Good questions! For these reasons and others, such as the lack of any concept of mail bouncing and the inability to even edit headers, I don’t regard Gmail as being an email client. Instead, I think of it as a kind of toy program that was designed to demonstrate what could be done with javascript, and it was an impressive demonstration when it came out.

I’ve had discussions with various groups that I’ve worked with where some people get the idea to move to Slack or some other platform, because email is not working well enough. When I ask them what the problem is with email, they start describing the shortcomings of...Gmail. They actually have no problem with email, they’ve just never used an email program.