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Comment by emu | Hacker News Reader

This article is link-bait, but I'll bite.

Simply put, Gmail provides a compelling user experience:

* fast and accurate search. This is key, and I don't know of a single desktop email client that even comes close to providing a decent search feature. Decent here means "answer full-text queries accurately within a second or so". I didn't realize how useful this was until switching to Gmail; now I have it, I can't switch back. I don't even bother organizing my email more than a minimal amount any more, I just search for things when I need them.

* remote access is also key. I regularly access the internet from at least 4 different devices, on at least 3 different operating systems. Sometimes I do so while traveling. Gmail makes this convenient --- all I need is a web browser. IMAP need not apply --- I found IMAP appallingly slow last time I tried it.

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My experience is the polar opposite. I have to rely on a native client to search because GMail search is so bad. It hasn't been that fast for a while -- waiting 30+s for a search is pretty routine nowadays. But worse, it's never really handled stemming well -- it has to be an exact word match, even for singular vs plural. And the number of false positives I get usually doesn't even make it worthwhile. I had resorted to deleting mail rather than archiving it, but that only helped marginally.

Having said that, I rely on too many marketplace apps now to make switching a reasonable alternative. So, I make do with native clients.

30s searches....I've gotta ask, how many gigabytes of email do you have? I've got about 3 and mine come back in less than a second.

One account has 2.5 GB, another has 700 MB. I'm on a lot of mailing lists and get a lot of transactional email. I just timed switching a label and that took 4s on the smaller account. This is in Chrome with SPDY enabled, too, so I doubt it's client transport.

I should probably note that it tends to be variable with the time of day. That's not unexpected, but still kinda sucks.

I have almost 2.5 GB's and also have zero problems with GMail's default search. Comes back in less than a second.

Maybe it's number of messages vs size of store. Or perhaps because a large percentage are similar in structure (google groups, monit alerts, etc.), they cause indexing to perform poorly. Dunno. But I wish I had < 1s searches.

> This is key, and I don't know of a single desktop email client that even comes close to providing a decent search feature.

I used to use Opera M2 built-in client and think it's even faster than Gmail web UI and very accurate.

I use Rackspace Email, over IMAP on the desktop, IMAP on my phone, and webmail when on someone else's computer. It's never slow in any way. When I sign up for things, I hear the ding of the confirmation e-mail within 2-3 seconds of submitting the form -- fast as push mail.

It's using IMAP IDLE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAP_IDLE), which is push email.

> This article is link-bait

You should probably check out who Harald Welte is and what he does before making such accusations. I don't agree with him here, but "link bait" this is not.

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