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Comment by aptwebapps | Hacker News Reader

What's the best Gmail alternative wrt UI features?

Not a clue about what you're seeking. I'm using mailbox, and thunderbird as a client for my devices (android, windows, linux and macos).

It works. For E2EE, I have GPG setup on all of my devices. It costs me a little over €1/month for paid account as I use my own domain.

The experience has been good, and something I absolutely advocate for and promote.

Thunderbird is not something one can recommend to a non-techie friend as a replacement for GMail. At least the last time I checked on Android, it required additional tuning for pushes, it worked poorly when there was too many messages in inbox (which is what almost everyone coming from Gmail has), didn't provide text formatting.

I don't know about "the best", but I'm very happy with Fastmail. It has a very nice UI, it has contacts and calendar, uses open standards, and their privacy policy is fine.

I switched to Fastmail when I degoogled, and I've been very happy with it. I genuinely feel that its UX and feature set are better than what I was getting from GMail.

What UI features do you consider important? I feel that email UI is largely standardized, and the main differentiating factor is speed (and Gmail is definitely not fast).

OTOH, what Gmail does with filtering promotional crap (spam, tbh) is decent, but I haven't compared against other mail service providers, so I can't give a comparative opinion.

Good conversation threading first. For the rest it may just be that I'm used to it but I find it generally much easier to read than, say, Outlook.

I use the Spark Mail client for that reason.

Do you like how gmail does threading? It’s flat threading and incorrect ordering is why I will not use gmail’s web interface.

Fastmail finally made their android client work offline too.

I've had a good time with them so far and am a happy customer. You can add as many domains you want and just easily leave if you're no longer happy.

another vote for fastmail, I got my own domain and been slowly changing my email eveywhere away from gmail. No need to do it all in one go. I barely touch my gmail account anymore, feels so freeing!

Thunderbird

Do you mean a self-hosted webmail app? Or a native/multi-platform native email client?

Personally I think Gmail UI is meh - but I no longer use email that much - so terrible UI/ux and no proper quoting/threading support isn't all that problematic.

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