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Comment by sigi45 | Hacker News Reader

Wow its ugly.

While people might or not might trust google etc. The spam filter and the ui from gmail is just to good to switch to any offline client.

I'm only using thunderbird for pgp mails.

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Gmail's UI is terrible. Where do people get the opinion that it's good? It's slow, nonintuitive, requires I click a button to see updates new emails on a thread, the filtering/labels are terribly limited... I could go on

Fast flexible searches and spam filters that work better than anything else I've tried. I put up with other issues for these two things.

I don't use an offline client because I use a home desktop, phone, and work desktop that aren't the same os.

That's because you have not tried the antispam solution that you have to pay for. To me gmail and its spam filter is a curse, I self host my own mail server and despite it being up to date to the latest recommended best practice, sometime for no apparent reason and for a limited period of time gmail will silently drop my legit emails into the spam folder of my recipient. I've grown to really dislike gmail for not caring about smaller servers who do their best to do it right.

I have heard people complain about false positives, but I check from time to time and don't see any.

I am using the paid Gmail product, no idea if that makes it any different.

I assume the volume they deal in would make a Bayesian filter more effective.

But it's not the best spam filter

Don't leave us hanging.

Everyone I've moved to Fastmail has found its spam filtering to be superior. It was the first thing my wife noticed.

Ah, ok. Thanks. It appears they use SpamAssasin under the covers. https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/spamchecks.html

I may be not seeing issues as we spent a fair amount of time using the "report spam" and "not spam" buttons when we first signed up for Google Apps, so it's been trained to our use case. It works very well for us.

They also have a very clever greylisting approach -- it compares against senders in your address book as one point of data which I've never seen done before because usually the spam filters I've run don't have access to that data and no open source greylist daemons do it to my knowledge

Gmail has keybindings for most actions I think.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=gmail+keybindings&atb=v16&ia=cheat...

Believe it or not but I know people in a small non benefit org I manage that are totally lost in GMail.

I had a request today to stop archiving or deleting mails older than three months. I never do that. They just hadn't figured out the paging buttons in the upper right of the interface. They had been thinking there were only 50 mails available in all of Gmail until this morning. They don't get the conversation model of GMail

Most used to use Office Outlook.

Maybe set conversation view = off, and set the page size to 100?

Maybe move out of gmail and its not so good UI/UX.

> The spam filter ... is just to good to switch to any offline client.

Your Gmail account is available over POP3 and IMAP. That means you enjoy the same spam filtering regardless of whether your use Gmail in your web browser or a dedicated e-mail client like Sylpheed.

It makes me think that these people have never used an offline email client and don't understand what pop and imap are.

Most of the gmail users I know are a bit clueless and lacking in the technical domain and don't understand what an email client is because they've only ever used webmails. So I would not be surprised if they were unaware of pop and imap.

First email client was outlook express, than thunderbird, than gmail.

I tried mutt, i tried others.

I'm not syncing my mails anymore i just get an pop up from my webbrowser that a new email is here.

I also use different computers (home desktop, home laptop, work desktop) and prefer the same ui with the same settings on all pcs. The browser became in some way, my operating system for mails.

Is it that surprising? Webmail has existed for longer than most people have had email and it's not tied to a job or ISP like the previous most popular options were.

I use Sylpheed on a Windows PC. I don't find it ugly, although I can see that some people might find the app 'old fashioned' in appearance.

I switched to Sylpheed from Thunderbird, which is arguably uglier, slower and more clunky in operation (at least on Windows).

In an age of fat, slow, memory-hogging Electron apps (often produced by large companies with lots of developers), Slypheed is a refreshing example of a slim, cross-platform desktop app maintained by just a single developer. It should serve as inspiration for others.

I agree. I started using apple mail and then Nylas but reverted back to gmail web interface after a few months. Unless you want to store emails locally email clients don't make sense.

Having multiple email accounts like most people (including exchange emails for work) Apple mail has been the only email client I've ever enjoyed using since it's not super fancy and doesn't feel bulky or ugly. It's clear which email I'm sending from and works relatively quickly. I also like not having to have another tab in my browser always open just for email and this is one of those cases I'm okay with an application always open like a terminal. I looked into nydus but having to have create another account to access my emails seemed odd to me.

I don't understand all these people saying it's ugly. It's gtk. The screenshots are old. Gtk these days looks modern,you can make it look however you want depending on what theme you choose. https://www.gnome-look.org/browse/cat/135/ord/latest/

Yet nobody took this project seriously enough to update the screenshot (nor the ugly website) in 15 years by the looks of it.

I never really understood that. People do all this work on some software yet don't spend a minute making a half decent website, the first impression of all their work. It's a shame.

>a half decent website

And what is wrong with current site?

Sylpheed is GTK2, those screenshots are GTK3.

Please, you have Gtk2 skins category just below the Gtk3 skins category.

I use both the Gmail web interface (at work) and notmuch-mode from within Emacs as an offline client. My evaluation: notmuch has a nice local search interface, supports tags and threaded views and handles PGP, but is similar enough to the Gmail interface. I find it much easier to use: https://notmuchmail.org/screenshots/

By coincidence, I used Sylpheed before and Thunderbird before that. I found both easier to learn than notmuch-mode, but ultimately lacking, especially regarding handling of encrypted messages.

Brutalism is big in web design right now. Never thought that would translate to app UI.

http://arngren.net

Sylpheed has been ugly for 15+ years.

(not that I don't appreciate utilitarian design. Claws and Emacs come to mind.)

Arngren's web page has been like that for years, not much new there.

If you looked at the screenshots, they are severely outdated (like obsolete for about 10 years).

it's not the shiniest UI around but the current one is hardly ugly.

>ugly

Matter of taste. I personally find it much more comfortable than gmail ui - less clutter and much faster

>spam filter

Works on server, used MUA does not affect it

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