Backsliding blogger dumps Mail.app for Gmail
David Chartier, über-blogger at TUAW, has decided to ditch Mail.app 
for Gmail as his primary e-mail client.
In a post announcing the change, he carefully weighs up the pros and cons of each, before concluding that Mail’s troublesome IMAP support and “outdated UI” are too much trouble:
I’ve finally settled on a decision, and by golly I plan on sticking to it. Gmail, officially, is my main email client. I will live and work most of the time in this most spectacular of web-based email apps.
Mail.app still earns a place in his toolbox as a backup client for those rare occasions when he needs “ninja-grade emailing super-powers”.
He joins a growing list of people who are abandoning desktop-based e-mail clients for Gmail.
Tags: Apple Mail, GMAIL, imap, mail.app, switchingRelated posts
June 13th, 2006 at 11:43 pm
I see. Apparently, there is a lot of people that don’t take trains, airplanes or - especially - don’t have problems in exposing their business conversations to external parties. Interesting.
June 14th, 2006 at 12:24 am
Hi
I’ll switch completely to thunderbird, as soon as the official releas contains the apple addressbook patch.
Greetings from switzerland
June 14th, 2006 at 1:17 am
the bloke is a cock. gMail is rubbish!!
June 14th, 2006 at 1:21 am
No, he’s not. He’s a good bloke.
And, even if he wasn’t, we usually aim for a more elevated tone here.
June 14th, 2006 at 1:22 am
I have big problems to exchange mail with somebody who uses a gmail account
for private and business conversations. I think gmail users should have a disclaimer in their mail sig that point out that the conversation ist not private.
Yes I know about pgp and the rest, but this is no option yet.
Personaly I do use a my gmail account only for website registrations and the like.
June 14th, 2006 at 1:49 am
@Hnz: I use GPG for the real important/private stuff, and I’v got an archive most of my Mails on gmail. My question is, what’s the difference of a random hoster and gmail? Do you think the sysadmin of your hoster xy is less able to take a look into your mail than gmail is? I don’t see a big difference between hosting the email on a regular hoster service or at gmail.
June 14th, 2006 at 1:52 am
I find the praise for GMail’s UI a little mystifying. It has an intriguing concept, but its execution is flawed in so many ways. Because of the linear message view, it’s hard to read mail threads that branch off into two separate threads of discussion. Likewise, when GMail fails to recognize that a new piece of mail is part of a previous discussion thread (usually because the subject or something else has changed), there’s no way to tell GMail to merge it into the existing discussion thread. It’s time consuming to glance through a large number of new messages, because you have to drop down to thread view for every thread that contains more than one new message. There’s no way to customize the spam filter except by adding someone to your address book, but that doesn’t work for new discussion participants, email discussion lists with arbitrary participants, etc. When you download multiple attachments they get stuffed together in a Zip file. I just find the UI has too many shortcomings for actual use. The GMail view would be a nice add-on view to an existing mail package though.
June 14th, 2006 at 2:50 am
I use GMail only for correspondence that I would be willing to post to a public BB. The difference between my regular e-mail, sitting on a server, and GMail is that with GMail your mail content is parsed and indexed and stored (where, by who, for how long?). It is Total Information Awareness, privately held by Google. With regular e-mail a person has certain expectations of privacy; with GMail you do not. GMail’s method of labeling and archiving is great. I would pay to use their service if they offered it without the TIA feature set…
June 14th, 2006 at 3:01 am
I’m with Jonas. Why are people more paranoid about gmail than any other service? Do you refuse to communicate with Yahoo mail users, or SBC users?
Unless you run your own mail server, it seems to me that there is some theoretical risk. I don’t see how gmail is any more risky than theh email provided by my ISP.
June 14th, 2006 at 3:02 am
I agree with artMonster.
And a Sysadmin reading my mails gets fired, and he hardly would put advertisement in my mail.
The only alternativ to protect yourself against these snoopers is to use gpg, which is unfortunally not yet wide spread.
June 14th, 2006 at 3:08 am
@bobinnv
the diff is that Google says it will index your mails and use that information. Others dont and if they do it is not legal.
June 14th, 2006 at 3:57 am
Let’s take privacy out the Gmail vs. Local mail client for a second. (I dumped Gmail precisely because of the privacy concerns. I run my own email via a third party ISP.)
Problems with gmail:
1- They want my contacts. This is not a privacy concern, those bozos want me to spend my time uploading them. Forget it. Gmail does not sync with my phone.
2- I need an internet connection. Slow internet connections are wose than not having an internet connection with things like gmail.
3- Logging into Gmail logs me into everything else that google uses. For example, I don’t want customized news just because I logged into gmail.
4- 100 threads per page. Sorry, I need more.
5- Cannot upload old emails. I have email dating back to 1996. Local mail clients are capable of importing those emails that I want. I used to keep them in folders separated by month. Then I collapsed them into years. Then I collapsed them into two archives of sent and recieved.
6- Bad threading. Just because I hijacked a thread to pull off some emails from the message does not mean that it is part of that email thread. A previous poster covered this better. No threading is better than bad threading.
Gmail is not the cat’s meow. Add privacy concerns to the mix and its the worst. Other ISPs do not retain your email information. Up till now it wasn’t worth it. With the FCC saying that they have to in case of litigation you know that free email is on its last legs.
Excuse my speeling, I am using windows which has no support for spell checking in FireFox (don’t tell me about any plugins please, I like saying this).
June 14th, 2006 at 4:12 am
ashah2 -
I can certainly understand (but not agree with) your UI complaints. To each his own - for instance, I think Gmail handles threading way better than Mail does. This thread started because someone likes Gmail more than Mail, and based on just the UI, that is certainly a debatable point.
But I still don’t understand the “privacy concerns”. I’m not sure why you don’t think other ISPs do not retain your ‘emai information’ - how does Charter Communications allow me to access my email on the web without retaining anything? Don’t they do backups? Don’t they scan every incoming email for their spam filters?
June 14th, 2006 at 6:49 am
bobinnv, I think the fundamental difference is that (in theory) Charter Communications does not read and retain a separate database of what you write. Google does. That is what you allow them to do. As long as everybody knows the rules, no problem. The rest is just UI preferences.
June 14th, 2006 at 6:50 am
I do apologize for breaking back into privacy at the end of my previous post. I was trying to stay on topic. :) I was merely pointing out that the government just recently told ISPs that they will have to start saving all correspondence (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/01/feds_need_ip_data/).
[OT] The crux of my argument will always boil down to cost. Only Google has the infrastructure to harness your data as a result you don’t know what they are doing with it. Everyone else has no real monetary gain to retain or even try to sift through your information.
I didn’t say Mail.app’s threading was better than Gmail’s threading. Gmail’s threading is pretty darn good, but like spam filtering it doesn’t work all the time. Unlike spam fiitering, I cannot fix the mistake. This inability to correct mistakes thwarts Gmail’s superior threading, and that is intolerable.
June 14th, 2006 at 7:48 am
The reality is all ISPs who operate email servers maintain complete backups of email traffic. The real risk of privacy invasion is not at the corporate policy level — it’s at the level of individual rogue employees/sysadmins who may decide to supplement their incomes by engaging in unethical behavior with customer data. I don’t see any difference between Google and other ISPs in this regard. Indeed, Google seems to attract a higher calibre of individual employee and thus may be less likely to have employees prone to abusing the database, or, because of their size, may maintain better data auditing.
If privacy is a genuine concern for a person, as opposed to a knee-jerk stance against a single company, the only solution is to operate your own email server. Even then, we’ve seen that three quarters of Internet backbone providers in the US are willing to allow traffic monitoring by government officials without a court order, so encryption is worth considering for truly sensitive information.
June 14th, 2006 at 4:32 pm
in response to jonas’ query:
it’s not that they *can*, it’s that they *do*. Each email in gmail IS processed for keywords, to macth against advertising, as well as make calendar recommendations etc.
One can argue that google isn’t doing anything “bad” with your email, and that the advertising is an acceptable cost to most for a pretty good service.
But being wary of a corporation who’s bottom line is their bottom line and the wallets of their investors, is not paranoia, it is merely awareness.
We all have the right to make these decisions (to use or not); but we also have the responsibility to be informed and vigilant.
cost + risk + value. weigh them for your own particular situation and need.
June 14th, 2006 at 10:57 pm
Having changed academic institutions a few times recently gmail is useful to me as a stable address with plenty of space & free POP. At work I use the gmail interface & at home I download to Mail. Mail is a blessed relief after the gmail interface, which I now detest. The trouble is you /have/ view it organized in ‘conversations’, which undermines the simple to-do functionality of the inbox. After reading a non-urgent email it might sit for a while before I reply; in Mail I can see it, in gmail it’ll get lost somewhere in a conversation. And an entire conversation gets promoted to the top of the list when a new message comes in. So the result is I no longer have a simple way to see what I need to reply to, organized by the recency of the message. I’m finding that when I’m using Mail important messages ‘pop out’ that I’ve overlooked or forgotten about in gmail.
The privacy issue bothers me more & more, seeing the direction Google is heading, their sheer scale, and the possibility of getting caught by mistake in a US gov electronic dragnet. No chance I’ll be using gdrive, and I’ll abandon gmail when I get a long-term institutional address. In 2020 Google will be trying to insert text messages into my dreams.
June 15th, 2006 at 12:06 am
GMail is great. If only they allowed you to toggle between conversation and chronological mode, I’d use it as my primary client too. Sometimes you just need to see the flow of incoming messages. The conversation mode requires far too much thinking, because even though you can see that a conversation has floated to the top of the list, the way Google shows the list of names attached to the conversation doesn’t make obvious who the latest message is from. Besides, even if it is somehow detectable, it’s clearly not obvious as I haven’t been able to figure it out (nor do I want to have to figure it out when glancing at a list of email.)
Also, I recently filled up my Gmail account, and it is SERIOUSLY difficult to clear out email to make space. With (I presume) many Gmail accounts now reaching “maturity”, Google urgently needs to provide an option to drop old email off the back of the database to make room for new stuff. Or provide much more robust searching and mass deletion options.
June 15th, 2006 at 3:45 pm
Gmail is the mainstream prototype for “folderless” mail management, a cool concept unfortunately crippled by limited tag support and other UI weaknesses (some mentioned in comments here).
I’d like to see explicit examples of people efficiently using it to manage high volumes of mail with a broad content diversity over long periods of time. It certainly doesn’t fit that role based on my own experience.
January 27th, 2007 at 5:12 am
these google conspiracy theorists are smoking too much crack,
gmail is one of the best (barnone),
re: privacy
its just as true that any ISP can snoop your email as google, you are no more safer with an ISP then you are with google so arguing that gmail is unsafe well its just not true,
i think its funny these people believe they are safer on an ISP ha ha, these same people probablly think their cellphone text messages and conversations are more secure with one company vs another
geez people wake up,