Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the Gmail complaint at all. Sure it has its weaknesses such as the policy to not spend the resources stemming emails causing search to suck, but Gmail pretty much defined the usable webmail interface for power users.

The interface on my webmail software feels like a mail client should -- easy navigation, threaded conversations, multiple window panes, and it's fast. Google on the other hand took years before they could be bothered to add buttons to Gmail, and even now Gmail's interface is an ugly monument to 90's era design principles.

Uh, in 2004 when Gmail launched it was one of the first widespread AJAX apps. It made Hotmail / Yahoo feel like molasses, gave you 200x storage, and added the idea of labels instead of folders. They obsessed tremendously over performance to make it usable by people who hitherto had only been able to tolerate desktop mail clients.

Now I realize a lot of things change in 6 years, but hell, Dreamhost is still using SquirrelMail. The author just throws it out there like amazing webmail is a foregone conclusion, yet I've not seen any webmail that beats Gmail even by a little bit. Can someone enlighten me?

A lot has changed since 2004. Yahoo for example has 3 pane viewing, tabbed email and chat, you can scroll through and see every email in your Inbox ever received without having to click any links.

It feels pretty much like a desktop application, actually...

threaded emails is a major reason to choose gmail over yahoo (in 2010)

GMail doesn't even respect In-Reply-To, and frequently screws up threading on any technical mailing list I subscribe to. It's good at its ad-hoc "conversation" grouping, not threading.

I use Dovecot + Postfix + Roundcube + Managesieve + SpamAssassin and am pretty happy with that stack (although I've currently got a very annoying Roundcube problem, so ...).

It's great that Dovecot + Postfix + Roundcube + Managesieve + SpamAssassin works for you, but not everyone wants to take that path (or knows how to). $50/year is worth it for some people not to have to diagnose Roundcube issues.

I think Gmail does hit a sweet spot for most power emailers. It took months for me to switch from my previous custom mutt + .procmail setup to Gmail. Do I still miss procmail sometimes? Sure. But overall, I save a ton of time using Gmail instead of rolling my own email solution.

All of that is completely understandable, but -- unless they've changed recently -- Gmail's filtering is really pretty far behind from what it could be, and Gmail's interface is -- for me, and the clients I support -- a frequent source of complaints.

That's not to say it's bad, but rather that -- given Google's size and the ridiculous amount of smarts on its payroll -- it could be a lot better. It just doesn't seem to be what Google is focusing on these days.

I'll grant though that Gmail has, hands-down, the very best spam filtering in existence. I really don't know how you guys do that.

But ... just to put things in perspective, I think that's the only killer feature that Gmail has left. Otherwise, it's pretty vulnerable; any service provider could launch the same setup I have, on the really cheap VPS services available these days, and readily compete with Google's business mail hosting.

I tend to agree with you on filtering--I want the ability to filter on headers, for example. See http://www.google.com/buzz/109412257237874861202/Tu7U17YACA8... where I made the argument that a startup could use Gmail OAuth to do filtering better than Gmail itself.

But I do think that Gmail Labs is pretty hard to beat. Labs like "Send and Archive," "Undo Send," and "Quick Links" save my bacon on a pretty regular basis.

I think the big deal there is yeah, Gmail works but it doesn't $50 a year work.

Personally, I wish someone I like, like Colin Percival, would start an email service. I like the way he runs Tarsnap.

The problem with starting an e-mail service is the crazy level of administration and sysadmin headaches it induces merely to be able to reliably send e-mail to 90%+ of endpoints.. let alone anything else.

The engineering problem is a pretty interesting one, but the headache of ensuring your users can actually get their mail someplace makes it seem dull or insurmountable to solo developers.

Yeah, I second this. Handling people's email is not fun at all, and 90% is way too low IMO. 90% would mean that 1 in 10 of someone's emails wouldn't make it to where it was supposed to.

Users start to get annoyed if you do any worse than 99.9%, and they don't like receiving any spam at all, and to make matters worse, "the other end" can be anything from a creaky old sendmail server to an Exchange monstrosity, either of which can communicate in odd ways or drop a message altogether.

I keep expecting to see email go the way of Usenet, but it keeps refusing to die.

Having spent far too much time figuring out problems in a fairly large email system (120 servers, world-wide, just about every MTA known, including Notes) I can heartily agree - there are just so many obscure ways that email can fail that it's really not funny.

I completely agree. Not only that, but users will typically deal with lots of software annoyances, but one thing they simply will not tolerate is late or lost email.

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