Inbox was nifty at first but it positively crawls now. Any input action takes several seconds, at best, to process on a fast machine, sometimes much more. Loading Inbox is about 30s. It's maybe 20x slower than straight gmail classic. Plugins will just slow it more?
Opening the 'Updates', er, 'section' with 2 emails in it took 2 seconds, which is silly.
I love the flow of Inbox but I'm seriously considering going back to a local client. Are there any good ones left these days? I liked mutt, but using it with an IMAP mailbox made it a bit clunky. I just need to work /fast/, without crashes, without spam, and preferably with vi keys and programmabil... never mind the last two, I can live with the speed, stability and spam-free parts.
Not really. I wish the Mozilla Foundation would rejuvenate their email client once and for all.
I found Nylas N1[0] works well, it's cross platform which is a big plus and has plenty of kb shortcuts.
[0]: https://nylas.com/
AFAIK Nylas doesn't work locally, but through their "cloud APIs". They are not alone in doing this, for example Outlook for Android does it too.
That's not acceptable for me. The email client should only communicate with the email provider. Trusting Google or Fastmail with my email is a leap of faith on its own without an extra third party involved.
I'd also question their business model. If Nylas Mail syncs via their own "cloud", it means it's not free to operate on an ongoing basis, which means it will end up either milking users for ads or die.
I would love that too. Sometime last year Mozilla enabled donating specifically to the Thunderbird project (which was a long time wish of mine) as opposed to donating to Mozilla as one entity, and I started donating to it. With more monetary support, we could have possibly have it become much better again (native and good Exchange calendaring support without extensions would be my top wish - the current scheme with the integrated Lightning and Exchange Provider is quite buggy).
As I mentioned elsethread, I'm thinking of switching back to gnus. Mutt was awesome too (I used it back when I used vi, then switch to gnus when I converted to emacs).
Gnus is pretty incredibly fast, and hyper-programmable, and as stable as can be. And it'll be as spam-free as the IMAP source is to begin with. Gmail over IMAP still has all the Gmail spam-filtering.
Like you I'm considering ditching Inbox/Gmail. It's getting more and more painful to work with.