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Comment by lukeqsee | Hacker News Reader

I clicked the link expecting to see security/privacy arguments (perhaps a HN bias?). Instead, I saw arguments against Gmail's best-in-class web-interface. The combination of keyboard shortcuts, labels, and filters make it the best. Having used Fastmail, it does rival Gmail, but only if you are an advanced user willing to put the effort into making it fit your use case. The reason I am slowly switching away from Gmail is founded in security and privacy considerations, somewhat better control over my own domain, and I think that Gmail's move to a the tabbed inbox was failure in large part, and mixes junk with legitimate mail in my inbox.

FWIW, I've used Gmail for 6 or 7 years and Fastmail for 1 year.

Edit: clarification

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I've been a Gmail user since its invite-only inception. I would agree with you about the UI a year ago. But the new SMS-sized compose window and the UI changes that put all non-basic functionality 2 or 3 clicks away are really annoying.

I would leave Gmail due to the UI changes, although I must confess I hadn't at the moment because it's too much bother to tell people about a new address, set up redirection, find out how to save all the old messages and have them at hand, etc.

I would imagine Google is a/b testing and keeping a very close eye on the analytics of usage/retention with the new interface. We (power users/technical people) may lose out, but they must be seeing the numbers and improvement over the previous interface.

One word: http://gmelius.com/

Extension that brings back the old compose and everything from their previous UI. Gmail's time machine. Awesome.

Thanks. I have just tried it, and it is indeed awesome!

I despise the new compose window, but most of the time I'm using IMAP anyway.

And what's your preferred client?

This might help: ctrl-click the compose button to give it a whole new tab to itself. Shift-click for a new window.

I can second this opinion. Not only that, but personally I like the new interface, even the classification that they are doing because you can customize it - I just got rid of the "Updates" tab, given that emails classified as such are usually important and everything is fine for me.

What I don't like about GMail is the complete disregard for digital signing and encryption with S/MIME and/or OpenPGP.

Therefore, on my Android right now I'm using K-9 and on the desktop I use Thunderbird. Thunderbird is actually pretty cool once you customize it a little (it even works with Google's Calendar and Tasks). There's even a cool Chrome/Firefox extension called Mailvelope, for making PGP work in webmail interfaces [1] and so it works straight in GMail, though in Firefox, due to a current limitation that probably won't get fixed until 27, it's very slow and also the extension currently doesn't support PGP/Mime and can't sync with key servers, although the author told me these features are planed for the next versions. And since I'm a Firefox user, I'll just have to wait for now.

Note - I'm a Google Apps user, which means I have my own domain. I can always switch without losing my email address. If you're using a @gmail.com email address, then you should really stop doing that.

[1] http://www.mailvelope.com/

I'm a Google Apps user, which means I have my own domain. I can always switch without losing my email address. If you're using a @gmail.com email address, then you should really stop doing that.

I'm thinking of switching to an Apps account but I'm worried about the complexity of the transition for all my data.. Do you have any advice for that? Also do you miss anything with an Apps account compared with a regular one?

I use Apps for a personal account -- but there are often odd quirks when Google releases new products that make it slightly inconvenient. In retrospect, I think a better alternative would have been just setting up my domain's email as redirects to my gmail, and then setting up the Gmail "Send As". I use this procedure for secondary domains I also use for email (with my Apps acct).

Just forward your email and only send mail from your apps email, that't what I did. But I also liked to start mostly clean slate since most of my stuff Google stuff was a mess.

I exported some email filters and all of my calendar events. It's also possible to export/import your email as well. For your google drive you can just share everything or save it on your pc and put it in the new Google drive folder.

The things I miss are really small. You might have a bit later or no access to beta's and new features are not turned on automatically (recently this was the case for webhistory, you had to push a switch in your Apps control panel).

Furthermore you should probably try using a catchall. I like it a lot, you can filter on specific sent to emails from different services. And you always know who sells your data. I use the format company-type@domain.com. This way you con filter on sent to emails that contain shop for all your online orders.

Here are some ideas:

(1) you can import your email from any account (that supports POP3) in a new GMail account. Just go to Settings -> Accounts in your new GMail account and configure it (note that the old GMail account also has to have POP3 activated). Actually from a new GMail account you can also send email using an older email account by SMTP. So basically, with a new GMail account, you can keep using an old email account from within the same interface, if that's what you want (heck, you could use a Fastmail.fm account from within a GMail interface, if you don't mind the slight latency).

Make sure that you label these emails with a special label, such that you can filter them later more easily.

(2) on your old email account, you can set a "Vacation Responder" that informs people of your new email address automatically.

So yeah, if you like GMail, then don't wait and do migrate to your own Google Apps domain. You won't get ads anymore in GMail, you'll have the option to migrate without losing your email address and you'll be treated like a customer (in my experience that doesn't necessarily match other people, their support has been very responsive).

And $5/month is not very cheap, but on the other hand it's the price for 1-2 coffees and I value my email. I do prefer the "Flexible" plan and not the "Annual" plan, because the later imposes a termination tax. So do it, don't wait.

It's not hard to switch your email, it's just hard to train other people to send you email on your new address. I have switched to my own domain three years ago, sent notification to everyone in my address book about the email changes, enabled automatic response on my old gmail account that informs the sender about email change every time it receives any mail, and I still receive ~25% of all personal emails through that old email account.

It's the same as when changing the phone number, people will just keep calling you on your old number that doesn't exist anymore and that complain to you that you didn't call back.

As a side note, the lack of support for legacy emails in Gmail and Contacts is really bothering me. I would like to be able to mark someone's mail as inactive, so that i can see these mails when I look for old conversations with the person, but not to show up in autocomplete when I try to actually write an email.

"Thunderbird is actually pretty cool once you customize it a little (it even works with Google's Calendar and Tasks)."

I used Thunderbird for many years, but switched to Evolution this year. I remember trying Evolution a few years ago and being unimpressed. It has come a long way since then.

Evolution also supports Googles calendar/tasks and also supports PGP. These things are built in to the main app though, rather than being included as addons. Evolutions LDAP support includes write support too (unlike Thunderbird) if that's useful to you. I've also found the UI to be faster and more responsive than Thunderbirds.

Also Thunderbird development has been pretty much abandoned by Mozilla, yet Evolution is under heavy development. Just take a look at their git log:

https://git.gnome.org/browse/evolution/log/

So yeah. Give Evolution a try if you haven't for a while. It's a great IMAP client.

Thanks for the heads-up on Evo. I was a longtime user until switching to T-bird in the mid-00s because it was a lot more visually attractive to me and more configurable/extensible. I see what you mean, Evo seems to have made big strides since then, definitely worth a test-drive for a while.

I'm not sure. Gmail's web interface certainly had been the best. But with the last overhaul, I ended up with big chucks of useless area on the top of my 1366*768 screen. Then there's the new Outlook. If we're stricktly talking about web interface, it's hard, at least for me, to say which one wins out.

>The combination of keyboard shortcuts, labels, and filters make it the best.

I find the web interface routinely bloats up the browsers mem usage (A freaking gigabyte to display a UI??!). The spam filter is average - on both false positives and false negatives. My inbox is only ~5GB and many searches are really slow.

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