When Google Mail was invite only, it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be. Fast, forward thinking in the way mails were presented. Then it became a monstrosity that I can no longer recommend to anyone.
Suddenly Google Inbox came along. Fast, simple, focused packed with useful new features like mail grouping and content extraction. And it was killed off after roughly two years without any of the features being migrated to another product.
It seems like Google became unable to innovate in the basic services they once revolutionized.
And any hands for Google Reader? I don't think any other tool has had that level of impact on my content consumption, prior or since. It was everything it needed to be and not anything more. RIP.
Then I went thru and tried all the competitors, new and old.
Quickly a few rose over what GR ever was and of them I settled with Inoreader - been a happy, paying customer ever since.
GR was holding down the evolution of feed readers by keeping theirs free. That was what, 5 million users not paying anybody for the service? When it was gone, things started moving forward again, fast. So actually, it's good that they closed GR.
Reeder on Mac and iOS is good, been using it for years. You used to need a third party service like Feedly to sync across devices but the latest version has iCloud syncing which is pretty handy.
I never used Google Reader, but did use other RSS, and I stopped years ago - not because RSS doesn't still work great, it does. But because so much of the content I used to consume with it is gone now. I used to follow a few dozen blogs that got updated regularly, and had RSS feeds. Now almost all those blogs are dead, migrated to Substack or Twitter, or post so infrequently that it's not worth a subscription.
A decade ago, the web browser felt like an endless source of amazing content, and an RSS feed was a great way to keep track of a lot of it at once. Today, I feel like there's still great content, but it's in Twitter feeds and newsletters, and my browser is for accessing webapps and storefronts. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong content or just don't know where to go to find the good stuff anymore, but somehow the end of Google Reader was prophetic, and whether that was a self-fulfilling prophecy or not is up to each of us to decide.
Weird for me to see all the love for Inbox in a thread about bloated webapps. I liked the Inbox UI a lot, but until it was spun down, I had an issue where each Inbox tab would eventually bloat up to 2-3 GBs. Considering I'd have 3 of those open, one for each of my Gmail accts, it quickly became something I couldn't use on my laptop (unless I refreshed each tab every couple hours).
> it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be
you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google.
Google has relied on their reputation in search to carry most of their products since the early 2000s, right up until Google Plus when things started to fall apart for them and people started to realize that Google is not the invincible Superman they pretended to be. Their "don't be evil" motto was a lie and not everything they touched turned to gold. In fact, it was almost always the opposite of that.
> you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google.
It also introduced, and led to the broad adoption of, a few really nice features: truly effective spam filtering, conversation threading that actually works, and tags instead of folders (e.g. a message can have more than one tag, but it can only be in one folder).
At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it.
Gmail's "threading" is probably its worst sin (beating out its weird IMAP interface). When I started using Gmail, my other mail client was mutt, but every other client at the time showed replies to email threads properly as a tree.
As an aside, you could argue that email conversations should look like a DAG (since you could totally quote multiple emails and have multiple In-Reply-To headers, why not) but I'm not aware of any clients that did that.
Gmail went a third way, completely linearizing a thread into a "conversation". This view makes it harder to have discourse over email: if you want to make sure to split a conversation and have both forks get addressed, you have to change the subject line to un-thread replies to your message.
I don't recall it being that much better than the competitors. And even today it seems like a coin toss as to whether an obviously spam email lands in the spam folder or not. Not to mention the seemingly shady backroom deals companies like Sendgrid, SES, etc. are making to ensure their emails get delivered to the inbox. That seems like an area ripe for corruption.
> At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it.
Anecdotal, but I very much preferred Thunderbird to Gmail, and was using it up until 2010 or so. Nowadays I use K-9 Mail (Android) where I need to and try to avoid the disaster that is modern email as much as possible.
It also introduced, and led to the broad adoption of, a few really nice features: truly effective spam filtering
Google Mail's spam filtering is many things, but I don't see why it's been particularly effective. Adaptive spam filtering was already being done before GMail came along, and unlike GMail's approach, the filters in other popular email clients didn't lurch so far towards avoiding false negatives that they all but broke normal email by having so many false positives.
I was a Google employee from 2005 to 2018. I HATED inbox, and I certainly wasn't alone. It divided users into two pieces, and the real issue was Google tried to force it on users rather than make it an option.
I actually just began the process of migrating away from Google about two weeks ago. I chose FastMail for my new email provider. It's $5/mo, but honestly, I'm fine paying that, solely to get Google out of my emails.
I find their UI to be simple and clear. I enjoy the notes/calendar features that come with the email. Their mobile app works fine on my android phone, and the push notifications from the Fastmail calendar are relatively unobtrusive.
Only downside so far was I had to cancel my NYTimes sub (honestly probably a plus) because it doesn't recognize the @fastmail.com domain as a valid email address. It's the only service I've had that problem with, including the important ones like banking, etc.
Huh, I didn't know about that. I knew I could use my own domainl; but I'm not really motivated to do so. the fastmail domain suits me well enough. I always have the option to use my own domain later on, anyway.
My NYTimes sub goes to my gmail, and then it forwards to my fastmail (I rarely need to check my gmail).
I was unable to sign up for an Etsy account with Fastmail. They only acknowledge the majors. But I was able to sign up with gmail and then promptly change it to fastmail. Really sophisticated opsec on their part.
I used to not like Outlook at work, but when I worked for a startup they used GSuites and the Google mail experience is so bad I honestly couldn't believe that anyone would be using it. Threads are mixed together when multiple people reply its impossible to read content anymore and they do also change the formatting of content which puzzled me the most.
Maybe for people that only ever used Gmail it's okay, because they are used to its weirdness and have never seen a more structured and visually appealing way to read email.
I just changed from a job that used GSuite to one that uses Office 365. I think Outlook is total garbage. The desktop client especially, and the website is barely an improvement. I've gotten used to it in the last month, but I still think the threading UX (my main gripe at this point) is really poor.
Maybe the lesson here is that if you use one of them for years, then the other seems really bad.
Outlook for Desktop has its quirks, but it's still extremely usable and (mostly) performant, especially compared to any of the web-based mail clients out there.
I don't know about the client, but make sure you are paying for the email SERVICE with your money. You want them to think of providing good service as how they make money, not scraping your email for advertising (or ??? - I can make up conspiracy theories...)
Suddenly Google Inbox came along. Fast, simple, focused packed with useful new features like mail grouping and content extraction. And it was killed off after roughly two years without any of the features being migrated to another product.
It seems like Google became unable to innovate in the basic services they once revolutionized.