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?
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'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.
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.
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.
"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."
>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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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'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.
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.
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
104 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadCan'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 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.
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 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 do the same check for "why is fastmail" and get "why is fastmail down" - I suppose slow is better than down.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-fa...
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.
Yes. Much more useful that way. They want to auto-suggest what is the most likely search, not what is the most likely content.
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 hope Google never buys them. The whole Opera period was scary, but they managed to stay independent.
Fastmail's spam filtering is atrocious in my experience.
Edit: come to find out, it's only supported on secondary logins, so the master account cannot have two-factor authentication.
There is still a simple, clean, basic Gmail https://mail.google.com/mail/h/
For more light weighted https://mail.google.com/mail/x/
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.
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.
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.
You can configure the spam filter to be more aggressive as well.
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.
In fact sometimes I feel that way about a lot of Google's products.
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.
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.
That said, I recently found out about the /h/ option in this thread and it loads instantaneously--faster than FastMail.
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 am going to have a look at Fastmail as an alternative to Gmail and Outlook.
fastmail: paid
These rants always skip that detail, the primary reason I stick with gmail.
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.
Gmail's filtering, spam detection, and labeling features are much better and Gmail integrates well with my calendar and file storage workflows.
All that said, I use Thunderbird with IMAP as my primary to all those accounts because a real email client is faster than webmail.
kmail for KDE seems OK. It's not my favorite, but it feels lighter to me.
Considering using Emacs.