.

If I took over Apple's software engineering, I would tell every engineer "None of you are working on features until a stock OS install has zero error/warning logs. No exceptions. Contribute to fixes or use your vacation time, but nobody touches anything until we get it all fixed. Then once that's done, nobody's allowed to work on features while there are open bugs in their backlog. No exceptions."

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

#739

Post by Tor3 »

smukherjee19 wrote: post #430

That's weird. I use Gmail regularly and did not experience anything like that; it works just the way it did for the past 10+ years. And auto categorization still works just fine, and no AI summarizing my email or trying to write my drafts. I wonder what difference we have in settings. Also, not to be disrespectful to the OP, but seems quite an... overblown reaction. To each their own, though.

This seems to be caused by "smart features" enabled in settings, and can be turned off. When they were introduced they popped up in gmail and you could choose to accept or reject, I of course rejected all of them (nothing good could possibly come from accepting), so I've never had any of the issues mentioned in the blog post.

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

#740

Post by aaarrm »

przmk wrote: post #513
pmontra wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the nothing to install experience. Every Android phone comes with Gmail and every device has a web browser. Do people have to install Gmail on iOS? I'm using Thunderbird with POP3 accounts, download on my laptop then remove from the server, daily backups. My phone has K9 (the old one with the UI I like) and I never remove messages from the phone. When I send mail from the phone I bcc myself so I can see the…

> Do people have to install Gmail on iOS? Why would Gmail be pre-installed on iOS?

They aren't sure, that's why they are asking..
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