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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Three:

1. My work email

2. My "personal" email, with a silly-sounding address (see my username).

3. A professional-sounding, but non-work-affiliated email (firstname.lastname@gmail.com)

I would love to combine 2 and 3. Unfortunately, I came up with my email/username when I was 12 and didn't know any better, and I don't want it seen in professional correspondence.

I add all three to Apple Mail on my various devices, and access them from a unified inbox. The exception is my work computer (an iMac), where I could add my personal accounts but have chosen not to.

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You're the perfect person I can asked an "advanced" question since you're using a unified inbox.

Would you see an improvement in having a web-based mail client where, with one login, you can access and quickly switch between all these addresses' inboxes?

Yes it would be an improvement, but I use web-based email so rarely I don't know if I'd bother setting up such a thing.

The only time I use web-based email is when I'm on a public computer and need a very specific message. When that happens, I know intuitively which account it's in.

Oh? I assumed web-based email is superior to a client installed on your machine since it's... in the cloud as opposed to local.

I can see you're not thinking of it that way. What's your underlying thought on web-based email vs local client?

Not OP, but I'm in a similar situation, so I though I'd share my insight, in case you're interested.

I prefer a desktop client because it's more lightweight than a web browser, I can keep it running indefinitely, I don't have to worry about accidentaly closing it and not receiving notifications afterwards. I can also have a dedicated icon in the tray that shows the number of new messages.

progressive web app it is then! thanks for the comment, definitely helpful since I'm stuck in my ways with love for running everything through Chrome

At least on Mac, I will always choose a native Cocoa app over a web-based one. Coca apps launch and run faster, are visually cohesive with my OS, and (usually) support Apple Events so I can plug them into Automator.

And honestly, it's just as "in the cloud" as a web based app would be. All my email is synced to my computer from my various email accounts, and that sync is solid and quick enough that I never think about it. I can log into a new computer and add my accounts, and all my email will be there.

I prefer Electron-based apps to Cocoa apps because my vision is substandard and the Electron-based app I know the best (VSCode) allows me to change the size of all the elements in the window. I have reason to believe other Electron apps will allow the same thing. (Although most Cocoa editors allow me to change the size of the text in the main pane, they do not allow me to change the size of any of the other text or other elements.)

I don't have a retina Mac, but I have experimented with a 27-inch iMac in a store: System Preferences > Displays offers a choice of 5 different screen resolutions, but all of them except for the native resolution are IME blurry compared to an Electron app or Chrome (which allows me to change the size of all the elements in the viewport). My vision is not so bad that I don't notice the blurriness even on a retina display.

Graphical Emacs is the only app I know of that uses native Cocoa APIs that allows the user to change the size of most of the apps's elements. (It does not allow changes to the size of scroll bars and elements inside pop-up menus, the title bar and the menu bar, but those things don't bother me.)

I don't think that functionality is too common among Electron apps? You can't increase the size in Bitwarden, for example.

I'm surprised you found the options in System → Displays too blurry. How long ago was this? Modern macs have such high screen resolutions that the slightly uneven scaling shouldn't be a problem. Indeed, on many new Macs the default resolution is not evenly divisible by the screen resolution.

On your non-retina Mac, you could use QuickRes to force "retina" resolutions.

You ask how long ago I experimented with the retina iMac. 2 months ago. non-native resolutions didnt look horrible, just not as good as native -- and even at native res, the text on Mac is not as nice / sharp as the text on Windows. and Im not the only comment writer on this site who prefers Windows text rendering even on retina displays.

I like http://displaymenu.milchimgemuesefach.de/index.html as a means of getting a full range of specific XxY resolutions for macOS (rather than the xs, s, m, l, xl approach in System Preferences).

I (nearly) always use a local app for my email too -- the UX is just so much better.

So far as being in the Cloud goes, all the email is kept in IMAP folders "in the Cloud", I just have a local cache in the Mail app.

I agree that all web-based mail clients are pretty low. Gmail/Outlook/other clearly-developed alternatives are good, but they also have native counterparts

Given a high-quality (good UX, etc.) web-based client would be available, would you consider switching?

I'll always consider other solutions, but ...

A native application has advantages over a web site, a web app, or a "native" app built using Electron, etc:

* in resource usage,

* in UX consistency,

* in integration with the rest of the system, eg. for scripting (Apple Script), accessibility, etc

* in working with locally-cached emails while offline or with degraded connectivity,

* in having no ongoing cost,

* in being vendor independent,

* in supporting the use of standard protocols (SMTP / IMAP), rather than a proprietary web backend API

and there's probably more I could come up with if I thought about it some more.

A web application (not an Electron app) has one primary advantage: it can easily access significantly more computational and storage resources than my laptop can. That could be an advantage for searching. There's probably other advantages I could think of with more time here too.

So, while I'd be happy to consider a web-based solution, I think it's fair to say that I think the deck is stacked against such a product, for my purposes.

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