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Comment by __sr__ | Hacker News Reader

Wow! I haven’t used regular Gmail in years! It will be a pain to switch back. The whole bundling, scheduling, snoozing, pinning, reminders etc are really useful.

But then it’s Google. The key people probably got bored and moved on and perhaps no one else is willing to take it up. At least they didn’t make 10 different email products like they did with IM.

Any suggestions for alternative email clients for iOS/Android (other than Gmail app) which works well with Gmail? The iOS client doesn’t work well with Gmail. I’m looking for something which has as many as possible features from Inbox and doesn’t mess up my inbox — i.e. no Mail Pilot.

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I recently switched back to Gmail from Inbox (before this announcement) and was pleasantly surprised that most of the features from Inbox were there. I barely had to change my workflow.

I like the way Inbox handles certain kind emails differently —- e.g. it extracts relevant data from newsletters, tickets, receipts, order confirmations, package tracking emails etc. so they are available at a quick glance. A quick glance tells me that is not the case with Gmail — correct me if I am mistaken.

Yep this is the biggest thing I'll miss. For example Inbox can automatically recognize a flight confirmation email and turn it into a rich card with supplemental information that wasn't even in the original email, stuff like the flight status and gate.

Additionally, the mobile app is amazing at deep linking back to the right place in another app. For example it can recognize a Seamless food order receipt and deep link back into the Seamless app to view the order status.

Ah yes, I don't think those features made it, but I never found that to be the killer feature anyway. Perhaps someone can remake those, now that Gmail has a proper marketplace for add-ons.

Do the addons work in the mobile apps or is it just browser things?

so now i have to pay for features that were previously bundled as part of the product...why exactly would i do that for a free email service?

For iOS I just stick with the native Mail.app to be honest.

It works well enough for regular IMAP or Exchange accounts, but there is something messed up with Google’s implementation of IMAP which causes the experience to be sub-par. Also, Mail.app doessn’t have anywhere near feature parity with Inbox.

Hence it makes the decision to move to Fastmail, which has standards compliant IMAP, so much easier.

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