Explain Gmail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients
2. Please consider avoiding Google (and Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple) as your email provider, due to their mass surveillance practices, both for commercial ad targeting and for US government political policing. There are several other reasonable webmail providers, if you really can't give up the web interface.
I use the mail client on iOS out of principle but still end up opening the gmail app when I actually need to find something.
A state actor will have less trouble breaking into a mail server I run, and I don’t really believe too much in the idea that other countries apart from the US are immune to police overreach.
Signed: someone who has multiple email addresses, has tried all the fancy alternatives (fastmail etc) and who desperately wants this stuff to work because having 3 web tabs to check email is annoying.
Only if they have a good reason to target you, personally.
But if we are talking about mass surveillance, attacking a large provider is incredibly *cheaper*: spend one million dollars on 0-days to gain access to one million mailboxes, or one billion to intercept submarine cables and backdoor CPUs and gain access to one billion mailboxes.
There is no way to attack somebody's personal, custom mailserver with a budget of $1.
I would actually make the opposite statement, i.e. generally, webmail clients are significantly inferior to desktop clients in most respects: Feature set, responsiveness, flexibility etc. And of course, being potentially somewhat secure, as opposed to guaranteed no-security with webmail.
As for search functionality - I'm not sure you're right, but I'll grant you that some webmail providers, like Google, provide speedy search.
I’m sure it’s something about my configurations but every time I mess around to figure it out it doesn’t work.
Generally my use of email is “look at stuff from right now” or “look at stuff from 6+ months ago”
(Here “wrong” means “does not find the email I am looking for”. Usually a failure mode of just not showing much of anything)
I have considered moving email accounts, but also don't have enough motivation for all that entails.
I have 2FA required on regular logins for example, which can be a Yubikey or authenticator app token. At the same time, I have app passwords, used by my emacs-based email setup. Mu4e gives me instant search-based access to my saved email, and pretty good security elsewhere. Is that an option?
Well, Google has your email, to read and use and pass on, so I'm not quite sure what this "advanced protection" can mean.
When I return back to my personal email using FastMail the difference is like night and day it loads fast and 99% of the time it works on the first try. I also occasionally use Outlook's webmail for work (as I work across different systems with some on Google and some on O365) and even Outlook webmail is generally faster than Gmail despite my main Outlook mailbox being much larger than my less-used Gmail mailboxes (although it is nowhere as fast as FastMail).
I remember the early days of Gmail -- it was a fantastic product in its heyday better than any other webmail client at the time. The quality has sadly dropped a huge amount especially in recent years to the point there are now viable alternatives. FastMail is one such alternative I have been very impressed with. Even Outlook's webmail is worth a look although the UX could do with some work.
I cannot understand all thr praise people give it, is it simply brand loyalty?
Everything about Gmail is very confusing to me; I have no love for Outlook (it's absolutely garbage) but in garbage rankings, Outlook is a bit more functional than Gmail is. Outlook has a more complete business eco-system vision I think than Gmail does, and there is a lot better integration with the other elements of Microsoft's ecosystem than Chrome has. For example, when I attach a Sharepoint/OneDrive doc to an email in Outlook, it offers to let me set the permissions for the recipients automatically. This doesn't make up for Sharepoint/OneDrive's awful permissions handling in general, but this element is convenient at least. (Again, I cannot stress how frustrating it is to even __see__ what permissions someone has for a Sharepoint/OneDrive document as regardless of your screen resolution/browser size, you're confined to a few centimeter width sized window, never mind that sometimes saving just outright refuses to work, and bulk-adding persons is even worse)
Gmail has awful design in many places; I don't like that a simple option like FWD is hidden behind the ... menu. I don't like that selecting an email from the list in gmail results in the menu buttons suddenly expanding. Even worse, the location of the reply button when the menu buttons are contracted is the same as the location of the "Mark as Spam" button when expanded; on browsers that aren't chrome, the display lag is enough that I can move my cursor far faster than the menu buttons expand and what __was__ the reply button location is now the "mark as spam" button location.
I don't like that it takes a good 5+ seconds to load the basic email list on a 100 Mbit connection. I don't like that logging into Gmail logs me into every other Google platform (e.g., YouTube) and I start getting spam about different channels or reminders to "engage" with various channels/social media. I don't like that I have to install a .dpkg for Mac to use Gchat video when other apps (e.g., Telegram, Skype, WhatsApp) are just a regular application that I can remove with drag/drop. I really don't like how "foreign" the Gmail/Google theming is with basically everything on MacOS and even on Android, or how few controls over basic UI functionality I get. (I really struggled to find in the Playstore how to monitor the progress of a download...)
Gmail and Google at large feels like an ecosystem that Google just expects everyone to buy into regardless of the platform/experience, and I truly cannot understand their intended way of handling the UI most of the time. The underlying methods of categorizing/indexing the information of course is fine, but actually interacting with it is frustrating for me compared to every Google product contemporary. As much as I dislike Outlook, I'd rather use it than Gmail. I'd rather use basically any chat program as opposed to GChat/Whatever it's called now (it's still really bad whatever the new product is called). Even Google itself I find myself fighting with Google's preferred results instead of what I'm actually wanting (without uBlock the first results are tons of ad spam that have nothing to do with the searches, and the first few results are usually some SEO'd result).
There is an "okay" experience with google if you go all in on it, but they certainly seem to bank on the idea that you'll do that in order to get access to Google results. The rest of the ecosystem is so clunky that it's really undesirable to use for me.
It is comical how long it takes to load on my internet connection. Has gotten better, but that is on my connection side.
My favorite crazy moment lately is just how long it takes to bring up the computer new window on a fresh page load.
It used to be great, mind. Not sure what I'm getting with the additional load times.
Moreover, when the developer in question demoed his work, the reaction from Brin (famously) was something akin to "there's 400msec delay, fix it". Which puts us clearly in the realm of the second scenario.