Why are people accessing emails from the webUI. Email is SMTP and IMAP, use any number of clients to access your email.
Your car can have any colour, as long as it is black.
All native email clients are stuck in 2005, lack most basic features, and have bugs not fixed in decades. Also, most providers have poor support for new IMAP features, such as NOTIFY.
Modern authentication.
S/MIME with cryptography that isn’t RSA.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5465.html
It's from 2009.
Without managesieve (2010, https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5804/ ), any decent filtering is impossible. (And no, it's not supported by almost any email client)
JMAP has already been mentioned.
I also don't remember any email clients supporting carddav.
>not UI
Why not UI? UI is very important. Even such a basic thing as muting folders works like cr*ap in k9mail. Is it better in "fairemail"?
I'm using Thunderbird with POP3 accounts, download on my laptop then remove from the server, daily backups. My phone has K9 (the old one with the UI I like) and I never remove messages from the phone. When I send mail from the phone I bcc myself so I can see the message from my laptop later.
Why? Because I don't like to leave my mail forever on somebody's else server. They can lock me out at any time (it will probably never happen) and my mail is mine.
Would I recommend this to anybody? Of course not.
Is it a problem not to have access to all of my mail when I don't have my laptop with me? It never happened to be a problem and it's always less likely to be a problem because of all the messages that are exchanged outside email and on mobile first platforms, even for work.
Why would Gmail be pre-installed on iOS?
You don’t install gmail, you connect a mail client to it or visit it in a web browser.
TIL. We really do live in separate bubbles.
It’s great if you never search for email I guess.
...from 5 accounts with at least a decade of history each, incl. my office e-mail.
But that means any spotlight bug is a mail search bug, and a settings search bug, and a “just launch this app” search bug, etc etc etc.
It also means that any bugs caused by one of these applications end up affecting them all. So if Contacts causes an indexer crash, none of your searches anywhere work any more. It’s a super fragile architecture. They did some work to split some of the plugins into separate processes but somehow it always ends up being insufficient.
At least on macOS there are some commands to blow away your spotlight index when it goes bad. On iOS you’re basically screwed unless you wipe and restore the OS.
These types of things should stand as big massive red flashing warnings with all these locked down systems - as you point out, in certain situations on iOS you’re just stuffed.
If I took over Apple's software engineering, I would tell every engineer "None of you are working on features until a stock OS install has zero error/warning logs. No exceptions. Contribute to fixes or use your vacation time, but nobody touches anything until we get it all fixed. Then once that's done, nobody's allowed to work on features while there are open bugs in their backlog. No exceptions."
This is why Gmail is nicer in many areas.
The thing I miss most about macOS now that I’ve gone all-in on Linux is actually Apple Mail. It’s just a simple and clean Mail app.
My current choice is Evolution and I’ve had very good luck with it so far. But ultimately the best Mail experience is on my iPhone.
I was using Thunderbird/BetterBird, but now that a Windows client isn’t a requirement for me anymore, I much prefer Evolution. Thunderbird is a notable pain when it comes to an inability to reliably export/import your user profile to other machines. It’s also such a cluttered application and I find the calendar UI to be horrendous. Good luck using a trackpad to scroll through months of the year.
The real reason I'm still using POP3 is that I'm using the mailboxes that are bundled with my domains. One on the registrars announced IMAP support a few days ago. All the others are still on POP3 probably because POP3 servers have been available since forever.
Because the UX of most email clients is extremely bad when compared with the webui of these email providers.
In mobile, webview-based apps exist mostly because they provide more ways to gather data on users.
If there was a way to run Mailspring on the web, I’d switch in a minute! I’ve tried to port it one time, but it got a bit tricky.
Mailspring uses a native module for syncing the mail, which would have to run either on a server somewhere or in a web worker. I think the web worker makes more sense nowadays, and would make it an offline-first app, but there’s a catch: how do you connect to IMAP/SMTP from a web browser?
Running the sync engine on a server is possible, but you have to have a server. It could make sense, though, if you’re running your own email server and want a killer webmail app to go with it.
(Also... Thunderbird is not that different from an Electron app itself. It uses Gecko instead of Blink, and has a few bits of XUL here and there, but the core premise is the same. Though it doesn’t use React at least!)
like what?
And probably a million other things that don’t hold up today.
For server side filters I just set them up in Fastmail using the web UI. That's the type of action I do once or twice a year, so totally OK to hop on over to the web app for just that.
I have no idea what you mean by 'push notifications'. I have Thunderbird open on my desktop, and it shows me when there is email. I have K9 on my smartphone, and it shows me when there is email (I don't have it set up to display notifications, but that seems possible). That's basically all I need to do email.
Push notifications: https://github.com/freswa/dovecot-xaps-plugin
I also have it pulling to local clients that just keep a few messages. Maybe 30% of the time is webui.
Has worked well for me for 30+ years (substituting telneting in and using pine until webuis existed).
“Email in the cloud mainly” is a useful pattern.
I only use one computer and my local mail app (macOS's in my case) just works. I can't imagine trading it for visiting some web site to read my email.
And I've had both multiple accounts various servers both private and work. And dozens of work-related role aliases which Mail.app correctly always used when replying. No problems there. Neither I have had to rebuild sqlite mail folder db, but did have some quirks first when work emails were transferred to Office365 which wanted to rename folders etc. nuisance, 2FA worked also worked fine since IIRC Mojave. I've had some addons MacGPG, sorting and maintenance scripts too. MacGPG does need some attention when upgrading though besides paying for subscription it moved time ago.
I've used also Thunderbird, mostly with linux. And used and tested whole lot of various clients since Elm was a thing -80's, then Pine, mutt etc.
The macOS Mail.app is fast reliable in my opinion, but sure there are things in its UX it could be yet improved. But still it's been long time among best and never broken or let me down over 20 years, both work and private use.
Thunderbird and macOS mail are great for that. Supporting everything from GMail to personal mail servers, and everything in between.
Also monopolies and mobile devices and skill issues.
They also let you host as many domains as you like and the servers are all EU based.
I get the same interface on my own computer as when I go on some other machine.
Less so as a reliable backup.
...but why do you need that?
Why does it need to be that fast too?
I guess many more people here are real power-users of email than I would expect for a forum full of engineers lol