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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

I heard that the gmail client was much better than the android general mail client. How do you feel about it?

(btw mail for iOS is not a very good mail client either, though it looks pretty nice and has been improved a bit in iOS4)

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The GMail client is OK but it's lacking in the feature department. No option for a 2-3 line preview of the message body, when composing a message you can't pick contacts from your GMail contacts or local address book -- you have to type in the addresses each time, as far as I can tell it doesn't support copy & paste.

No multiline is a fair point. Message composition auto-fills the recipient when you start typing - I can get to my intended recipient in 1-2 taps, usually. I prefer it that way, though I can see how others might now. You can, though, just tap a contact's email to start a new email to them. It certainly does support copy-paste, though. I'm on 2.2, so that may be part of it, perhaps?

Every input field supports "select all", cut, copy & paste at least since 1.5.

Doesn't work on 2.1 Seems to be a known issue:

http://bit.ly/bQUdvU

The mail application on Android feels very clunky, but I think the gmail application on both Android and iPhone are pretty comparable in terms of features/flow.

That's true. Hopefully I have only gmail account that I use frequently, I also have me/mac.com one, but I rarely use it.

Google shines in the web also with gmail.com, while somehow Mac's me.com feels slow, also their Mail client is not that good either, but the rest of the Apps are top-notch.

And Mail for iPhone rocks! Too bad I don't use my iPhone as phone, just for developing (T-Mobile customer with G1).

The general client doesn't do search of any kind, not with IMAP at least. Pretty sad for the number one search company in the world.

A huge issue with the gmail client is that you cant send-mail-as. I have my school account hooked up to gmail using my schools SMTP server but I cant't send mail as that email address from the phone.

If any Google engineers are reading this. Please fix this. This is a huge issue.

Btw this double post wasn't intentional.

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