
Goodbye Gmail - dangoldin
http://dangoldin.com/2014/03/18/goodbye-gmail/
======
andrenotgiant
Using the "Why is X" Google autosuggest as proof is meaningless, no one
searches for "why is gmail so great" and the same suggestions come up for all
popular products and services.

~~~
thejosh
Lucky he didn't do a "why is fastmail" search :).

~~~
dangoldin
Haha - I just did one "why is fastmail down". Gmail has that as the #2 spot so
I consider it a tie =)

------
motyar
Not yet ready for a switch?

There is still a simple, clean, basic Gmail
[https://mail.google.com/mail/h/](https://mail.google.com/mail/h/)

For more light weighted
[https://mail.google.com/mail/x/](https://mail.google.com/mail/x/)

~~~
sliverstorm
Yup, I literally _have_ to use /h/. Standard has become so slow I can count
the seconds between the end of page loading and the begin of responsiveness
(like how Windows used to boot to the desktop, but be unresponsive for another
30 seconds)

------
chavesn
This article is misleading on several accounts (as others of its type often
are).

\- Yes, initial payload size matters. But where's the true comparison about
what each app is loading? How are the features and the UX? Would a power user
be satisfied with Fastmail (e.g. search, filters, etc.)? (It looks nice, but
none of this was discussed at all).

\- The disparate email count comparison is excused _way_ too quickly. Have you
done a similar test with a brand new Gmail account?

\- Anecdata. I've never had the page load problems as bad as described. 2-3
seconds, and I reload once every week or less. "Sluggish" is a weasel word --
what is sluggish? Searches return in ~1 second for me (~7000 emails, I'm not a
saver.)

\- You can turn off chat.

\- Switching is never as simple as described, and forwarding is a fairly messy
solution (and will only get messy as the author creates new login accounts and
further forks his usage).

\- Ugh, the "Google suggest" argument. For the record, the only suggestion for
Fastmail is "Why is Fastmail down"

I clicked on "Goodbye Gmail" hoping for some substance or an interesting story
but instead got feelings, anecdata and glossing over the problems of a real
migration or search for a qualified alternative.

~~~
sitharus
From a recent Gmail -> Fastmail switcher, who imported all emails from Gmail

\- Fastmail's UI is far faster to use, viewing emails is instantaneous,
loading a folder with 30,000 emails takes a second at most. They have infinite
scrolling with native scrollbars, and it doesn't slow down as you scroll. It
does break momentum scrolling sometimes.

\- I'm not too sure about search compared to all the Gmail filters, but
filters are run via sieve. A real power user can edit the raw sieve commands
if they like, but there's a UI on top that's powerful enough for most uses.
There's no "Filter messages like these" though, that was handy.

\- Turning off Chat/Hangout did make Gmail use less RAM and start faster, but
didn't improve load times once it was active.

\- Switching was fairly easy for me, since I use my own domain. Fastmail
imported my old Gmail data via IMAP and I just switched MXs.

\- With you on Google Suggest. Fastmail have had their share of problems, but
they report them quickly and write up what went wrong.

------
sitharus
I have recently made the switch from Gmail to Fastmail as well, and I couldn't
be happier. They don't have all the features (calendars are coming soon!), but
they also don't have Google+.

In my experience it's a lot faster, both web and IMAP are extremely fast.
While the storage is smaller than Gmail I don't find this an issue.

I haven't used the XMPP servers yet, but it seems to have the same features as
non-hangouts GTalk.

~~~
dunham
How are they with spam? I'd just run my own mail, but I can't beat Google's
spam filtering. (They have millions of email accounts, real time, as a data
source.)

~~~
lukeqsee
Spotless. I've gotten maybe one false negative (i.e., the spam hit my inbox)
and no false positives.

~~~
elq
I have a very different experience. I've had my fastmail account for ~5 years
and get 20 new pieces of spam in my inbox daily, while on my gmail account,
that I've used for ~10 years, I only get 1 spam per month on average.

Fastmail's spam filtering is atrocious in my experience.

~~~
hnwhatevz
Works fine for me. They also have flexibility in how spam is handled, and you
could even forward to gmail and back if you really wanted to use its spam
filtering.
[https://www.fastmail.fm/help/spam_virus_protection.html](https://www.fastmail.fm/help/spam_virus_protection.html)

------
coffeecheque
Having made the switch to Fastmail a while ago, I agree with the comments -
mostly.

While Fastmail is fantastic, it lacks the implementation polish of Gmail. Two-
factor authentication is there, but not via a popup like on gmail. You have to
enter it in the web-form. This is a hassle, because I use LastPass and it's a
bit fiddly. Further, under Fastmail you create new logins in addition to the
master account password. The new logins can have two-factor, but the master
can't. So there is a small vulnerability in that at least one password without
the protection of two-factor.

Secondly, the spam filters on Gmail are far better. Fastmail has got a bit
better, but it's still worse when compared with Google's offering.

Thirdly, Fastmail costs. While I'm more than happy to pay, I doubt many people
would switch services from a free to paid, just because it appeared to be
slightly slower.

That said, I really love Fastmail. I'm more than happy to pay and I'm a very
satisfied customer. I can't wait for the promised features of a calendar and I
hope - one day - there'll be the ability to sync address books.

~~~
dangoldin
Thanks for sharing - I'm only a few days in but have really enjoyed the
snappiness and simplicity. I do wish it had better calendar support (for that
I'm still on Google) and a bit more polish but so far I'm glad to pay for it.

The spam point is interesting - I plan on using Fastmail for my important
personal stuff and gmail with forwarding for everything else. Hopefully that
will make for a good tradeoff.

~~~
sitharus
I've actually found Fastmail is better at spam filtering. I had a problem with
many false positives on Gmail, but Fastmail is doing alright.

You can configure the spam filter to be more aggressive as well.

------
r0s
Spam filtering in Gmail is a killer feature, now as much as when it first
appeared.

These rants always skip that detail, the primary reason I stick with gmail.

~~~
sliverstorm
You can always forward your mail through GMail. Publicly, your address is
r0s@gmail.com, but that account forwards to another address. Boom, spam
filtering. You can even give out your "private" address to trusted parties,
and skip the middleman.

~~~
yen223
This negates the privacy benefits of not using gmail, no?

~~~
sliverstorm
Sort of. You give out your gmail address to untrusted sources that will sell
your address (Forums? Misc. Websites?) and your private addresses to trusted
sources. You can't count on your communications with untrusted sources being
secret in the first place; they are untrusted!

------
inthewoods
I don't have any of this experience with GMail. Not saying it doesn't have
flaws - but my experience is pretty great.

~~~
shaunol
Sitting here thinking the same thing ..

Can't say I've ever had performance issues or even a moments downtime whilst
using gmail since it was launched.

Is a paid vs. free solution even comparable?

It's also a bit weird to compare the requests made on initial load considering
these web pages are arguably meant to be kept open- but regardless, shouldn't
the browser be caching these?

I think a more fair & thorough comparison would be to investigate what gmail
has that other solutions don't by introducing the larger initial overhead. I'm
guessing _a lot_ of cross platform compatibility code and plenty of code to
integrate to Google's other services.

In which case, I would say if you are concerned about the initial page load
and having more responsive interface (once again, no complaints here) and
don't need integration to Google's ecosystem, you may not be the target
customer for gmail. Which is okay.

~~~
ams6110
I have accounts on both gmail and fastmail, for different purposes.

Gmail has become bloated enough that it's really only usable on modern
hardware. I have an older laptop I use when I travel (don't really care too
much if it gets stolen, damaged, etc.) and gmail is painfully sluggish on it
while Fastmail is still quite usable.

Fastmail has also, however, become more bloated than it used to be. I
preferred their UI from a couple of years ago, but have grown to tolerate the
current one.

~~~
sliverstorm
I've mostly jumped off the webmail bandwagon altogether. They are _all_ headed
that direction (except squirrelmail) so I stick with IMAP access. Outlook 2010
is currently idling on my laptop at an astonishing 36.6MB.

------
whichdan
I have about 12.5k messages in my inbox at FastMail, and another 26k in
separate folder. Both inboxes load instantly, and the infinite scrolling is
seamless. Jumping back-and-forth between message and list view is equally
quick. While they currently lack features like a calendar, they do have a lot
of powerful tools -- I have several domains and email accounts conditionally
filing mail into several folders, with custom personalities/signatures when
replying from each folder. Very happy with it, and the devs take bugs
seriously whenever I message them. (To be fair, it's usually just UI edge
cases.)

Edit: Just to quickly elaborate on the infinite scrolling: FastMail takes the
total number of messages in a given folder and uses that to calculate the size
of the viewport. When you scroll to a given position, it fires off a small
AJAX request for _just_ the messages that are in view. Since each message is a
fixed height, it gives them a lot of flexibility for calculating what to show.

Also, FWIW, they do support message threading.

------
blueskin_
Gmail used to be great back in the early 2000s, but its time has long passed.
The metro-ified UI is ugly and clearly only designed for tablets, options are
steadily being hidden or removed, and the privacy concerns have only got
worse. Not to mention, if you want to use a better client such as Thunderbird,
their IMAP is glacially slow and often breaks altogether. The only other
alternative is to use POP3 to bulk download all mail and sort through it
locally.

I switched from gmail to running my own mailserver a couple of years ago; best
decision I ever made about email. It's faster, more private, I can issue my
own DKIM keys (and I know my signatures haven't been messed with), and I get
sane spam filtering with visible scores that doesn't source its data from
other people's email and has a much lower false positive and false negative
rate, which only improves via Bayesian learning.

------
iLoch
Well if we're offering our suggestions for alternatives, I'll throw
Outlook.com in the hat. I use it daily and find it as easy to use as Gmail, if
not easier. Perhaps it's missing a few features that Gmail's got going for it
like the tabs - but that doesn't bother me that much.

~~~
ryannevius
I snatched up an @outlook.com address back when they were still rolling it
out, mostly to use as another junk email account. It sat for a while; but over
the past few months, I find myself using Outlook.com more (for business) and
Gmail less. The Outlook interface is a pleasure to use.

------
justinzollars
I've noticed maps is considerably slower and less responsive. Google has
become corporatized so I'm keeping my expectations in check.

~~~
phatfish
GMail is pretty good. But the new maps is atrocious on any browser except
Chrome (surprise surprise). The old version is much faster on all browsers.
Same for the Android app, which also destroys my phone battery now too.

------
benblodgett
Why wouldn't you just use imap in an email client? I don't see any benefit to
using a cloud email service when you can just host email easily on a cloud
server..

~~~
lumpygravy
_Why wouldn 't you just use imap in an email client?_

I agree, unfortunately, GMail has a non-standard IMAP implementation. As a
result, it doesn't work well with Mail.app (while Fastmail's pristine IMAP
does) and plugins such as MailTags.

------
lukeqsee
I made the same switch a couple years ago (GMail -> Fastmail) and have had the
exact same (pleasant) experience. Fastmail is fast and has sane defaults, a
powerful filtering system, and good spam detection. As a bonus, I don't have
to worry about Google reading my email to show me relevant ads. I've gladly
spent the money to have reliable, fast, standards-friendly email. The only
thing they lack is two-step authentication.

~~~
poulson
According to the Fastmail webpage, they _do_ support (optional) two-factor
authentication:
[https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html](https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html)

~~~
lukeqsee
Thanks! I think it's new. That's the first I've seen regarding it.

Edit: come to find out, it's only supported on secondary logins, so the master
account cannot have two-factor authentication.

------
doesnt_know
I moved off Gmail (more accurately, Google Apps) a few years ago. It was the
last thing tying me to Google. Privacy concerns were the motivation for me,
not any technical or feature issues.

I closed my account without having a "full featured" alternative ready.
Instead, I used the the mailbox feature provided by my domain registrar[1]. I
initially set out to only use this as a temporary arrangement, but the quality
of service has been so excellent that I've had no reason to move from it.

Keep in mind, because of this move, I'm no longer a "typical" email user. At
least, not what has become typical of email. I use it purely as a personal
communication tool. Not as an information archive, password manager, file
storage or any other (mis)use of the thing that has seemed to become standard
these days.

I access it through a desktop client via IMAP, but they also provide webmail
access via an instance of the GPL licensed Roundcude[2], which I use extremely
rarely.

[1] [https://www.gandi.net/?lang=en](https://www.gandi.net/?lang=en)

[2] [http://roundcube.net/](http://roundcube.net/)

------
ipince
Passing judgment based on a "why is ..." auto-complete suggestion seems
flawed, as the searches are heavily biased to the negative end.

~~~
dangoldin
That was more of a fun thing to add - the actual performance is noticeably
slower for me. Both loading and navigating take a longer amount of time in
Gmail. Probably should have just left that out since everyone seems to be
drawn to disproving that particular point.

------
comex
I'm considering switching from Gmail for similar reasons - multi-second delays
when switching to a label are kinda unacceptable. But this is 2014, and if I'm
going to switch, it needs to be to a desktop application so that I can have
some vague semblance of security - at least supporting PGP mail and accepting
messages which happen to be delivered securely with STARTTLS without the
possibility of eavesdropping on my end, even if most of my mail is never going
to use PGP. Plus, my laptop almost certainly has more CPU to spare than some
random cloud server, so in theory searching should be faster, even if the rest
of the UI can be equally snappy in a webapp as in a desktop app.

Unfortunately, after trying several candidates, I have yet to find an app
whose UI I actually like, so I'm still using Gmail. I think I will try
Mailpile once it's ready.

~~~
danieldk
If not Mail.app, what about notmuch with one of the supported clients ;).

~~~
comex
I have tried Mail.app (with Gmail IMAP for now); it's quite nice, but has some
issues such as poor expressiveness in search.

notmuch looks interesting. I do use vim heavily, but I'm not sure I want to
read all my mail in fixed-width... wonder if the web client is any good.

------
JohnTHaller
Gmail has definitely gotten... 'heavy'... over the years. I clocked it at
about 6 seconds to load my inbox with just 8 messages in it (Firefox 28 on a
decently fast machine on a 100MB/5MB connection with low latency). And that's
before the pause and the load of the Hangouts widget. Loading the /h/ variant
of email is under 2 seconds. My Rackspace mail webmail comes up in about 3.

All that said, I use Thunderbird with IMAP as my primary to all those accounts
because a real email client is faster than webmail.

------
ajkjk
I'm still using Gmail, but I'm frequently struck that every change they make
to it is almost intentionally making it worse.

In fact sometimes I feel that way about a lot of Google's products.

------
computerjunkie
This article may be a little biased but as a user of Gmail and Outlook I can
agree that Gmail is sluggish to a certain extent. Outlook's interface made
managing my email much simpler and straight to the point. I have not come
across issues about Microsoft's server not playing nice with email clients.
Yes Outlook may not have as many features as compared to Gmail but it does
what it says on the tin, and does it well in my case.

I am going to have a look at Fastmail as an alternative to Gmail and Outlook.

~~~
sliverstorm
What do you mean, Outlook has less features than GMail? Sure doesn't seem that
way to me.

------
huddy1
I thought I would give fastmail a try and whilst I agree that gmail isn't as
slow as the article makes it out to be (for me at least) I do like how
fastmail just does mail, it's simple, there's nothing else I have to worry
about turning off. It does one thing and it's the only thing I want it todo. I
have only just signed up so If my opinion changes then I'll post back here but
so far it looks quite nice. I'm yet to decide if I want to make the switch
though!

------
psychometry
Funny, I switched from Fastmail to Gmail a couple years ago. I was used to
having IMAP access from my time in college, so Fastmail made sense at the
time, but I came to prefer having a uniform mail experience--wherever I was
connecting from--via a robust web client.

Gmail's filtering, spam detection, and labeling features are much better and
Gmail integrates well with my calendar and file storage workflows.

------
jerrickhoang
It takes 6 seconds for you to load Gmail? Where do you live? I feel sorry for
you bro.

~~~
nilkn
For Gmail to reach full interactivity it takes at least 6 seconds for me quite
often. Keep in mind that after the interface initially shows up, it's still
very sluggish for a few seconds as it loads in Google+, the chat section, etc.

That said, I recently found out about the /h/ option in this thread and it
loads instantaneously--faster than FastMail.

------
joshfraser
It's a good idea to set up a forward to another account just for redundancy. I
forward all my email to Yahoo just in case Gmail has an extended outage,
accidentally rm -rf's my account, etc.

------
eskimo87
I use Gmail via Fluid app on mac and it works great independently (doesn't
slow down n stuff). But if I keep gmail open in chrome, it sucks up lot of
memory over the time.

------
ChrisArchitect
pretty bad post, more evidence of relevant factors would be useful to add
credibility. It seems this experience of lag is really not the norm, so why
rant about it in such general terms. it's your machine/environment probably
Enjoy fastmail or whatever. Gmail remains usable and has grown to support its
userbase....and still holds its own from the revolutionary place it launched
at in 2004...

------
thejerz
I use Sparrow. I get the benefits of Gmail, without any of the problems you
cite.

(N.B. You don't have to use Sparrow; pick any IMAP client you like.)

~~~
sebastianavina
acquired by google?

------
sGrabber
they are trying to make changes to improve. give them some chance to improve.
They have moved all the downloading to server side & so downloading an
attachment or running a video is much faster now on gmail as compared to
earlier

Lets give them a chance to improve before we bid goodbye

------
arasmussen
I bet you this post will let FastMail steal a dozen users from Gmail. Any
affiliation, @dangoldin? :P

~~~
dangoldin
Ha I wish. I'm not even paying for Fastmail yet =) Still have 55 days before I
need to.

------
andyv88
Also works much more reliably in foreign countries where Google services may
be slow/blocked

------
periferral
slightly off topic but I'm looking to move away from Thunderbird as a mail
client. I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions. I use gmail but not
online but without updates to tbird, thats becoming the bottleneck

~~~
johnwalker
I'm also interested in any answers to this. I haven't come across anything as
easy and usable as Thunderbird.

kmail for KDE seems OK. It's not my favorite, but it feels lighter to me.

Considering using Emacs.

------
jrochkind1
reads like an informercial.

------
chris_mahan
The real question is how to "Goodbye Email".

------
thejosh
gmail: free

fastmail: paid

~~~
sliverstorm
Sometimes not banging your head on the keyboard each day is worth $10/year.

~~~
thejosh
Sure, but comparing a paid service to a free service and expecting the free
service to be as good as a paid service is silly.

~~~
sliverstorm
You still pay for GMail, in the form of being a captive audience for ads.

------
3327
You know Gmail is free? And Fastmail costs $$$?

------
corresation
I have gmail open in a couple of tabs pretty much for weeks. Were I to
actually close and reopen chrome, the vast bulk of the resources would be
cached.

This seems to be optimizing an artificial. Or maybe an irrelevant is a better
word. It's like measuring Windows boot times -- as is so common with each
iteration -- when recovery from sleep is far more relevant to most people now.

Further, and this may sound overly cynical, posts that proselytize a change
should have a HN minimum required period before they can be submitted. Saying
"I changed from {x} to {y} this past weekend, and boy is everything awesome
now!" are invariably followed by the requisite post detailing how much of a
mistake moving to {y} was.

~~~
maccard
Not everyone leaves their browsers open when they're at the computer. I don't,
and on a 100/100 connection, from click to inbox open it takes me almost 7
seconds. I tried it twice on all 3 of my gmail accounts with varying results,
but none faster than 5.

~~~
corresation
Not everyone, but I would wager that most do: Many office desktops went from
having an instance of Outlook.exe open 24 hours a day, to a couple of tabs in
Chrome. Which is exactly why Google made it a rich, all-encompassing platform
(calendars, contacts, instant messaging) -- it's a conversation dashboard that
is intended to sit resident.

This whole discussion sounds like some sort of Fastmail astroturfing campaign.
I mean when people complain about Google+ (which in gmail is wholly
materialized as a +YourName up in the corner), it sounds like rote talking
points.

~~~
johnpowell
I have a account on both gmail and fastmail. If we are just concerned about
speed fastmail wins for me. And there is that whole tracking thing that bugs
me so that is another win for fastmail. I just use gmail for signing up on
websites I will most likely only visit one.

