Comment by alberth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alberth | Hacker News Reader

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> It is pity, that Google Mail is «good enough» and it killed development of good desktop e-mail clients.

You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the time.

It had auto-complete for who you wanted to email (prior you had to manually type their email address).

It came with an eye watering amount of storage (1 GB).

Worked from any computer (when POP was common and downloaded the emails locally to that desktop computer).

And more.

So it wasn’t so much that Gmail is “good enough”. It was more like desktop clients saw how much better Gmail was and didn’t think they could compete - also given that Google provided the hosting as well which allowed for tighter integration - something a desktop app alone could ever do.

Note: I'm not saying I think Gmail is a great experience. For web, I personally really enjoy Fastmail and for desktop - I surprisingly have grown to like Outlook. What I am saying is that when Gmail was launched, it took a lot of wind out of the sails of desktop mail app creators.

> You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the time.

It was not better for me than old FIDONet GoldEd 2.8x! It didn't (and doesn't) support proper threads, it supports effectively only top-quoting, it didn't (and doesn't) understand mailing lists in any way, it didn't support forward-as-attachment in both ways (now it supports it, though). Its filtering is still much more cumbersome than even Thunderbird one, not to say Sieve, and can be done only from web, but not from Android client. It doesn't support any crypto natively, both PGP or S/MIME.

Their are all features which I'm using daily (maybe, crypto is not daily, but still use sometimes).

Only good thing is labels, which is more flexible than tree folder structure. And, yes, full text search, obviously, as it is Google product.

As far as I remember, Thunderbird was not much worse than it is now, and it is supports most of this (though, quoting was and still is very weak, problem solved in FIDONet in 1990s!).

To be honest, I don't remember what was situation with address book and address autocompletion from it in Thundrbird before GMail, maybe there was none (but I will surprised, as, again, it worked in old TUI-based FIDONet client for DOS and OS/2), but this feature is trivial to implement in desktop app, and it could use LDAP or another centralized directory, not only addresses collected from your mail.

It was better than any web-mail, for sure, but better than desktop client? It is debatable.

1GB of storage is question of hosting, not client.

Update: Add to it modern gmail hate to self-hosting mail domains, and I could say that Google kills email as federated, free, non-vendor-dependent system. It is not surprise to me, of course, but still.

How do you do Gmail style threading view in thunderbird ? They changed the game wrt email display and 20 years later I still don’t know how to get thunderbird to do it.

Gmail:

- see all email bodies for a single conversation in one long list , like a DM in a messenger, with smart hiding of quoted text so you only see new content

- in your inbox / archive view, mix both sent and incoming emails in such conversations, so I don’t have to toggle between Sent and INBOX or Archive

I would be happy with just one of these two but I genuinely can’t hack it.

I would personally go as far as to say: any email client which doesn’t do this, is wrong.

> How do you do Gmail style threading view in thunderbird ? They changed the game wrt email display and 20 years later I still don’t know how to get thunderbird to do it.

I hate it. It hides texts, and I lost answers in this view more often than I want to admit. If it is not ping-pong conversation (I wrote you, you answer, I answer at your last answer, etc), but discussion between 3+ people where different people answer to different messages, gmail view is total mess when you cannot understand who answer to what. As I said, it doesn't support threads, only messenger-like conversations.

Any e-mail client which doesn't support tree view for threads is wrong.

You can put answers to same folder that message your answer in (any?) sane e-mail client, Thunderbird is not exclusion.

Update:

> smart hiding of quoted text so you only see new content

I've missed text hidden by mistake due to some formatting quirks more than once. It is solution in search of problem: proper quoting doesn't need any magic.

> How do you do Gmail style threading view in thunderbird ?

I used an extension once but it broke at some point.

> - see all email bodies for a single conversation in one long list , like a DM in a messenger, with smart hiding of quoted text so you only see new content

Or not so smart hiding of "repeated" content like say an image with a different URL but hey the rest of the <img> tag is the same so close enough for Gmail.

Context menu > Show message in conversation

You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the time.

There was never a time when GMail was better than plain old Outlook, but this is coming from someone to whom IMAP has always seemed like a really terrible solution in search of a nonexistent problem. My email database is important to me, and worth managing locally, as this thread more than adequately demonstrates.

Boss at the time: "You should quit using that old POP3 crap, and switch to IMAP. It's awesome." Boss a half-dozen times over the next few years: "Hey, can you forward me a copy of that email we got from XYZ a couple of years ago?"

I don’t see how IMAP would prevent you from having old emails

If you're going to keep them all locally anyway, what's the point of IMAP?

(Admittedly my judgement was formed at a time when one user, one device was the rule. I suppose if mobile access to email is important, there's a good argument for keeping the data server-side. I solve that problem with VNC.)

I’m not going to keep all of them locally, but that doesn’t mean I lose access to any of them. I can instantly access all my emails from 20 years ago.

As you mentioned I do access my email from several different devices, and each one having a different subset of my emails would be absolute hell.

I’m curious, do you log onto your computer from your smartphone in order to access your email?

I’m curious, do you log onto your computer from your smartphone in order to access your email?

Usually. If I'm going to be gone for more than a few days, though, I'll shut down the main PC and run Outlook from my laptop, which is set up to leave the messages on the POP3 server so they'll get copied into my master .PST file when I get back.

20 years means that either you maintain your own IMAP server and do a good job of it, or someone else does. In my previous company, there was always some reason why people couldn't put their hands on older emails. Meanwhile, my current .PST file goes back to 2007.

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