Google is about to launch a Gmail Web Redesign
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
...we're just gmail users because, however sadly, it's still the best damned mail client on the planet. Nobody's even come close since 2004. Everyone's had plenty of time to write a replacement - nobody has because email is a terrible technology and it's a thankless chore to work on/with.
Gmail's interface hasn't significantly improved since... maybe smart labels, several years ago? I'd argue it's been surpassed, and most of it's features are par for the course today.
A much larger reason people are Gmail users is because it's incredibly hard to move providers if you have an (at)mailprovider.com email address.
I actually pipe my Fastmail through Gmail just for the spam filtering. Sigh.
Kinda wish they released their spam filtering service as a stand-alone service.
Assuming spam filtering is "good enough", which it is, I'd rather not have my mail used for helping other people's mail get filtered better. FastMail solely uses email you confirm as spam to help their spam reporting efforts, and you can even disable that setting. No accidental spam gets mined for any purpose outside your own account's benefit.
I also feel Gmail trusts it's own opinion more than yours, with regards to training behavior. I used to have receipts from some stores always marked as "promotions" or even "spam", no matter how many times I tried to teach Gmail otherwise.
With Fastmail, if I push the spam filtering too aggressively then I get constant false positives. With Gmail, there's no tweaking and I maybe get one or two false positives per year, and never anything very important.
Obviously different people have different kinds of emails/inbox volume/etc, but that's my experience.
I definitely think FastMail's default spam filtering settings are good enough as is, but you're definitely right, different people have different experiences. The email address I currently use is only three years old, give or take, so it likely hasn't ended up on nearly as many spam lists (yet) as the average Gmail-user-since-2006.
If you give me all emails of 2 billion people, I can build you such a good spam filter as well.
Err, no. Scrolling through 10k emails is a UX disaster. There's a reason why Search exists, and it's this use case. If your email is properly categorized, you rarely end up with folders that large anyway.
I've yet to see anyone handle email categorization and filtering anywhere close to as sanely as Gmail, and I seem to try everything about once a year, get pissed that nobody else can figure it out, and go right back to Gmail. It's especially important to someone like me who's on dozens of open source mailing lists and needs to cross-correlate conversations between lists ("[List Y] Hey I need to update X to make Y work again." "Go talk to someone on list X and file a bug on X's tracker..." "[Bugtracker X] Bug for making Y work again" is an incredibly common email workflow in OSS-land).
My biggest pain in email these days is that Gmail hasn't implemented any kind of smart filter for idiots that can't figure out their own email address - (namely, people signing up for email lists and using services thinking they have my email address... I keep getting incredibly absurd why-the-hell-are-you-even-emailing-this email including medical records, police reports, travel documents, confidential legal communications, etc. from people who share my particular first-letter-last-name pair).
I more or less feel Gmail's filtering thinks it's smarter than it is, it doesn't value my opinion much: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16813203
I'd say the Mail.app is better than Gmail because of it's design and UX, but it often freaks out on "large" actions like bulk deletes or moves. Gmail the app only reads what it needs, allows easily selecting many emails (>50 at a time), and filtering. You can obviously search, filter, and do bulk actions in Mail.app too, but I find the versions in Gmail to be way better because they're either faster or more reliable.
Mail.app also doesn't totally understand Gmail's tags and that an email appears in multiple folders. I'm always afraid of moving emails around in Mail.app.
2) Filtering and categories are still unparalleled, a decade on. Nobody's even come close to the power of Gmail's tagging and filtering. (Seriously, if you want to see just how bad the competition is, fire up Outlook Web Access and try to create some, even really basic, filters. You'll commonly end up with multiple copies of emails or broken read-state tracking, broken threading, etc. I'm forced to use OWA at work and it's excruciating to the point where I simply don't use their filters at all and deal with Inbox Hell by searching alone.)
3) Searching. Gmail's search engine doesn't seem to have suffered as badly as Google's main search has over the years, and as so it still remains incredibly powerful for "power users" like myself. By comparison, OWA's searching feels like something a CS student would implement in class to check a box on a requirement list.
And that's why I'm on Gmail.
And then Google bought it.
Now it's gone forever.
the best damned mail client
No, but go ahead and throw wads of your cash at Thunderbird.
Since they have a separate Inbox product, hopefully they will be able to refresh it with all the new modern bits, without removing any of the advanced power user functionality we have all come to love and relay on.
RIP dark themes.
For folks interested in avoiding your email provider also being an advertising company, I switched to Fastmail* last year. They've got gmail import and full IMAP push support (something gmail canned years ago).
I'd also love to see other hosted alternatives to gmail. I looked into rolling my own on EC2 but decided I didn't have the expertise to do it "right"
I personally don't really want to deal with cPanel, too. Not because cPanel isn't cool, but because I explicitly wanted to pay somebody to do the management for me so I didn't have to get too in-the-weeds. I'm certain I'd misconfigure something somewhere and I just don't want to deal with that.
EOD it seems mostly like personal preference and how much you want to tinker. Value for both seem close to the same.
I've also read mxroute's writeup on why they use cpanel, and apparently it just made sense to use it for user configuration, and that under the hood it's all a very unusual setup (I don't understand enough about email to be honest).
edit: looks like they have a deal at $60 for 2 years with 40GB, still unlimited domains and users, which to me is the main draw.
The billing is awful (they may have changed it and I may have not noticed) but I login every three months or so to manually renew a three month subscription, I don't think there's recurring monthly billing.
There is recurring monthly billing and I've never experienced any issues with their billing. Reference image: https://piqdd.com/fastmail.billing.screen.png
I wouldn't knock MXRoute, if you're happy with it, that's awesome. I'm a pretty happy FastMail user, personally, but I will say the account-based pricing has sniped me: I wanted a separate mail account on my domain for a very low usage, text only email handling piece of software... and it would double my bill to do that. I'd at least like to be able to have my different user accounts on different user tiers, pricing-wise, and currently that isn't available.
They offer a demo here http://demo.sogo.nu/SOGo/
The account sogo1, sogo2, sogo3 are available to login and see what it looks like.
I hope they don't add more dead white space like they did when rebranding from the old blue design to the current red.
Edit: oh god, I read on that article they want to merge Gmail and Inbox and the white space in Inbox is freeking horrible. Why? Why do this? I had looked at Inbox briefly and thought to myself no way. I can see 8 email in Inbox and 21 in Gmail today. One email in inbox has embedded spammy ad pictures that absorbs 3x the normal amount of space.
Ran across an article with better images of the redesigned GUI. First glance, it looks good. Compact display of information, balanced interface controls, better coloring scheme. That all said, proof will be in the pudding~
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/04/gmail-com-redesign-l...
[1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/calendar/xd-5...
This is probably why Gmail is nearly the last Google product that looks like it did in the 2000s: they had to start over.
So progressive enhancement/alteration for now, not a product shutdown
As quoted on: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/11/google-is-about-to-launch-...
On a brighter side, basic HTML version still works very well in Gmail, hopefully that won't be broken with the redesign.
I'd really like the ability to see what emails I've replied to (with conversation mode off), but pessimistically I'd expect we're getting mostly unneeded aesthetic changes and functionality regressions.
Otherwise the gmail interface doesn't really need any improvement. It's email. there's not much special about it.
anyway airmail (app) is decent so maybe time to go back to a local client.
Maybe this time they will decide to hide the TO field?
(Let's not forget the current Gmail had a big design update that added lots of whitespace a few years ago.)
That update from a reader who witnessed a Googler dogfooding the new UI was interesting:
'“It was a hybrid of Gmail and Inbox,” he told me. “The left-side column was more like inbox.google.com and the right side was an enlarged version of Gmail.'
Let's just hope they don't repeat the Google News redesign; forcing the content column to be fixed width. I'm looking at the new Material Design Google News right on a 40" 4k screen, the column with actual news items is like 30% of the width of the screen:
Edit: Eeek. I just tried inbox.google.com. It behaves pretty much like the new Google News in terms of layout. I think this is what we can expect.
The first thing I do on any new phone is make the text size as small as possible so I don't have to scroll so damn much.
Reminds me how happy I should be to have a designer on my team who isn't obsessed with removing every nifty feature.
He'll be replaced soon and the new designer seems to be great too: I know she's already tried to get a basic dev environment up and running which is something I really don't expect from the designer camp.
I distinctly remember when Google Maps underwent Material Redesign. I traveled around Scotland for over a week pre materialization and Google Maps was a fantastic tool for navigation. Post materialization I went on a trip to Ireland and it was a train wreck.
The scale was gone so your navigator was unable to give you helpful instructions like "the next turn is in 300 yards". Eventually they added it back, first only when zooming and later with an option to make it persist always.
The old Google Maps had inertial compensation so if you lost a GPS lock briefly it would continue to update your travel along a route using your last recorded speed. This was useful when driving in the mountains or city. Now if you momentarily lose your GPS lock it just freezes your position on the route until it reacquires a lock. It's incredibly frustrating because there's no indicator so you have no idea when glancing at the screen driving down the street. I can't tell you how many turns I've missed because of this.
The old Google Maps had some rejection logic so if you were following a route and GPS reported your position radically different from the last update it would be ignored. Now if you're driving through areas with sketchy GPS you jump around and Maps is constantly calculating a new route.
They removed elevation data which complicates trip planning. It's not so much a problem with driving, though it can be. For hiking though it's a pain because you can't see how difficult the terrain is going to be.
And the Maps webapp still doesn't have a compass. The most popular online map in 2018 can't show you magnetic north, which I guess is because you can't rotate the map at all. That feature was cut in some distant redesign.[0]
On Android, anyway.
Also, Japan doesn't even have street names so we've always had 'turn left in xxx metres' since ever.
Open street map is a bit better in this regard.
The street names are "pronounced" by a Google server. If the phone can't download the audio within a few hundred milliseconds, it falls back to a prerecorded audio clip made locally on the phone.
Get a better cell provider, and you'll get back to full functionality.
Also, they have a very different take on 2FA. 2FA access is PIN+OTP and even though someone figures out PIN and OTP the OTP always changes and PIN is useless w/o it and one can access IMAP with the normal password.
I guess it fits in with the Google Search motivations of becoming an answer engine, instead of a search engine by providing a single specific answer instead of a breadth of resources to explore on your own.
Facebook does the same thing. I don’t know why companies prefer the fixed width design. The original timeline design was SO compelling with photos filling the entire width of the screen.
If they increased the text size and image size to make up for it then the amount of items per page would go down.
I don't see what they could do that would work very well on larger screens aside from adding more columns.