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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

Better webmail and calendars exist (I use one of them), but because of Google's control of the entire market, two thirds of users are still on Gmail. That's the monopoly effect: Better products don't win out when one company controls the playing field. And now Google's out to introduce their own proprietary email format to hurt other parties even more.

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Interesting. Their control of the market didn't seem to stop me from moving all of my Email out of Gmail recently. I just went and did it. I must have missed that screen where they say, "You can no longer continue exporting your E-mail. We control the playing field, so other services cannot win out!"

You are part of a tiny group of people that has the knowledge and motivation to do it, much of the population couldn't/wouldn't.

Maybe 20 years from now, this would be different with majority of the people being tech savvy (like the majority of people who can drive today).

Of course one can argue that it is the consumers' fault for not looking for better options...

Yeah, I think you addressed your own concern there. Why would a consumer who doesn't know how to export mail need something better than Gmail? I'm a power user, and I don't need anything but Gmail, so I can't fathom that there's some unserved email opportunity that consumers would love fulfilled if only they knew about Gmail competitors.

The stupidity of "the common user" you just referred to is not Google's fault or responsibility.

Maybe so, but the common user is what most users are and Google needs them to make their big money.

I'd like to hear what better webmail and calendar option you have, because I'm certainly not using Gmail because Google controls the market.

So far Gmail is by far the best email client/service that I've found.

I haven't found a better webmail or calendar than Google's, especially self-hosted. Could you reveal what service you're using?

I'm using FastMail, which isn't selfhosted. I have some high hopes for Mailpile though. FastMail's working on an open source standard called JMAP, which has seen some interest from a couple of open source mail projects, and would move labels from being a Gmail-proprietary thing to something openly supported and standardized. Sandstorm.io, where I host my documents, just stated a goal to bring their email support up to par: https://sandstorm.io/news/2018-02-19-http-rewrite-and-more

Email-based startups and open source projects don't seem to move very fast though, likely because due to the Gmail monopoly, they don't get a lot of support.

So neither of those supports multi-inboxes, labels based on complex filters or the ability to 'snooze' emails.

Also, they don't automatically extract information from a mail into my calendar (e.g. event/flight/...).

Can't see in which sense those are "better" than free gmail.

You can definitely automatically filter email into different folders as it comes in, and they support complex rules. You are specifically asking for weird nonstandard behaviors which cause more problems than they fix.

(For example, when I used Gmail, the "multiple inboxes" feature didn't work well with third party mail apps, because it isn't really multiple inboxes, it's just Gmail sorting the inbox on the fly. I ended up disabling them and adding custom rules into Gmail to sort them into proper folders.)

As the case is FastMail does actually have that feature, I just prefer to use actual rules and folders. ;)

Snooze is, from my understanding, an Inbox feature, not a Gmail feature, and I still fail to see any value. (But maybe as a non-Inbox user I just don't know?) You have read, unread, and pinned/starred functionality, how and why one would hide one's emails from oneself until a later point, I have no idea.

Extracting data from emails automatically is an antifeature, since it's privacy-invasive. I specifically pay FastMail for it not to do things like that to my mail!

But on the opposite end:

* FastMail's interface is faster and cleaner than Gmail's and contains no advertising.

* FastMail's email/calendar service is fully standards compliant, unlike the number of hacks required to interoperate with Gmail's proprietary nonsense. Just yesterday I was reading about this: http://blog.fruux.com/2014/10/16/google-carddav/

* FastMail gives me incredibly fine-grained control over how my mail is handled, including it's spam filtering.

* When I have an issue with FastMail, I can ask for help, and a real human (and one random time, literally the CEO) will respond, and assist me with my problem.

----

FWIW, Outlook.com has a pretty nice email client too, and their account management is a lot more mature than Google's (I can change my Microsoft account's email address, something Google remains incapable of to this day, somehow).

Gmail has been around for over a decade, it's the least common denominator now, most email services are at least as good as Gmail.

Mailpile is great. I use it as sort of a webmail for my private email server. But it's not even close to Gmail, and has no calendar, or note taking app (yes, I actually do use Keep).

I don't think FastMail can really compete with G Suite on anything except "not being the leviathan." Which is not nothing! But as a tool, it's just not as good. And Outlook which you mention in the comment below doesn't even have this.

Let's not underestimate Google here. They offer a full productivity suite, an excellent, tight integration with Android, plus Chrome sync for multiple profiles. They're tough competition.

I went looking for a replacement to escape Google, but I'd definitely disagree FastMail is "just not as good". On the contrary, it makes Gmail feel old and poorly maintained in comparison. It's better written software, before you get into the fact that you can get real human support for it.

  > Email-based startups and open source
  > projects don't seem to move very fast
  > though, likely because due to the
  > Gmail monopoly, they don't get a
  > lot of support.

A great big {{citation needed}} as to your claim of a cause-and-effect relationship between these two statements.

A bit off-topic, but what proper calendar alternatives exist? Although I don't really believe any competition for email exists (though I'd love to be proven wrong with an alternative that can do snoozing), I can't really believe that no such alternative for calendar exists.

So, what are those better webmailers?

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