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Comment by GhostVII | Hacker News Reader

I would rather have some CSS to make the basic HTML Gmail look like the classic Gmail. Adding CSS to the new Gmail doesn't make it any faster, which is my biggest problem with it. The basic HTML version runs really fast, but it could use a bit of CSS to make it look a bit nicer and add a little more whitespace (at least on my 4k monitor it's somewhat cramped).

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Google is becoming really frustrating. I am trying to transition off inbox because they are killing it. The performance of the new gmail is miserable though.

I will desperately miss the clean inbox paradigm when Inbox goes. I am struggling to go back to the old way of managing my email with no done button and poorly configured categories. I feel like I have to do it now or I won't adjust in time for Inbox being sunsetted early next year.

I recently made the transition and it wasn’t that bad. My brain adjusted to hitting archive instead of done. And the gmail app archives when you swipe right. The categories needed a little manual adjusting, but works good enough after the tweaking

You can actually even customize what the right and left swipes do. I have left for mark as read and right for archive.

I'm a bit curious, what features are missing?

The done button is the archive button in normal Gmail, and I think the new Gmail has the magical categories, although I don't use them.

If you're using bundles, that's the one big feature that isn't ported, but it doesn't immidiately sound like you are.

> The done button is the archive button

True, but the point of Inbox was to treat your email like a todo list. By definition, it is the same, but training millions of Inbox users that this is new behavior makes it hard to grok.

> If you're using bundles, that's the one big feature that isn't ported, but it doesn't immidiately sound like you are.

Every Inbox is probably using bundles whether they remember or not. It becomes incredibly powerful when you have a trip coming up and your flight, hotel, rental car, etc. is all bundled up together.

The other feature I'm going to miss is reminders. Now I'll have to start emailing stuff to myself again, which is quite a few more steps.

(Unless of course I'm missing something, in which case I hope someone here corrects me.)

Recurring reminders. Can't do that with emailing stuff to yourself.

Gmail has smart reminders, or maybe I dont understand. I rely on gmail important filter. If I sent an email but there isn't a response back after like 4/5 days gmail puts a reminder into my important section. It's super helpful because I have a hard time remembering the smaller things.

I don't think that's what I'm looking for. I want to enter reminders that don't necessarily arise from an email. For example, if I'm asked in the morning to get some groceries, I'd set a reminder in Inbox about that that would arise at the end of my work day.

Now in Gmail, as far as I'm aware, I'd have to email that reminder to myself, and then snooze that email until the end of my workday.

I've been using https://www.followupthen.com/ for this sort of thing

Hmm, that looks nice, but not necessarily faster than snoozing an email I sent to myself when already in my email interface...

It should be (slightly) faster, since you don't need to interact with the email a second time -- instead of writing an email to yourself, write it to 5pm@fut.io and it'll get sent back to you at that time.

Ah, it can work that way as well? That is indeed slightly faster - I'll consider it if Gmail doesn't have Reminders by the time I'm forced to leave Inbox.

Had a look at the Tasks integration built into GMail now? Essentially the same as reminders. Add a due date and they function the same as reminders - across google calendar as well. On the phone there’s the Tasks app. Works pretty well IMHO, especially having the option to drag an email into a task.

Bundles for me. I get so much mailing list and advertising spam that my personal Gmail is almost unusable without bundles

Bundles is the big one. Whenever I log in to normal Gmail now instead of Inbox I immediately get put off and reminded I really need an alternative to Gmail that won't let Google mess with my email interface any more.

I know this suggestion has been made a million times here by now, but you should really try a service like Fastmail! A few weeks back I began transitioning my data away from Google, and the performance and overall quality level of Fastmail really blew my mind. It's probably the best and fastest web app I've ever used.

I'll make it a million and one. Moved from gmail to fastmail a year ago, cant recommend it enough

Gmail search often doesn't even work for me anymore, I simply can't understand how decisions are made at this company.

Is there a way to migrate all your email and maintain your Gmail address indefinitely?

Google takeout offers mailbox format, & address stays active as long as you log into once in few months..

I've used imapsync before (link below). You configure in your gmail credentials on one side and your new account on the other. You'll want to set up "device" password for it to avoid any 2fa/not a robot checks. It does take a while due to google rate limiting (think days). But once you get it started, you can just let it run.

imapsync homepage: https://imapsync.lamiral.info/

imapsync github gmail faq: https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync/blob/master/FAQ.d/FAQ.G...

If I remember correctly (maybe four years ago) I just downloaded all my email over IMAP using some desktop client then re-uploaded onto Fastmail. It's a one time hassle but definitely worth it, especially if I had known what I had to do yesterday. I sifted through 10 years worth of email looking for train and plane tickets and hotel bookings etc because I needed to know exactly which dates I crossed which borders .. anyway off topic, a huge pain of course, but an easy task on Fastmail, where as my laptop gets brought to its heels every time I have to open my gmail inbox.

Oh and you can set gmail to forward everything to your Fastmail. You can even have it land in a separate folder to keep it all neat.

Lately I've had issues sending from my gmail account on Fastmail, I think google changed their security practices a while ago..

Our migration tools have at times been fragile (I myself tried and failed to migrate from Gmail about a year before I ended up working at FastMail—something about a Gmail security change that broke it), but I believe that they’re all working properly at present. We have a guide for migrating from Gmail in our documentation: https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/gmailimport.html. We’re planning improvements to the procedures, too, to make it easy to use rather than merely possible!

Just enable pop3 access (at least temporarily), and get your other inbox to import all the mail. Then set up forwarding in gmail. That's it.

I've had Google search barely working for me recently. Searching for "55U5863DB input lag" - fire first result: "missing: lag", multiple other results: "missing: 55U5863DB". I've also searched for "Actor Name Game Name" recently (I forgot forget which), and the first few results all had "missing: Game NAme".

Searching for anything specific is becoming tedious.

Seconding this. I love that they don’t harass you to download their app when you open it on your phone browser.

The web app is so fast I find it satisfying to experience it being rendered at seemingly light speed on any device.

It’s really a joy to use.

How's the search and spam filtering?

Spam filtering is alright (at least for me it's similar to Gmail), search has issues if you don't put the exact term I found, I don't like it that much. Fortunately, you can search with a lot of criteria and usually I find what I want.

For clarity: search does stemming (so “work” will find “works” and “working” as well), but it doesn’t try to match synonyms or related words (so “laptop” won’t find “notebook”).

Is there some kind of "SaaS in a box" setup where I can just have all my web apps like mail, photos, storage, repos, etc hosted on AWS or something, in one place, under my control?

https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted

https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign

I find FastMail painfully slow. Particularly the mobile app. Long threads with tables and images will crash the app and make Undo unusable on desktop

I work on the FastMail frontend. I’d be interested to have more details, because we pride ourselves on living up to our name (fast!), and providing a robust service. If you have something you can share which concretely performs badly or exhibits such bugs as you describe, please send a test case to support@fastmail.com, asking for the ticket to be passed to me, Chris Morgan. If it’s particular emails that you want me to be able to check, put them in a folder named “forwebmaster” (so named at present for strange historical reasons) and mention that you’ve done so, otherwise I won’t be able to see them.

Observations I can make:

• For the mobile app especially, startup can be slow, but once it’s running there should be no performance issues. The app should never crash; what you describe sounds like it could be running out of memory, which would surprise me, because FastMail’s memory usage is habitually excellent (on Firefox on desktop, I tend to find a long-running FastMail session to use about 11MB only).

• If you have very large emails, the current interface renders them completely, which can be slow; in our upcoming JMAP-based interface, which we’ll be transitioning everyone over to in the near future, we truncate at 100KB by default, which I’ve definitely observed having a positive effect on performance on certain types of inordinately large (like 6MB cron job logs) or unreasonably-written emails (HTML for email is awful; if anyone ever asks you to craft an HTML email, run away).

• I know of no bugs in undo handling. If you know otherwise, please advise so that we can investigate and fix it.

Sorry for hijacking the thread, but since we've got you here:

I'm a happy FastMail user with two separate accounts (one personal and one for business). With the latter, I run into a following issue: there's no proper way to specify a tax ID number, in order to get an invoice that's valid in my country. I run that by your support last month, they generated me a new invoice manually (this one had boxes instead of non-ASCII characters, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), but it seems I'll have to resubmit a ticket each month to get the invoice. Is there something both me & the support team is missing? Is there a chance for a "tax ID" field in billing info UI?

Sorry I neglected to answer this earlier. We have a task in our internal tracker about this, for VAT at least.

Thanks for the reply.

I need the same number for VAT and income tax, so solving the former would help me with the latter as well.

Happy Fastmail user here. Thank you for providing a quality service!

> For the mobile app especially, startup can be slow

PLEASE fix this! "Startup" is basically "any time I click an e-mail notification". Having to wait 5-10 seconds to see the end of a one-sentence e-mail is incredibly frustrating! Every time I recommend FastMail to a friend I have to qualify it with a "but" because of this.

That said, I love the responsiveness of the web app. I wish all websites were that responsive. It is the reason I'm a customer of probably 5 years now. Keep up the good work!

I experience this pain also—I use comparatively cheap phones, currently a Samsung Galaxy J1 2016, and so the FastMail app is seldom running when I open it. Opening an email from a notification takes me 9–13 seconds in Australia, depending on various conditions. Partly in consequence but partly also due to my personality, I only use the app on my phone for the notifications (for which no startup is needed) or when I need access to my emails and am away from my laptop.

When we start using service workers, we’ll be able to load without any network round-trips, a quick measurement of which suggests about four seconds saved for me in Australia (high latency, remember—for people in the US, the saving will be closer to a second and a half), so the nine seconds is hopefully then down to about five, five that we can subsequently work on optimising more aggressively, once the biggest obstruction (the network) is removed.

But all of this will take time to make happen. In the mean time, thanks for recommending FastMail to people with the caveat: I agree wholeheartedly with you on it!

If it had "snooze" I'd give it a shot. I don't want to run client software or third party extensions.

I wish I could, be the business I work for is on G Suite.

You can use a proper (local) client though, can't you?

I already manage most of my e-mail via filters and just my plain old Mail.app. My current plan is to go back to Thunderbird honestly for my Desktop OS needs.

The new gmail is also buggy.

1. Items will randomly not open and I need to force refresh the page to open a particular email.

2. Search sometimes returns 0 results and clicking on search again seems to work.

This would be a great option. Maybe Google could get on that, but they're more likely to axe the basic Html version considering their latest trends.

I shudder to think it! And shudder again at the 70% likelihood you are prescient with your comment

For the first time in many years I've stumbled upon a word I have never ever heard before, not in a movie, not in any literature, nowhere. Thank you.

It seems HN has utility after all.

Happy to share and partake in the natural refulgence of the variegated English language with you.

I like you're speak.

But what does it mean, to shudder?

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/shudder

Here it is used in a somewhat popular song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oQ8sNSYXmQ

Shuddering is an involuntary convulsion that typically occurs when something is unconscionable or otherwise triggers a physionomic reaction that cannot be helped [meaning, it happens autonomously, of its own accord, based on the immediately preceding data]. You can't really shudder someone, it doesn't make any sense as a transitive verb, and yet the idiomatic usage in English has landed on "I shudder to X" where X is a thinking-pondering-considering verb such as "I shudder to think." or "I shudder at the prospect of his presidency" it's usually used to denote a non-positive feeling with the topic matter and when people actually shudder in real life, we do so with a sound exclamation under our breath such as "euuu" as your shoulders, arms, and potentially more gently vibrates or wiggles to indicate the effect being felt and received.

Human bodies shudder, and we typically denote body with "I" but it is a distinction between thinking self and bodily self, this shudder idea, because we typically don't use things such as "I was shuddering all night x" that's just weird and would make someone think you experienced a seizing episode. Not sure how this made it into English. In unrelated matters of similar linguistic domain, the Japanese have an expression "made my stomach stand" which is an expression to indicate "anger arose" ... not sure how that came to be either!

Funny, that happened to me this week as well. With the same word!

Was it him again?

Good ol' Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

> not in any literature

It would seem you are way over due as far as reading Frank Herbert’s Dune-series goes.

A bit off-topic, but Dune also gave us this magnificent quote:

> I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

- Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.

Reminds me of Helvetimail - I wonder if it still exists somewhere and works with basic HTML gmail?

https://www.swiss-miss.com/2009/09/helvetimail-a-minimalist-...

Edit: found the original CSS on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20110817055720/http://www.josefr...

This is the latest copy I could find --

https://web.archive.org/web/20140521210452/http://www.josefr...

Sadly, it doesn't work. The CSS used for the simple Gmail is remarkably minimal to a fault for folks like us.

edit: here's an extremely basic Dracula theme you can use with Stylish. As a disclaimer, this is roughly ten minutes worth of work -- I don't doubt that I missed the other 80%.

https://pastebin.com/raw/srPD5E5Z and literally the invert of that https://pastebin.com/raw/enmLB3Wz

It's definitely not pretty, but with a little time it wouldn't be too difficult to spruce it up.

I can't edit my comment, but if you're interested in trying out a Dracula theme, check out https://github.com/hello-party/Gmail-Basic-HTML-Dracula

Its still not perfect, but it does show potential for better themes for the basic HTML.

Basic Html version is here by the way, everyone: https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html&zy=h

Its really really fast.

I'm using it all the time now, and only dropping back into 'standard' mode if I need to do fancy formatting - which is rare

Seeing how slow the Standard view is, I'd pay good money for such a CSS theme.

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