The Case Against Gmail 435
stry_cat writes "Ed Bot makes the case against Gmail: 'Gmail was a breath of fresh air when it debuted. But this onetime alternative is showing signs that it's past its prime, especially if you want to use the service with a third-party client. That's the way Google wants it, which is why I've given up on Gmail after almost a decade.' Personally, I've always thought it odd that no other email provider ever adopted Gmails "search not sort" mentality. I've been a Gmail user since you needed an invitation to get an account. However Gmail has been steadily moving towards a more traditional email experience. Plus there's the iGoogle disaster that got me looking into alternatives to everything Google."
So why *don't* other mail readers use labels? (Score:5, Insightful)
What? (Score:4, Insightful)
one more thing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
you forgot the US Government spying. until our IT giants tell the US government that they are leaving the united states if they don't stop, there is no reason to continue to freely use their service when an alternative is available.
Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at (Score:5, Insightful)
Ed Bott has been sucking the Microsoft tit for years and he loves it.
I've been using Gmail since the old days when you had to have an invitation, and I've always used a third party email client because Gmail's web-based interface is stupid and pointless. Ed Bott is an idiot and I don't understand how he ever got a job writing for any computer/tech related magazine or website.
iGoogle Disaster was overblown (Score:4, Insightful)
I knew exactly one person who used it, it simply wasn't a popular feature, even if it was the homepage on some Gateway PCs.
Sadly, many people don't realize that just because a web feature exists and works now, doesn't mean that it can be considered permanent. Auditing for security, proper functioning in the latest browsers, and other general maintenance still cost money. Google at least gives some notice, not all providers can do so.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Despite Google's lofty rhetoric about open standards, the Gmail protocols are undocumented and not available for licensing. Apps can perform a limited set of interactions with Gmail via its API, but if you want to build a communications app that connects directly to Gmail, you have to use either IMAP or (shudder) POP. Either way, you get a severely compromised experience. And neither configuration gives you access to calendars and contacts.
I've never tried to build yet another e-mail program using Gmail, but there are at least dozens out there for iOS and android, the ones I've used seem to work just great, so I'm inclined to think this is an overstatement.
Also
The biggest problem with getting Gmail to work with third-party clients is that it doesn't use the same filing system they do.
I'm guessing you can actually configure gmail to work that way. I'm also skeptical that there aren't clients out there that work with one of the most popular e-mail services out there. Specifically because I use some of them and they do actually work fine.
He tries to generalize it, but it seems like he's talking about outlook specifically not working with gmail. Maybe he should try not using outlook? I dunno. Maybe that's just me. I hate outlook, but my work seems to love it. I have to forward my work e-mail to a gmail account to use it on anything besides outlook.
Why Is This News? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am serious. Why does /. consider an article by a Microsoft shill bashing Google and recommending Microsoft's product to be worthy of our time?
Thank you in advance for any serious answers.
Thunderbird reads Gmail just fine . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're worried about privacy: I pay for Verizon FIOS. That includes email. I *pay* for this, it's *mine*, they're not supposed to be making money off it . . . except I know from other evidence that they are scanning the email just like Google does, especially when I'm looking at it with the webmail interface rather than Thunderbird. So I don't think you can trust paid services either. And I'll bet dollars to donuts that if you run your own server, someone is scanning things to the SMTP port. If you don't control the wires end-to-end, then you don't have control, period.
For the ultra-cool folks who ask "who uses a client" and "who uses email anymore" . . . what are you doing reading such an ancient site as Slashdot? Go read something that nobody else knows about yet, and let us dinosaurs roam in peace.
it's the best around (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:iGoogle Disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it's totally bullshit that you would want to have a single page with all your email, news, weather, and everything else, launching from the start of your browser session. It's idiocy only pursued by the elderly to want to look at one page to get instantly up to date on everything.
I'm sorry that iGoogle was your singularity.
Re:who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
People still use email for anything other than verifying forum accounts and retrieving forgotten passwords? There are so many faster and easier ways to communicate
That's possibly generational. I don't like to send SMSes because of the character limit and the idea that it's at least nominally tied to one device. I don't use any social networking services because I've actually read their terms of service. I think phone conversations are intrusive and damaging to my concentration, so I prefer not to talk on the phone, and many slow typists I know dislike any sort of realtime IM system.
Most of the people I know who dislike E-mail don't like the "formality" of having to write complete sentences or are paranoid about the possibility of some kind of record being kept of the exchange, but to me it's clearly the best general-purpose communication tool available most of the time. The haters tend to be young and want to conduct as much communication as possible through either Facebook or SMS.
I don't know if that's you or not, but I will say that E-mail isn't going away any time soon regardless of your wishes to the contrary.
Re:Ed Bott is a clueless dolt (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it's stupid. If you have to constantly search for things it means you are a lazy disorganized slob. The number of times I've had to search for an email can be counted on one hand because I have things organized so that I know where they are.
Why should I waste time manually organizing my e-mails when I can just search for them when I want to read them later? Computers exist to do menial work for me, so I don't have to do it myself.
Re:iGoogle Disaster (Score:4, Insightful)
Google is being helpful in training/educating us not to rely on their free products for anything important.
Google DeskTop search? Downloads were disabled with only a days warning. No really adequate replacement has really come forward since (I would guess Recoll is the best of the lot). The "rationale" offered seems to be white-wash for a decision to "encourage" us to store our data in their cloud.
Then iGoogle. Is so expensive for Google to run iGoogle servers? Really?
All the other services they have turned off are perhaps less significant due to smaller user bases, but they teach their lessons to users also.
Before becoming dependent on a Google service, you need to keep a back-out strategy in your pocket.
Re:one more thing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:iGoogle Disaster (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe, but also a bit fallacious. There's a trend today towards removing long running 'advanced' functionality in order to give the appearance of simplicity.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand the problem either. Gmail works fine with any IMAP client I care to configure. IMAP itself has some weirdness around how clients interact with various folders, but that's not Gmail's fault.
Yes they are, they decided to implement their IMAP support in a non-standard way.
Also, plenty of other issues ARE their fault [google.com].
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
Google doesn't support IMAP push. Neat, huh?
Re:So why *don't* other mail readers use labels? (Score:5, Insightful)
A better question is why Google is using IMAP folders as labels instead of using IMAP labels as labels.
Re:Search is Google's answer to everything. (Score:4, Insightful)
"I don't have to "search" for Excel on my PC, I know that if I click down here, then up and over here, I see the little [X~] icon. I don't open the search bar and type Excel. And I never open the search bar and type Excel.
I rarely use Excel, definitely not enough to commit its location in menus to memory. But I can type winkey+e+x+enter in a fraction of the time it takes for you to "click down here, then up and over here" through menus. I'd say using search to launch applications is the right way to do it -- one of the few additions I think they nailed in Vista.
Re:iGoogle Disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. His slant can easily be determined from his comments about using calendars in Outlook: he complains that Outlook can only open gmail calendars in read-only mode. But this appears to be a limitation of Outlook -- my Thunderbird client (with the appropriate calendar plugins) can update gmail's calendar, so why can't Outlook?
He then parrots the "scroogled" talking points.
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't understand the problem either. Gmail works fine with any IMAP client I care to configure. IMAP itself has some weirdness around how clients interact with various folders, but that's not Gmail's fault.
Well, yes, it is Gmail's fault.
Gmail doesn't really have Folders, because its just a mail heap with pointers (labels) to simulate folders.
So if Gmail has a non-standard implementation, its up to them to go the extra mile to make it work with Imap.
Their current implementation is needlessly complex, to the point that anyone actually using much more than the default Inbox (a shifting target of late) has to have a pretty good understanding of both the folder concept AND the label concept to get things to work right.
Re:Add Mail Recall as a feature (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately that functionality requires support from the recipient's systems. My mail server doesn't understand the concept of a recall notice, it's just another message in my mailbox. My client doesn't understand them either, so I just see a strange message that does nothing. And frankly I like it that way. I don't want someone else pulling things out of my mailbox, I want a nice clear unaltered record of what was sent to me when. I don't ever want to be in a situation where someone can show me a copy of a message that was clearly sent to me that I had no clue about because I never saw it in my inbox and I have no record of it and no way to prove I didn't receive it.
"more traditional email experience" (Score:5, Insightful)
Hardly. Every time they change the UI it feels less like email, and more like a strange conglomeration of email, social media, and instant messaging, where email always loses importance. I personally find the whack-a-mole buttons annoying as hell, especially since the one I use second most ("mark as read") is buried under "More".
And I'm sure anyone here who has tried to deal with Gmail as an IMAP server has yanked out at least one fistful of their own hair.
Google have turned DO NO EVIL into an imperative (Score:1, Insightful)
So this guy may be a slimeball by vote. I believe you.
But Google certainly cannot even themselves project themselves as DO NO EVIL
anymore. Their whole strive towards non-anonimity is all at the least playing into
the hands of the NSA.
And from that we may (Chomsky anyone?) conclude that it is INTENDED with that
purpose in mind. <Profanity here>
Re:Full Disclosure (Score:5, Insightful)
It's an opinion piece, not full of fact and research. There's nothing to refute, unless you have a mind reading machine to see if he's expressing his true opinions.
Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown (Score:4, Insightful)
Nonsense. If the people at ighome.com and netvibes.com and protopage.com igoogleportal.com can figure it out, I'm pretty sure someone at Google can figure out how iGoogle works.
Unfortunately, none of those alternatives are nearly as well-designed or refined. I'm gonna miss it. I had my RSS reader, my inbox, my weather, calendar, phases of the moon, task list and XKCD, plus a bunch of bookmarks all on one portal page. It was what I saw when I started a browser and it has worked perfectly for me for years. I'm pissed enough about Google dropping it that I've changed my search engine and rooted my Nexus 7.
I really don't care if I'm just one of a very few who rely on iGoogle. I'm just not gonna support a company that takes away a product I like a lot and would have happily paid a few bucks a month for. Fuck Google.
But at least it's a reminder that you can't get too dependent on these big corporations, because it gives them the power to fuck with you if they so desire.
Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown (Score:5, Insightful)
t wasn't worth the time to make it monetize-able.
I think they are making a fundemental mistake here.
There a quite a lot of services brutlly cut because they weren't profitable enough. Sounds sensible.
Big problem though is that it raises huge doubts about whether it's ever worth investing time in a new service. Since they are so keen on cutting, I'm not going to expand my usage of services beyond what I currently use, because basically I don't trust them to keep it up and running.
Cutting niche services hampers the abilitiy to make non-niche ones.
Re:iGoogle Disaster was overblown (Score:5, Insightful)
The insistence on using real names was what turned me completely off on G+
It was an obvious attempt to monetize my information to the point that they were getting more out of it than I would. Heck, Facebook while basically a cesspool at least uses "enticement" to get the information instead of "forced". While they gather what they can, they don't force me to participate. (I have massive ad-block capabilities so I don't worry about Facebook much.
That, and Google hooked it up with Youtube, forever linking what you watch and what you post with your real name, you CANNOT dissasociate them once Google has done that. And now you've got a company handing over your real name to the company that decides to have a copyright shit fit over the background music that happened to be playing on the radio while I filmed my cat getting it's head stuck in a watermelon and uploaded it to Youtube. G+ is downright DANGEROUS to privacy if you care about that.
I don't need that shit in my life, and if Google insists on it, I don't need Google in my life either.