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Ask HN: Best alternate client to web-based Gmail? Now that it sucks

51 points by Humphrey ↗ HN
With the most recent update to web-based Gmail, it is super janky and it feels like the interface gets in my way. I've started to dislike writing emails now.

What are good alternate clients that still get all benefits of Gmail, but with a fast productive interface?

29 comments

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Klonoar
FastMail.

Nothing is as _good_ as GMail, which is the most frustrating part, but FastMail gets pretty close in my experience.

I guess disclaimer that I did some brief consulting work with them years ago to explore WKWebView usage in their app; I only recently started using them myself, though, so my opinions at this point are more influenced by that than anything else.

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troydavis
Seconded. After 15+ years mostly using Gmail or mutt, I moved to FastMail’s webmail about 3 years ago.

I like FastMail’s webmail better than Gmail today, but not quite as much as Gmail ~10 years ago.

Humphrey
Sure -- FastMail seems like the way to go if you get to choose these things!
j88439h84
What is fastmail missing that gmail has?
true_tuna
Funny how it has come to this. There’s a common refrain at google. Reliance to regressive change is branded change aversion. It utterly misses the point. If you change something it damn well better be better. Because change forces your user to re-learn. Actively making things worse for no benefit (like the latest gmail update) is the final stage of “that’s just change aversion” mentality.
Humphrey
Absolutely! I get that they have added in some cool new features under the skin (the auto suggest as you type is cool) but it's too many steps backwards to be worth it!
fjni
you can go 10+ years back via https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html but that's probably not what you're looking for either.
maxxxxx
Thanks! I think I like this better.
Humphrey
ha ha! Man that brings back memories!! It's weird how it "feels" faster, although, I think it actually takes longer for each page load.
pier25
I actually prefer the design of this outdated version than the new one...

Why can't Google simply keep the classic version alive? (the one they just replaced)

sublupo
I recently changed to Thunderbird due to the Gmail gui change. So far it is working really well. There are some very small problems that may be fixable, I just haven't figured out how. Such as, no automatic 30 second undo option on sent mail, a lot of emails get saved as new drafts even after sending, and I can't figure out how to link other accounts and then bring and to send as that account without having to add it as a new account. However, it is amazing how fast it is relative to Gmail. Creating a new email is instant and can be made full screen, where as in Gmail it takes a few seconds for a small compose window to open. Simply opening Thunderbird is instant as opposed to the new Gmail that has taken me 30 seconds at one point. Another reason that I installed Thunderbird is because I eventually hope to leave Gmail. So I'm starting by changing the GUI, and maybe in a year I will update my address.
Kagerjay
Im actually considering going from thunderbird to gmail, fastmail or outlook

The reason is b/c thunderbird doesnt have a good reply monitor,threading for conversations or plugins to handle it. I have to buy things from vendors all the time and manufacturer reps always never do their job properly until I remind them 2 to 5x (not an exaggeration) over the course of 2 weeks. The reason is b/c most are all low tech and cant manage emails. I wish I could just bypass them entirely but its complicated.

Sometimes vendors dont use emails like purchasing@company.com and use name@company.com and dont tell me they fired their sales rep and hired a new one. So sometimes my emails go to deadlinks again and thunderbird has no monitoring solution and poor conversation threading.

Its becoming a huge hassle for me so I need a better tracking system. Gmail has many integrations for this though on the other hand.

I dont know if I care all that much about privacy in all honesty. I am more worried about getting vendor locked through google,so I might set an smtp/imap account with thunderbird for my google emails.

The new google gmail is not really that bad in all honesty. It loads slow starting out but it does not bother me though. Some of the view modes make my eyes bleed though UX is beyond atrocious especially with attachments.

Humphrey
Alright -- I've got thunderbird running -- lets see how this goes!
throwaway487548
Two options.

1. Apple. Really.

2. Setting up your own Linode with postfix, dovecot and roundcube is just a half of an hour. Domain name registration is about an hour.

Of course, you won't get any services, which is the main product Google is trying to sell indirectly (it monetizes your content, services are free as long as you your generate content).

tjoff
Is roundcube really the best option? I just can't stand using it.
0xADD1E
I use rainloop for my self hosted. Works much nicer, especially on mobile devices
marticode
Setting up your own mail server is way more work than that. Setting up the software is the easy part, you are now gonna have to deal with spam blocklists as well as ISP that just blanket-block some hosting companies IP ranges.
cco
Which parts get in your way? I much prefer the previous gen to current default settings but I've found that you can largely emulate the previous gen even if it's not perfect.
Humphrey
> Which parts get in your way?

The slowness, lag, ugly font. Even scrolling is laggy. I'm just waiting for it to respond often. Sitting around waiting for the collapsible sidebar to collapse.

nshelly
Superhuman. Not cheap, but I love how fast it is with its native app (Electron I think). They write updates immediately locally, and sync that in the background, so you can breeze through your unsorted email quickly (pressing keyboard shortcut 'e'), and pressing 'tab' to switch between split inbox views. They also show read/open receipts if you enable it, and have keyboard shortcuts for unsubscribing as well. When you reach inbox zero they reward you with a new, beautiful picture every day.

A fully-featured integrated calendar is lacking but apparently will be improved in the coming year or so.

wingerlang
What changes exactly is everyone talking about that made it worse? I literally feel no difference in the UI/UX (apart from the initial 2 second load animation).
Humphrey
The main issue is performance -- so janky -- animations shudder. There is even a delay waiting for text to appear while I'm typing an email.
dolessdrugs
So Slow. It'll take seconds to open an email or label sometimes.
Mauricio_
It's very slow. Some filters are broken for me now. And some of the fonts used are ugly, but that's the least important thing.
garyclarke27
I happily pay for Office 365 in my startup which is open source based (PostgreSQL, HTML, CSS, JS, Polymer) just for Outlook and Excel. There are cheap subscription options I think available for consumers. Outlook is for me, far superior to GMail (I’m no MS fanboy, I hate Word and Sharepoint). GMail was fine for a free product, but the thing i hated about it most was that you could not easily sort mail by clicking on column headers such as date/ from / to etc. I could not believe that such a basic critical capability was absent - have they added it now?
ngrilly
I've started to use FastMail, which is great. The thing I miss is the automatic triaging of emails provided by GMail (personal, promos, forums, updates, social). FastMail provides something similar, but with a lot of false positives, and sady the filter is not available in the mobile app :-(
negativ0
Thunderbird, for classic email usage is the best option if you don't want to pay for Outlook.

And you are right the interface not only gets in your way, most of the time it doesn't open the email when you click on it. Incredible that at Google those praised engineers make a unusable product.