My CS instructor once asked everyone in the class to "raise you hand if you still use an email client." My hand was the only one that went up, and a couple of people laughed and said "really?"
I think that was almost 10 years ago.
I think that was almost 10 years ago.
I guess the sad state of affair in regards to email syncing protocols (POP3 and IMAP) are partly to blame, JMAP might help a little but I guess it's too late.
I'd say it's entirely that. Sync was so often half-broken with real email clients across multiple devices that having no offline access was a price nearly everyone was willing to pay to fix that, provided the web client were good enough (and, clearly, the problem was so bad that it didn't even need to be that good).
[EDIT] Also: accessing your email on devices you don't own/control.
I get email. I read them. I archive them. I only interact with each email for about 10s and then it's gone, usually forever. Very occasionally I need to search for something in the archive. I also need to send so I just need a text box to write in and somewhere to drop attachments.
What else is there that you need in a client?
Finding an attachment someone sent last week that you didn't have time to look at until now.
Finding a long set of instructions you sent to someone two years ago so you can forward it to someone else.
That they use to read your emails, harvest your data and advertise to you.
see https://notmuchmail.org/ your email archive just isn't that big
as for natural language processing, I'm not aware that Gmail does this for user search? maybe it does, but I haven't noticed more than some basic stemming. and given the choice (is not hidden), even most basic users prefer exact/stemmed keyword search over "cleverly" second-guessing returning noise results you didn't ask for.
also there's many non-proprietary search result sorting and filtering techniques that do a great (and predictable!) job, locally, without having to go all deeplearning about it.
remember that a lot of the sophisticated NLP analysis stuff Gmail does, is for the benefit of targeted advertising first and user experience second.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190
Plus labels and filters allow me to automatically "tag" messages based on sender/domain/wildcards/other variables
I don't have a huge amount of emails but I manage 3 Gmail accounts using a single client (with inbox delegation) and also older Ymail and Hotmail accounts as POP3.
1. Search was better in Opera 12 than in any email client I've ever used (Gmail included). That has never been surpassed.
2. Gmail used to have excellent search, until recently. Recently I've observed many very glaring bugs with it, where swathes of matching emails are completely omitted from search results. This is something that may have gone unnoticed if I'd not begun to use the search function to regularly recall emails I knew existed, but it's become a repeated, almost reliably testable phenomenon with my own account.
I switching to running my own e-mail server around 2013 and have had a much better experience using just Thunderbird and occasionally RoundCube.
+ 2+ minute wait for new emails to hit my inbox, + spinning wheel every time I load the inbox, and + oddly formatted html mail from coworkers.
Maybe those issues are to do with google's slow imap servers, but I finally realized no matter where the issues come from I need to get work done. That can't happen with the combination of gmail, large accounts, and any external client I know of.
And I have to say, after installing a keyboard plugin I can read email without using the mouse. Something I never got right with t-bird.
- it's very convenient for accounts you check only in one place
- it's infinitely more convenient than any browser-based interface besides GMail that I've seen so far
I'd be using a client for my personal mail too, if configuring Emacs to work with GMail wasn't such a pain.
Also, don't tell me that on your phone you check your e-mail through a browser!
You also reminded me of another e-mail annoyance - people sending PGP signatures in attachments make it nigh-impossible to search for actual attachments, as every conversation with those senders looks like it has one.
"X - Y of Z" (and not "X - Y of many") the keyword being many of course.
Your able to hover over the "X - Y of Z" and choose "Oldest" [1].
So essentially if data is indexed your able to.
I was not able to search any filter and apply this however on any Label I created I was able to do this.
So steps to find the oldest from amazon would probably have to be
1. Create filter+label that groups them all into one category. Wait for indexing to catch up should be fairly quickly since we are not talking petabytes of random data.
2. Choose the label on the left and on the top right hover over the "1-100 of 9999" and choose oldest.
Not the best work-a-round of course and makes sense why it's setup this way (Helps with optimization) however if a person sets up a lot of labels then they are already set up to do this feature.
[1] https://gsuitetips.com/tips/gmail/sort-email-by-oldest-first...
edit Also there is the method of using the search field parameters for example.
"Amazon.com before:2004/04/16" [2]
then you could more quickly go thru them (however if you didn't know your starting point this would prove to be tricky of course!)
Basic-html gmail, yes.
All my fav native email clients get bought and killed by larger companies.
I like to think of myself as being minimalist and flexible in some ways, but if I started a company tomorrow I could see myself springing for Outlook running the front end for a postfix/dovecot server just for the convenience.
I've found setting up complex filters to be easier to set up in Gmail. Gmail's search is also much faster and it's results more relevant with huge mailboxes.
Gmail also lets you create calendar events from keywords in messages, which Lightning didn't do last time I used it, iirc. I admittedly haven't used Lightning very much; I found that syncing Google Calendars in Thunderbird had a nasty tendency to lock up the app.
Exactly what work use cases have I been missing out on?
(or they're a bit clueless about how their work phone connects to some sort of IMAP host)
Interesting.
I don't use it all the time, but sometimes I want to read my email without digging out my phone.
Logging into the webmail separately honestly seems like a pain. Why do that when I can just fire up Postbox on my desktop and have all my mail right there?