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Comment by TedDoesntTalk | Hacker News Reader

The only thing preventing me from leaving Gmail is that they have awesome clients (web, android, iphone). And all of them sync well. Does anyone else have this?

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Awesome clients? For android try ninemail (if you are calling android default email client awsome you wont come to your breath for next 2 weeks ;). For web you have gazillion of them, from roundcube to horde and nextcloud plugin (anyway, its just a user interface, protocols are standardised (mostly IMAP beeing used for accessing mail and any client supporting it can read emails). But yep. It is for self hosted people. And I think that everyone in 2020 should be self hosted (I thought that in 2000 too but it is just getting worse, everyone locking himself into some vendor jail, one way or another).

Or K9 if you want an open source client to inspect the source code if you feel like it's necessary to ensure that the app works as intended.

The search abilities of gmail make it the killer app for me:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en

I'll try ninemail. Thanks.

>Does anyone else have this?

Everyone has this. It's called IMAP.

IMAP is not a cross-platform client. It's a protocol.

Yes. That's why everyone has it.

All email clients (non-web) do the same thing (including sync). And you can plug imap/smtp into almost every email client.

As for the gmail web client, various services are providing similar interfaces on their email service.

I don't know about Proton, but right now I cannot think of anything missing from FastMail that exist in Gmail -- they even support label now. The clients are better than Gmail, IMO.

What about search capabilities? the search power of gmail is awesome:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en

Fastmail supports basically all of that, plus some extra capabilities: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/search.html

If you depend on Google suite, you might miss out on features provided by the online office tooling.

They lack automatic translation of emails. Not a big deal, but in gmail it's one click away and with fastmail you have to copy-paste.

If you are focused on privacy, you probably aren't using a client app. Browsers are the way to go, particularly on mobile devices. They allow you to more easily prevent data being stored on the device. The simple presence of an app evidences that you have an account with that service whereas a browser, absent bookmarks, reveals nothing. I don't hesitate to unlock my phone for airport checks. They aren't going to find anything, nor be able to say I have an account anywhere.

(A great thing about HN is that you don't need to have an account in order to read articles. So I can bookmark it on my phone without worry.)

Since the browsers are a spyware on their own, especially chrome, this is not really true. And fingerprinting, cdns, etc. doesnt really provide you privacy. And local storage, history, cookies, syncing bookmarks to google etc. doesnt help either. We could argue about ssh / rdp access but browser is surely not a way to go.

But if you use an open browser you have at least a hope of addressing those issues. The app is a black box you just have to trust.

Not really (I am quite proficient at reversing, but this is a special case ;) ).

Browser is a huge, unreviewable (well not true but there is not just simple to reverse java code but also arm dissasembly to be done and that part can take forever), black box that you have to trust and as you dont use it for one single task (as for instance mail client - there is exactly one ip address where it needs to connect to in my case - to my mail server - and my mail client is allowed to connect exactly there and nowhere else) you cant "jail" (pun, not as bsd jail) it. And I dont use any google spyware on my android phone, like GMS.

This might be of help to you, I have reviewed the code and if you pay a donation directly, it wont do anything fishy (and I am building my own version and diffing every version with my baseline - for 2.266 I can guarantee it is safe): https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard

It's possible to value (incremental gains in) privacy without taking it to such extremes. I definitely wouldn't want to go to such lengths, and I'm probably somewhat more privacy-conscious than many.

https://sparkmailapp.com/

This looks good -- but it looks like they host the mail server, correct?

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