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Comment by honkhonkpants | Hacker News Reader

"the mobile web interface is actually good" That's funny you should say that. I use gmail on its mobile web interface exclusively (using chrome on ios), while my wife who is a fastmail user can't make heads or tails of their mobile site. What is it you prefer about fastmail's mobile site?

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What problems does she have with the web interface?

For example one thing I like in FastMail is that in the message list you can finger swipe an item to the left for Delete and to the right for Archive. In Gmail doing that is not accompanied by a drag, so it isn't intuitive and you can only Archive, but not Delete. I like my Inbox to be clean and I prefer to delete junk, no reason to pollute my archive with nonsense. And when viewing a message, FastMail's UI also has arrows for jumping to the next message, which I like.

Another thing that bothers me in Gmail is the message details. In FastMail's UI you get more details.

And also, Gmail's mobile UI has virtually no preferences you can adjust and you have to switch to the desktop version for it, whereas FastMail's mobile UI has most settings in the desktop version.

Honestly I don't know. All I know is she basically refuses to use it because it's too much work.

It sounds like the FM mobile site meets your requirements, especially with respect to inbox zero housekeeping (that I don't practice). I think that's a long way from claiming that the gmail mobile site doesn't work, as the other poster stated.

I think it's nice that there is more than one email service. I don't think they have to be totally ordered by some objective criterion.

One thing that _really_ annoys me about swipe-to-archive on gmail is that, if you do it accidentally, you can't swipe back to undo -- you have to actually tap 'undo'.

My muscle memory just seems programmed to swipe back in the direction I came; and this seems much more intuitive. It's such an annoyance that I've now disabled the swipe functionality.

Does Fastmail implement this better? Or maybe I'm just strange...

Hey, yes, in Fastmail it is properly implemented - it behaves just like the iOS email client, or others: you have to swipe all the way (either to the left for archive or to the right for delete), but if you swipe back, or if you simply release without going the whole way, it will just cancel the action. And you get the swipe animation, so it's intuitive. Which is not something you see often in mobile web interfaces :-)

I, too, would be interested to know what issues someone could have with the Fastmail mobile interface. I'm not even sure how they could make it simpler - it's pretty great.

HN and FastMails mobile interfaces are the only mobile interfaces I am able to use on the entire Internet

Twitter has a nice mobile interface as well.

For me, using Chrome on Android, Twitter's mobile interface displays an error page whenever I try to attach a photo. Apart from that it's quite nice.

HN has tiny links (firefox android at least), I always have to zoom in to get to comments or upvote anything. But otherwise fairly readable …

I agree about Fastmail's mobile interface though. Almost anything else goes through Reader View (currently trying out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea... which seems promising). Just wish the Reader View could remember my scroll position …

Funny, one of the reasons I switched to fastmail was because my mum could understand their interface but gmail kept changing every month! I haven't had a support call asking where the new email button has gone since.

One of the biggest benefits to fastmail for me is the buttons are labelled with text on desktop.

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