Goodbye Gmail | Hacker News Reader

Goodbye Gmail

dangoldin.com

82 pointsdangoldin101 comments

Using the "Why is X" Google autosuggest as proof is meaningless, no one searches for "why is gmail so great" and the same suggestions come up for all popular products and services.

Yea you're right - it's definitely a biased sample but still shows others are experiencing it to some degree.

I do the same check for "why is fastmail" and get "why is fastmail down" - I suppose slow is better than down.

It also can show that billions of gmail accounts exist and there are so many middle reasons your mail can be down, besides the actual source. I bash google all the time, but the gmail is legit so far in my book.

That, and your search results (and auto-completes) are personalized.

Lucky he didn't do a "why is fastmail" search :).

Haha - I just did one "why is fastmail down". Gmail has that as the #2 spot so I consider it a tie =)

"It seems kind of ironic that a company whose motto is “Don’t Be Evil” has a flagship product that believes virtually every demographic group should be murdered en masse. I don’t know if this is a weird quirk of the search algorithm or if pretty much everyone who makes should-statements on the Internet is recommending genocide."

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-fa...

>or if pretty much everyone who makes should-statements on the Internet is recommending genocide

No, you are seeing a reflection of what other people are searching too. It's a mirror into peoples private naughty thoughts. Stuff they wouldn't say themselves, yet they search for to see if there are arguments supporting the thought.

I've always wondered - are Google's autocomplete choices based on what people are searching for, or are they based on frequently-found phrases in website content?

I'm pretty sure it's based on the most commonly searched phrases with phrases containing words on a blacklist deleted. Add in some magic to throw off the spammers and competition.

>are Google's autocomplete choices based on what people are searching for

Yes. Much more useful that way. They want to auto-suggest what is the most likely search, not what is the most likely content.

Not yet ready for a switch?

There is still a simple, clean, basic Gmail https://mail.google.com/mail/h/

For more light weighted https://mail.google.com/mail/x/

Yeah, it's time we go back to the basics. The html version is lot faster.

Thanks. I didn't know /x/ existed until now.

Yup, I literally have to use /h/. Standard has become so slow I can count the seconds between the end of page loading and the begin of responsiveness (like how Windows used to boot to the desktop, but be unresponsive for another 30 seconds)

Wow, /h/ is so much faster than standard Gmail. I'm legitimately going to use it all the time from now on.

I stopped using Conversation mode a month ago, and it's been both refreshing and shaved over a second off load time.

This article is misleading on several accounts (as others of its type often are).

- Yes, initial payload size matters. But where's the true comparison about what each app is loading? How are the features and the UX? Would a power user be satisfied with Fastmail (e.g. search, filters, etc.)? (It looks nice, but none of this was discussed at all).

- The disparate email count comparison is excused way too quickly. Have you done a similar test with a brand new Gmail account?

- Anecdata. I've never had the page load problems as bad as described. 2-3 seconds, and I reload once every week or less. "Sluggish" is a weasel word -- what is sluggish? Searches return in ~1 second for me (~7000 emails, I'm not a saver.)

- You can turn off chat.

- Switching is never as simple as described, and forwarding is a fairly messy solution (and will only get messy as the author creates new login accounts and further forks his usage).

- Ugh, the "Google suggest" argument. For the record, the only suggestion for Fastmail is "Why is Fastmail down"

I clicked on "Goodbye Gmail" hoping for some substance or an interesting story but instead got feelings, anecdata and glossing over the problems of a real migration or search for a qualified alternative.

As a power user, I like my shell access to my mail machine. Procmail, shell scripts, perl...

Oh, and GMail has definitely grown a lot more heavyweight. I've had to switch to the classic HTML interface to get anything done in GMail on my 3 watt 1GHz laptop. Turning off chat helped, but not nearly enough.

From a recent Gmail -> Fastmail switcher, who imported all emails from Gmail

- Fastmail's UI is far faster to use, viewing emails is instantaneous, loading a folder with 30,000 emails takes a second at most. They have infinite scrolling with native scrollbars, and it doesn't slow down as you scroll. It does break momentum scrolling sometimes.

- I'm not too sure about search compared to all the Gmail filters, but filters are run via sieve. A real power user can edit the raw sieve commands if they like, but there's a UI on top that's powerful enough for most uses. There's no "Filter messages like these" though, that was handy.

- Turning off Chat/Hangout did make Gmail use less RAM and start faster, but didn't improve load times once it was active.

- Switching was fairly easy for me, since I use my own domain. Fastmail imported my old Gmail data via IMAP and I just switched MXs.

- With you on Google Suggest. Fastmail have had their share of problems, but they report them quickly and write up what went wrong.

My experience with Fastmail's webmail (coming from GApps) is that it has all the features a power user needs, minus the annoying Google+ and Google Drive integration. Heck, it even uses GMail-style keyboard shortcuts.

The primary downside is that you lose labels (and get folders instead).

- Switching is never as simple as described, and forwarding is a fairly messy solution (and will only get messy as the author creates new login accounts and further forks his usage).

For me, the automatic IMAP migration in Fastmail just worked, ~21000 e-mails.

I have recently made the switch from Gmail to Fastmail as well, and I couldn't be happier. They don't have all the features (calendars are coming soon!), but they also don't have Google+.

In my experience it's a lot faster, both web and IMAP are extremely fast. While the storage is smaller than Gmail I don't find this an issue.

I haven't used the XMPP servers yet, but it seems to have the same features as non-hangouts GTalk.

I'm a fastmail switcher, too. $40/yr.

Yeah I switched to Fastmail about a year ago for myself + my family members (using the Family plan with custom domain). Have had absolutely zero regrets.

Another vote here that Fastmail is fantastic.

I hope Google never buys them. The whole Opera period was scary, but they managed to stay independent.

How are they with spam? I'd just run my own mail, but I can't beat Google's spam filtering. (They have millions of email accounts, real time, as a data source.)

Spotless. I've gotten maybe one false negative (i.e., the spam hit my inbox) and no false positives.

I have a very different experience. I've had my fastmail account for ~5 years and get 20 new pieces of spam in my inbox daily, while on my gmail account, that I've used for ~10 years, I only get 1 spam per month on average.

Fastmail's spam filtering is atrocious in my experience.

Works fine for me. They also have flexibility in how spam is handled, and you could even forward to gmail and back if you really wanted to use its spam filtering. https://www.fastmail.fm/help/spam_virus_protection.html

A few months ago I had to drop my spam threshold from 5 to something like 2.5 -- my spam issues cleared up immediately.

Also important to note: Fastmail has been rock solid for me (and I should know - over 10 years there). Gmail outages seem frequent compared to the number of times I remember FM going down.

Having made the switch to Fastmail a while ago, I agree with the comments - mostly.

While Fastmail is fantastic, it lacks the implementation polish of Gmail. Two-factor authentication is there, but not via a popup like on gmail. You have to enter it in the web-form. This is a hassle, because I use LastPass and it's a bit fiddly. Further, under Fastmail you create new logins in addition to the master account password. The new logins can have two-factor, but the master can't. So there is a small vulnerability in that at least one password without the protection of two-factor.

Secondly, the spam filters on Gmail are far better. Fastmail has got a bit better, but it's still worse when compared with Google's offering.

Thirdly, Fastmail costs. While I'm more than happy to pay, I doubt many people would switch services from a free to paid, just because it appeared to be slightly slower.

That said, I really love Fastmail. I'm more than happy to pay and I'm a very satisfied customer. I can't wait for the promised features of a calendar and I hope - one day - there'll be the ability to sync address books.

Thanks for sharing - I'm only a few days in but have really enjoyed the snappiness and simplicity. I do wish it had better calendar support (for that I'm still on Google) and a bit more polish but so far I'm glad to pay for it.

The spam point is interesting - I plan on using Fastmail for my important personal stuff and gmail with forwarding for everything else. Hopefully that will make for a good tradeoff.

I've actually found Fastmail is better at spam filtering. I had a problem with many false positives on Gmail, but Fastmail is doing alright.

You can configure the spam filter to be more aggressive as well.

What worries me more is that it is apparently very hard to get support:

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=68642

There are many such complaints in the forums. For nearly the same price Google gives phone support.

Spam filtering in Gmail is a killer feature, now as much as when it first appeared.

These rants always skip that detail, the primary reason I stick with gmail.

Funnily the spam filter is what finally got me off Gmail. It developed a serious false positive problem with a couple of mailing lists I'm subscribed to - and yes the address was in my address book and all the other usual 'fixes'.

I can handle false negatives occasionally, but false positives are much harder to spot.

Fastmail's filter (SpamAssassin for the most part) is configurable in how aggressive it is.

You could have created a filter to avoid marking these mails as spam.

Only after you find out they were getting filtered, usually because someone calls you to say "WhyTF aren't you responding to my emails?"

I have used Fastmail for as long time (Yikes, at least 6 years at this point?), and have never had any issues with their spam filtering. For context I get about 800-1000 ham emails a day.

You can always forward your mail through GMail. Publicly, your address is r0s@gmail.com, but that account forwards to another address. Boom, spam filtering. You can even give out your "private" address to trusted parties, and skip the middleman.

This negates the privacy benefits of not using gmail, no?

Sort of. You give out your gmail address to untrusted sources that will sell your address (Forums? Misc. Websites?) and your private addresses to trusted sources. You can't count on your communications with untrusted sources being secret in the first place; they are untrusted!

I wish my address was r0s@gmail.com -_-

I don't have any of this experience with GMail. Not saying it doesn't have flaws - but my experience is pretty great.

Thanks for the data point - I've spoken with others and it's been a mixed bag - some say it's slow and others don't. I wonder how much of it is perception of speed vs actual speed. Can you try reloading it and seeing how long it takes to load?

Sitting here thinking the same thing ..

Can't say I've ever had performance issues or even a moments downtime whilst using gmail since it was launched.

Is a paid vs. free solution even comparable?

It's also a bit weird to compare the requests made on initial load considering these web pages are arguably meant to be kept open- but regardless, shouldn't the browser be caching these?

I think a more fair & thorough comparison would be to investigate what gmail has that other solutions don't by introducing the larger initial overhead. I'm guessing a lot of cross platform compatibility code and plenty of code to integrate to Google's other services.

In which case, I would say if you are concerned about the initial page load and having more responsive interface (once again, no complaints here) and don't need integration to Google's ecosystem, you may not be the target customer for gmail. Which is okay.

I've always found Gmail reliable, but I've seen plenty of performance issues in the last year.

I now have personal email on Fastmail and work on Google Apps. The difference is quite striking. It'll take a good 20 seconds before all of Gmail is loaded, Fastmail loads in under one second. Gmail will easily take 300-400 MB of RAM in Chrome after a few hours, Fastmail is around 40-50MB.

Then there's clicking on emails. Once you've browsed for emails in Fastmail you'll understand why I thing Gmail is slow these days.

Also Fastmail's IMAP implementation is much more reliable.

I have accounts on both gmail and fastmail, for different purposes.

Gmail has become bloated enough that it's really only usable on modern hardware. I have an older laptop I use when I travel (don't really care too much if it gets stolen, damaged, etc.) and gmail is painfully sluggish on it while Fastmail is still quite usable.

Fastmail has also, however, become more bloated than it used to be. I preferred their UI from a couple of years ago, but have grown to tolerate the current one.

I've mostly jumped off the webmail bandwagon altogether. They are all headed that direction (except squirrelmail) so I stick with IMAP access. Outlook 2010 is currently idling on my laptop at an astonishing 36.6MB.

It very well may be isolated to a few people - my wife uses it without any issues and yet it's noticeably slow for me. I agree with you that the comparison isn't 100% valid but it was more of a proxy for how much crap Gmail loads - it will also continue to make additional requests through the session.

I think the code to integrate the other Google services is the problem for me - I don't need it and it clutters my experience.

I have about 12.5k messages in my inbox at FastMail, and another 26k in separate folder. Both inboxes load instantly, and the infinite scrolling is seamless. Jumping back-and-forth between message and list view is equally quick. While they currently lack features like a calendar, they do have a lot of powerful tools -- I have several domains and email accounts conditionally filing mail into several folders, with custom personalities/signatures when replying from each folder. Very happy with it, and the devs take bugs seriously whenever I message them. (To be fair, it's usually just UI edge cases.)

Edit: Just to quickly elaborate on the infinite scrolling: FastMail takes the total number of messages in a given folder and uses that to calculate the size of the viewport. When you scroll to a given position, it fires off a small AJAX request for just the messages that are in view. Since each message is a fixed height, it gives them a lot of flexibility for calculating what to show.

Also, FWIW, they do support message threading.

Gmail used to be great back in the early 2000s, but its time has long passed. The metro-ified UI is ugly and clearly only designed for tablets, options are steadily being hidden or removed, and the privacy concerns have only got worse. Not to mention, if you want to use a better client such as Thunderbird, their IMAP is glacially slow and often breaks altogether. The only other alternative is to use POP3 to bulk download all mail and sort through it locally.

I switched from gmail to running my own mailserver a couple of years ago; best decision I ever made about email. It's faster, more private, I can issue my own DKIM keys (and I know my signatures haven't been messed with), and I get sane spam filtering with visible scores that doesn't source its data from other people's email and has a much lower false positive and false negative rate, which only improves via Bayesian learning.

Well if we're offering our suggestions for alternatives, I'll throw Outlook.com in the hat. I use it daily and find it as easy to use as Gmail, if not easier. Perhaps it's missing a few features that Gmail's got going for it like the tabs - but that doesn't bother me that much.

I snatched up an @outlook.com address back when they were still rolling it out, mostly to use as another junk email account. It sat for a while; but over the past few months, I find myself using Outlook.com more (for business) and Gmail less. The Outlook interface is a pleasure to use.

I've noticed maps is considerably slower and less responsive. Google has become corporatized so I'm keeping my expectations in check.

I've noticed this with maps as well. I don't know what that has to do with corporatization, but I do know slow, hiccupy, and failed to load when I see it.

GMail is pretty good. But the new maps is atrocious on any browser except Chrome (surprise surprise). The old version is much faster on all browsers. Same for the Android app, which also destroys my phone battery now too.

Why wouldn't you just use imap in an email client? I don't see any benefit to using a cloud email service when you can just host email easily on a cloud server..

Why wouldn't you just use imap in an email client?

I agree, unfortunately, GMail has a non-standard IMAP implementation. As a result, it doesn't work well with Mail.app (while Fastmail's pristine IMAP does) and plugins such as MailTags.

I made the same switch a couple years ago (GMail -> Fastmail) and have had the exact same (pleasant) experience. Fastmail is fast and has sane defaults, a powerful filtering system, and good spam detection. As a bonus, I don't have to worry about Google reading my email to show me relevant ads. I've gladly spent the money to have reliable, fast, standards-friendly email. The only thing they lack is two-step authentication.

Yea - I was a bit hesitant but ended up making the switch anyways. It looks as if the other comment mentions that they do have it so I'll check it out.

According to the Fastmail webpage, they do support (optional) two-factor authentication: https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html

Thanks! I think it's new. That's the first I've seen regarding it.

Edit: come to find out, it's only supported on secondary logins, so the master account cannot have two-factor authentication.

I moved off Gmail (more accurately, Google Apps) a few years ago. It was the last thing tying me to Google. Privacy concerns were the motivation for me, not any technical or feature issues.

I closed my account without having a "full featured" alternative ready. Instead, I used the the mailbox feature provided by my domain registrar[1]. I initially set out to only use this as a temporary arrangement, but the quality of service has been so excellent that I've had no reason to move from it.

Keep in mind, because of this move, I'm no longer a "typical" email user. At least, not what has become typical of email. I use it purely as a personal communication tool. Not as an information archive, password manager, file storage or any other (mis)use of the thing that has seemed to become standard these days.

I access it through a desktop client via IMAP, but they also provide webmail access via an instance of the GPL licensed Roundcude[2], which I use extremely rarely.

[1] https://www.gandi.net/?lang=en

[2] http://roundcube.net/

Passing judgment based on a "why is ..." auto-complete suggestion seems flawed, as the searches are heavily biased to the negative end.

That was more of a fun thing to add - the actual performance is noticeably slower for me. Both loading and navigating take a longer amount of time in Gmail. Probably should have just left that out since everyone seems to be drawn to disproving that particular point.

I'm considering switching from Gmail for similar reasons - multi-second delays when switching to a label are kinda unacceptable. But this is 2014, and if I'm going to switch, it needs to be to a desktop application so that I can have some vague semblance of security - at least supporting PGP mail and accepting messages which happen to be delivered securely with STARTTLS without the possibility of eavesdropping on my end, even if most of my mail is never going to use PGP. Plus, my laptop almost certainly has more CPU to spare than some random cloud server, so in theory searching should be faster, even if the rest of the UI can be equally snappy in a webapp as in a desktop app.

Unfortunately, after trying several candidates, I have yet to find an app whose UI I actually like, so I'm still using Gmail. I think I will try Mailpile once it's ready.

If not Mail.app, what about notmuch with one of the supported clients ;).

I have tried Mail.app (with Gmail IMAP for now); it's quite nice, but has some issues such as poor expressiveness in search.

notmuch looks interesting. I do use vim heavily, but I'm not sure I want to read all my mail in fixed-width... wonder if the web client is any good.

Gmail has definitely gotten... 'heavy'... over the years. I clocked it at about 6 seconds to load my inbox with just 8 messages in it (Firefox 28 on a decently fast machine on a 100MB/5MB connection with low latency). And that's before the pause and the load of the Hangouts widget. Loading the /h/ variant of email is under 2 seconds. My Rackspace mail webmail comes up in about 3.

All that said, I use Thunderbird with IMAP as my primary to all those accounts because a real email client is faster than webmail.

I'm still using Gmail, but I'm frequently struck that every change they make to it is almost intentionally making it worse.

In fact sometimes I feel that way about a lot of Google's products.

This article may be a little biased but as a user of Gmail and Outlook I can agree that Gmail is sluggish to a certain extent. Outlook's interface made managing my email much simpler and straight to the point. I have not come across issues about Microsoft's server not playing nice with email clients. Yes Outlook may not have as many features as compared to Gmail but it does what it says on the tin, and does it well in my case.

I am going to have a look at Fastmail as an alternative to Gmail and Outlook.

What do you mean, Outlook has less features than GMail? Sure doesn't seem that way to me.

I thought I would give fastmail a try and whilst I agree that gmail isn't as slow as the article makes it out to be (for me at least) I do like how fastmail just does mail, it's simple, there's nothing else I have to worry about turning off. It does one thing and it's the only thing I want it todo. I have only just signed up so If my opinion changes then I'll post back here but so far it looks quite nice. I'm yet to decide if I want to make the switch though!

Funny, I switched from Fastmail to Gmail a couple years ago. I was used to having IMAP access from my time in college, so Fastmail made sense at the time, but I came to prefer having a uniform mail experience--wherever I was connecting from--via a robust web client.

Gmail's filtering, spam detection, and labeling features are much better and Gmail integrates well with my calendar and file storage workflows.

It takes 6 seconds for you to load Gmail? Where do you live? I feel sorry for you bro.

For Gmail to reach full interactivity it takes at least 6 seconds for me quite often. Keep in mind that after the interface initially shows up, it's still very sluggish for a few seconds as it loads in Google+, the chat section, etc.

That said, I recently found out about the /h/ option in this thread and it loads instantaneously--faster than FastMail.

It's a good idea to set up a forward to another account just for redundancy. I forward all my email to Yahoo just in case Gmail has an extended outage, accidentally rm -rf's my account, etc.

I use Gmail via Fluid app on mac and it works great independently (doesn't slow down n stuff). But if I keep gmail open in chrome, it sucks up lot of memory over the time.

pretty bad post, more evidence of relevant factors would be useful to add credibility. It seems this experience of lag is really not the norm, so why rant about it in such general terms. it's your machine/environment probably Enjoy fastmail or whatever. Gmail remains usable and has grown to support its userbase....and still holds its own from the revolutionary place it launched at in 2004...

I use Sparrow. I get the benefits of Gmail, without any of the problems you cite.

(N.B. You don't have to use Sparrow; pick any IMAP client you like.)

acquired by google?

they are trying to make changes to improve. give them some chance to improve. They have moved all the downloading to server side & so downloading an attachment or running a video is much faster now on gmail as compared to earlier

Lets give them a chance to improve before we bid goodbye

I bet you this post will let FastMail steal a dozen users from Gmail. Any affiliation, @dangoldin? :P

Ha I wish. I'm not even paying for Fastmail yet =) Still have 55 days before I need to.

Also works much more reliably in foreign countries where Google services may be slow/blocked

slightly off topic but I'm looking to move away from Thunderbird as a mail client. I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions. I use gmail but not online but without updates to tbird, thats becoming the bottleneck

I'm also interested in any answers to this. I haven't come across anything as easy and usable as Thunderbird.

kmail for KDE seems OK. It's not my favorite, but it feels lighter to me.

Considering using Emacs.

reads like an informercial.

The real question is how to "Goodbye Email".

gmail: free

fastmail: paid

Sometimes not banging your head on the keyboard each day is worth $10/year.

Sure, but comparing a paid service to a free service and expecting the free service to be as good as a paid service is silly.

You still pay for GMail, in the form of being a captive audience for ads.

Trust me, if you used the paid Google Apps, it isn't any faster ;).

You know Gmail is free? And Fastmail costs $$$?

I have gmail open in a couple of tabs pretty much for weeks. Were I to actually close and reopen chrome, the vast bulk of the resources would be cached.

This seems to be optimizing an artificial. Or maybe an irrelevant is a better word. It's like measuring Windows boot times -- as is so common with each iteration -- when recovery from sleep is far more relevant to most people now.

Further, and this may sound overly cynical, posts that proselytize a change should have a HN minimum required period before they can be submitted. Saying "I changed from {x} to {y} this past weekend, and boy is everything awesome now!" are invariably followed by the requisite post detailing how much of a mistake moving to {y} was.

Not everyone leaves their browsers open when they're at the computer. I don't, and on a 100/100 connection, from click to inbox open it takes me almost 7 seconds. I tried it twice on all 3 of my gmail accounts with varying results, but none faster than 5.

Not everyone, but I would wager that most do: Many office desktops went from having an instance of Outlook.exe open 24 hours a day, to a couple of tabs in Chrome. Which is exactly why Google made it a rich, all-encompassing platform (calendars, contacts, instant messaging) -- it's a conversation dashboard that is intended to sit resident.

This whole discussion sounds like some sort of Fastmail astroturfing campaign. I mean when people complain about Google+ (which in gmail is wholly materialized as a +YourName up in the corner), it sounds like rote talking points.

I have a account on both gmail and fastmail. If we are just concerned about speed fastmail wins for me. And there is that whole tracking thing that bugs me so that is another win for fastmail. I just use gmail for signing up on websites I will most likely only visit one.

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