
Gmail, We Need to Talk - testrun
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/10/gmail-we-need-to-talk/
======
rconti
GMail, we need to talk. We need to talk about how substring searches do not
work, 11 years after your launch. We need to talk about how you've slowly
engineered out everything that was good and unique about GMail. We need to
talk about how you "flattened" the style, removed colors from threaded
messages, and just decided to use shades of grey everywhere. We need to talk
about how difficult it is to tell one message from a forwarded message from a
divider line from attachments from the next message in a thread. We need to
talk about how you've decided to replace the window manager by insisting that
my messages be a window inside of a browser window, but ones that adhere to no
UI standards. We need to talk about how you've hidden the date of a message,
and hidden the To: address, and the Subject, so that what used to be a simple
tab action now requires multiple mouse-clicks.

And apparently something about HTML emails too.

~~~
gdulli
Maps has really become a chore to use, too. I remember getting directions used
to be easy once and now it's like interacting with enterprise software.

~~~
icebraining
What? If you left-click in a place, a small card appears with an arrow that
you can click to get directions. If you right-click, you can get directions
from or to the place. And if you search, you also get a very visible round
button with an arrow and the label "Directions".

How is it hard?

EDIT: Sorry if this came out as aggressive. I'm just dumbfounded, that's all.

~~~
gdulli
I'm not a UX expert and don't have the vocabulary to describe what's wrong
with it. What I know is that I used to enjoy using it. Not just for
directions, but I'd use it for fun to explore new areas. And now I dislike and
avoid using it altogether. Similar to Gmail. It's just feels like a mess of UI
elements that show and hide and move dynamically, don't have fixed spots on
the page, don't work consistently, etc. Like it was excessively focus-grouped
or committee-designed.

I know how to get directions in the new interface. I just don't like doing it.
Is it more clicks? More elements taking up space I don't care about? Hijacking
the native right-click menu? Aggressive resizing/panning when I didn't ask for
it, to accommodate what it thinks the new context should be? I don't really
know.

~~~
d23
Here's a few more: randomly zooming out to full-earth view, changing the area
of my search after I've already zoomed in, crashing all the time on mobile,
randomly giving me results halfway across the earth, randomly changing my
destination when I zoom in, randomly zooming out to full-state view.

These are the obvious ones. There are more subtle UX fumbles too. If I click
my house while I'm in my house and click directions, I probably don't want
directions _to_ my house. I probably want directions _from_ my house.

Edit: Oh! That ridiculous thing it does when my phone vibrates. Someone
decided they could detect frustration by using my accelerometer. Now any time
I get a text message and am using maps, maps gets insecure and asks me to
submit feedback.

------
scott_s
The example presented are the kinds of emails I actively avoid. Perhaps the
author is right, and Gmail is not working with them on purpose. If that is the
case, it may be because many users are like me, and they tend to not want
fancy-looking marketing emails, and just want basic rich-text features.

The Schema initiative - I didn't know it was called that until now - is in the
other direction, and I like it. Emails that have valuable information for me,
such as airline flights, are presented not in the way those that send it want
it to be shown, but in a way that my mail client thinks is best. Frankly, I
want _sameness_ in my emails.

~~~
badloginagain
Marketing emails are not the only ones that developers want to look not
broken.

To pick an instance at random: Confirmation emails for purchases made,
especially if they have tickets as an attachments. If this email looks broken,
customer thinks it's phishing or something, and might end up trashing it, just
because styling is not supported consistently.

And I take issue with your argument of "marketing emails are bad." You may not
like them, and that's fine, but there is a large part of the internet
ecosystem that do like marketing emails- such as my mother who likes learning
about deals/sales/coupons at her favourite outlets.

~~~
davidbanham
Why is that email using HTML?

Hello there! Thanks for purchasing X for $Y. Your tax invoice is attached.
Here's where you can track your delivery:

[http://example.com/tracking](http://example.com/tracking)

Thanks!

~~~
badloginagain
Such a minimalist design may work for some products/brands. But just as many
companies, especially companies that put a lot of focus on brand management,
may want nice images and responsive design. It's not an unreasonable request.

Even if it's not as effective for click-through/customer re-engagement/etc.
you should let the _customer_ decide on what kind of emails they want. Data
will prove if nice images and ads are less effective than simple HTML. Gmail
shouldn't be forcing that decision, it should be empowering the greatest
number of people to do the most amount of things.

~~~
Consultant32452
I disagree. If you don't want your email to look the way Gmail displays it,
use a different client. I don't want a million configurations for how I could
possibly have my mail displayed. Show me a good option. If I don't like it,
I'll use a different option. That being said, one thing I really miss in Gmail
compared to other options is being able to do things like sort by the sender
and that sort of thing. Instead I have to search for that sender which often
gives me many false positives.

~~~
badloginagain
Sorry, I was not clear.

For consumers, gmail should provide the optimal email experience- if they
don't like it, they have the choice to use a different product.

But for developers, gmail should provide as many tools and as much
functionality to meet developers need. That way developers build, Google
profits.

------
LeoPanthera
Maybe I am just really, really old at this point, but sending emails in plain
text solves all these problems. I don't think I've ever received an HTML email
that couldn't have been adequately represented in plain text and maybe an
attached image if necessary.

~~~
brwnll
You've never received data that needed to be displayed as a table?

If plain text email was the end-all, then instant messenger and SMS would have
killed email a long time ago.

~~~
Karunamon
If we're just displaying tables rather than interacting with them, that
problem is solved.

    
    
        +----------------------------------+---------+------------------------+
        |               Col1               |  Col2   |          Col3          |
        +----------------------------------+---------+------------------------+
        | Value 1                          | Value 2 | 123                    |
        | Separate                         | cols    | with a tab or 4 spaces |
        | This is a row with only one cell |         |                        |
        +----------------------------------+---------+------------------------+

~~~
eggnet
That only works if you can guarantee monospaced font rendering on the client.

It also looks ugly.

~~~
dredmorbius
You cannot guarantee squat. Which is pretty much the gist of TFA, _within a
single vendor 's various client interfaces to its own unified email system._

However, as I put on my True Scotsman hat and kilt, any true email client
_will_ present monospaced fonts, therefor those which fail to do so aren't
real email tools.

------
igetspam
GMail, we need to talk. Thank you for making it complicated for people to send
me "rich" text emails. Thank you for making it harder for embedded tracking
images to function correctly. Perhaps the moving target that are your
rendering changes will lead to a simpler, more featureless, email landscape
like we once had. I really appreciate the time and money designers are forced
to spend on annoying me; if i have to deal with the full frontal assault on my
eyes, they should at least have to work for it. Please keep up the good work
and thanks for encouraging people to focus on the iOS market instead (those
people will buy anything AMIRITE?).

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
> Thank you for making it harder for embedded tracking images to function
> correctly.

Thank you Google for protecting my privacy and making spam harder.

------
DanBC
> Gmail and its plethora of rendering quirks is a big reason why developers
> avoid working on email. Developers like well-defined and documented
> environments, and email is anything but. Although many email clients suffer
> from rendering issues, getting an email to display nicely in the various
> Gmail desktop and mobile clients gives developers the most angst.

THANK FUCK. Seriously, just send me plain text.

~~~
kbart
Exactly. It looks like some companies try to send you a whole website over an
email.

------
qewrffewqwfqew
I've become convinced that gmail's goal is not to improve email, but to
extinguish and replace it. This article talks about one minor aspect of that.
In addition:

* breaking established addressing conventions. Gmail (last time I used it) made it difficult to distinguish between To: and Cc:, both in received emails and when sending.

* messed-up quoting, and other broken conventions.

* the one that's been discussed to death here recently: it's on the way to impossible to send email and expect it not to be silently dropped if you're not on gmail.

* the email authenticity measures linked to the last point also screw up mailing lists and forwards. Most of the DMARC notifications I get from gmail now include a bunch of FAILs for people that forward from another domain to gmail. Soon, they'll simply stop receiving most mail.

Email is walking dead, and gmail is largely to blame.

~~~
cronjobber
Back in pre-history, they did a similar number on their usenet interface,
again after having offered a decent product for long enough to lure people
away from running local clients.

~~~
qewrffewqwfqew
They killed usenet off good by providing a reasonable interface that
encouraged people to link to it .. then destabilising the URLs. I've seen wiki
links to google groups that have been changed 3 or 4 times before people
simply gave up trying to re-find the original target.

Pisses me off no end.

------
drhayes9
HTML emails reduce clickthrough rates:
[http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/plain-text-vs-html-
emails-...](http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/plain-text-vs-html-emails-data)

I think most people (correctly) interpret HTML-ness in email as a signal that
the email is undesirable.

~~~
ryan-c
> While the plain-text emails we created had some formatting capabilities
> (hyperlinks, tracking pixels, etc.), they were as close to plain-text as we
> could while maintaining the ability to track opens and clicks for testing
> purposes.

That sounds like "HTML email with minimal cruft" rather than "plain text" to
me.

~~~
drhayes9
Yeah, that's definitely true. "HTML email" in this case is a synonym for
"email with lots of images and crud" in it.

------
CM30
Oh god, HTML email. Gmail and Outlook literally make coding these things an
absolute hell due to their dreadful lack of supports for any form of standard,
and the author is damn well spot on about it.

Indeed, the only good thing I can say about Gmail is that they didn't try to
use the Microsoft Word engine to render HTML like Outlook did. The way HTML
email is set up and the table filled soup like code that's needed to use them
well is about half the reason most developers fall back to things like
Mailchimp templates rather than trying to make anything half decent.

It's also why it's a real shame that the old email standards project kind of
got abandoned, because absolutely zero progress has been made on this front
for years upon years (outside of Apple's smartphone email apps).

And yes, while plain text email does 'work', good luck convincing a company
(or your boss) to go with something basic rather than the equivalent of a
glossy print brochure.

~~~
mvdwoord
Gmail and Outlook? I had to create some HTML email reports to be read in Lotus
Notes. It made me extremely sad as Notes invariably does.

~~~
mschuster91
Be thankful you hadn't to target Notes, Thunderbird and Outlook like I had to
once. I still have the occasional bad dreams from this job.

------
csomar
If you haven't already, you are better leaving Gmail

1\. Have your own domain for emails. This is important. Gmail (or any service
provider) can block you/remove your account for no reason and with no
recourse. Your email is very important if you are doing serious work and have
financial sites and data linked to that email address.

2\. The very reason that I used Gmail was speed and storage. The very reason
that I left Gmail was speed. Storage is no longer relevant now. Speed become a
problem in 2012-2014. It seems better now, but there seems to be "rush hours".

3\. The Gmail web app is no longer good. I like a very simple interface
because I write very long email. Why make the "compose" show up as a pop-up? I
write emails and not chat messages.

4\. The SPAM filter is good until it catches a couple business emails. This is
when I decided that no SPAM filter is better.

5\. If you don't pay for the product, you are the product. I left Gmail after
using it for 8 years. I was fine for 12 years but as the business grow I
thought about that line. Suddenly, I had strange thoughts about Google using
all my data.

~~~
g_delgado14
> If you don't pay for the product, you are the product

I'm starting to think that this statement is becoming really generalized.
Anonymized data has the power to help society.

I.e. anonymized cancer patient data to help doctors see larger societal trends
without jeopardizing client privacy.

I trust larry page and the Google team, and presume Google is handling my data
responsibly.

~~~
DaveWalk
You have a really interesting argument against the oft-repeated "If you don't
pay, you are the product." I think you are right, that there is great power in
anonymized data, but ultimately motives matter. From what I saw as a former
scientist, the goodwill of patients donating their tissues formed the
foundation of great cancer (and neuroscience, and HIV, and...) research. IBut
I think there is a social contract for scientists (and open-source
programmers, and nonprofits, and...) that gives them credibility. Maybe it's
our human nature to trust them, and for them to trust themselves?

But 1)corporations are obliged to care about profit, and 2) anonymized data
can be de-anonymized with (to me) astonishing ease. In _Data and Goliath_
Bruce Schneier cites a dozen cases of de-anonymized data, from health records
to Netflix history to personal identification.[0] It is possible that I'm just
more paranoid than the average GMail user, but this scared the bones out of
me.

[0] An example on his website:
[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/05/reidentifying...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/05/reidentifying_a.html)

------
dijit
I'm weird, I don't like all this HTML email.

What I _do_ like, is that when I get an email with things like flight details
that my client can add it to the calendar.

if I have any complaint with gmail it's that they're too successful, running
your own mail server that's standards compliant and runs all the
DMARC/SPF/DKIM + PTR is fine, but until you have a reputation with gmail 70%
of people aren't seeing email from you (and I'm not talking marketing emails).

which is self-fulfilling, because my emails go into the spam bin, which means
when the spam bins get churned into the anti-spam learning engine it has, it
sees that "(S)He's been marked spam before".

So it somehow centralises email, which is at it's core decentralised. :\

------
guyzero
Gmail, we need to talk about how you make our unpopular product unpopular even
with people who want to like it. We also need to talk about how to let more
junk mail into people's inboxes and maybe you could just skip the whole thing
about sorting important mail out from Sears flyers?

"Journalism"

------
thieving_magpie
techcrunch, we need to talk about your article titles.

Addressing the content of the article:

\- "Gmail Makes Developers Shun Email", I can't think of any developer I know
that shuns email, and they all pretty much use gmail.

\- "How Gmail Breaks Email", to be frank... not even in the slightest. Sure,
it sounds pretty annoying having to jump through all those hoops for a
fancypants email.

\- "Google should take the lead in bringing the web mail stakeholders from
Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL together toward the support of a common set of CSS
and HTML."

Who makes a demand like that of a company? Hey, Company X, gather every
industry leader please and force them to all standardize to one spec. Am I the
only one that would prefer companies to not be in the driver seat for these
kinds of decisions? Isn't this what led to the IE6 debacle?

I really don't get these articles. Today I've read HN front page articles
about horrible gmail is (my favorite email service for the past 10 years) and
"Amazon kind of sucks". I must be out of touch.

~~~
Shog9
It's an opinion piece from a guy who... apparently... wants to put image
carousels into emails and is upset that GMail doesn't let him, and yet dares
to intrude upon his beautiful iOS.

Hopefully no one exposes him to the ocean of old Outlook clients with crufty
Word-based HTML renderers out there; he might die of a heart attack.
Mentioning Pine/Alpine would be cruel as well.

~~~
jkturbo
Author here. Haha yes I write on experimental techniques like carousels mainly
to get developers curious into the kinds of stuff they can do with just CSS.

I'm very aware of Outlook's backward HTML support, but at least its a single
client. With Gmail, each of their clients has weird quirks that make it
frustrating to code for.

As developers sometimes creating HTML emails are necessary, such as creating
system generated reports for business users. Right now, the process is fraught
with issues - including figuring out Outlook, so fixing this does not just
benefit email marketers alone.

------
ryan-c
Media queries in email would allow a number of information leaks about how the
email is being viewed, which I don't especially like. Allowing external images
is already pretty awful.

~~~
icebraining
Images are much less problematic for Gmail users since they started proxying
them[1]. Now the sender can't tell if you opened the email by checking if the
image was downloaded.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2013/12/gmail-...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2013/12/gmail-blows-up-e-mail-marketing-by-caching-all-images-on-
google-servers/)

~~~
ryan-c
I was aware of the proxying, but didn't realize that gmail always prefetched
the image. This implies that even sending each recipient a unique image URL
will not work?

~~~
jkturbo
Author here. Gmail does not prefetch the image. Appending a unique image URL
will still allow the sender to know when you've opened the email. The proxy
eliminates your IP as well as user-agent so the sender can't tell where you
are and what you're using to read the email.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I was going to argue with you and go get a link to wave in your face.

But you're right: [https://blog.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-
works-...](https://blog.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-works-and-
what-this-means-for-you/)

------
akrymski
Nobody seems to have mentioned that the author works for FreshInbox - an email
marketing company.

Sorry Justin, but sending web-pages by email is exactly why email sucks. No
messaging apps allow HTML+CSS markup to be sent, and there's a reason for this
- it's not readable. Instead send a URI/Link and the recipient can view the
HTML using a tool that's designed for that - the browser! Web-pages aren't
messaging. That's what the WWW is for, not email. Apple is totally at fault
for introducing HTML support in emails, they didn't see the spam coming. Email
is a messaging protocol, not a news reader or web browser. NOBODY (except for
advertisers) wants SHOPPING CARTS in their emails. What non-sense.

------
zaphar
Allowing style to be included in a web based email client is just asking for
trouble. It's not just _hard_. It's close to impossible thanks to CSS global
nature. You would have to literally parse out the css and rewrite it as well
as all the html content to automatically uniquely namespace it so it doesn't
collide with the rest of your page. And meanwhile you've just created a new
attack vector for your email service with security implications you may not
want to take on.

All of that just so that you can pretend an inherently text medium is actually
a way to deliver web pages directly to users. This is a lot of work for
questionable benefit to GMail's actual users as opposed to Email Marketers.

~~~
jkturbo
I'm the author of the article. All the other web mail clients from Yahoo!
Mail, Outlook.com, Comcast and so forth support the style tag. If it was a big
security attack vector, all those clients wouldn't be doing that.

The other webmails rewrite ids and classes and prepend unique identifiers to
prevent them from clashing with their own namespace (AOL is the only one that
puts it in an iframe).

Interestingly Gmail webmail actually supports the style tag but strips out id
and class selectors in them leaving element selectors - so they're actually
doing some heavy duty parsing already.

As for it being an inherently text medium. I would say it depends on the
recipient. Emails do not need to be web pages, but simple CSS styling can go a
long way to ease readability in emails - especially in a long curated
newsletter like Product Hunt.

------
RawInfoSec
It's email. SMTP. It's not instant messaging and it sure isn't a browser.

Point blank, it's easy to see that this is by design and not by quirk or
fault. If anything Google are looking to maintain usability by keeping as
close to RFC spec as possible.

One of the biggest problems facing email today is SPAM, and general
deliverability. Once you veer far off spec it gets a lot more difficult to
manage these two issues.

For example, look how nice Greylisting worked in theory, until you realize
that most IT or hosting companies don't have a clue how to configure an MTA
within RFC specs and do silly things like retrying delivery every 5 mins.

When your dealing with complex systems, it's better to keep each part of that
system well oiled and within a predictable spec. And then Microsoft adds HTML
support to Outlook so that marketing execs can throw 15 sales related images
and some wording about saving trees...

Often, solution providers should have given an alternative when asked to do
things that break from standards. As we often say in this field, "Just because
you can, doesn't mean that you should."

Kc/

~~~
dijit
>look how nice Greylisting worked in theory, until you realize that most IT or
hosting companies don't have a clue how to configure an MTA within RFC specs
and do silly things like retrying delivery every 5 mins.

that's what needs to happen for greylisting to work.

it's spambots that don't have the retry ability.

~~~
RawInfoSec
Thanks, but you misunderstand my point. Actually you pretty much prove my
point that most MTAs are run by those who can't grasp that there are RFC
standards out there.

An MTA should never resend after only 5 minutes. It should wait at least 25
minutes before even the first retry.

I've seen many set up to retry every 60 seconds, giving up after 5 tries. One
IT tech even told me it was so his boss doesn't have to wait 3 days to get a
non-delivery report! Lol.

------
alkonaut
I'm not going to add another "just use plain text" comment. I really want to
send images (in the text, not just attached), and simple rich text features
such as bold text can really help readability. But that's not a huge
responsive webpage crammed into an email -- it's just rich text. It's html
entirely without style, neither inline nor in a header. That should be the
standard email format apart from plaintext. My client can style all emails
like I want them in terms of fonts and so on. Consistently.

If the sender wants me to see a website, just send me the damn link?

------
spdegabrielle
Gmail- thanks for the free email service for the past _years_. I don't mind
the pretty minimal advertising you include for a _free service_. I could run
my own mail server, but yours is fine, and let's face it - far better than the
email that provided by my ISP. (You would think ISP's would be more motivated
to provide a better service with the single feature that is most likely to
stop me switching provider.)

Oh- what's that? Do your competitors find it hard to advertise on your
platform? That's _so sad_. I really value the service that email marketers
provide.

Thanks again Google,

Your search is still ok - but it is your email account that is good enough to
keep me as a customer. An Bing is awful. Except for the arial photos - they
are better than the shitty ones on google maps.

------
smithkl42
Being the only coder at my startup, you have to do everything. And the other
day, I had to spend the whole day troubleshooting rendering differences
between Outlook and GMail. It reminds me of the old days, back around the time
of IE6, when it was all-but-impossible to get FF and IE to render the same
HTML - except worse, by at least an order of magnitude. It's astounding to me
that the same companies who've worked their asses off to make sure that their
browsers all render HTML and CSS exactly the same, haven't given the slightest
thought to making sure that their email clients can get along. This is a huge
time-suck for developers. Glad to see that they're getting the public shaming
they deserve.

~~~
jkturbo
Author here. Glad to hear this from another developer. I think once developers
are tasked to code an email, perhaps something as simple as a notification or
a report, they'll quickly realize how truly foobar the email situation is.

Short emails may be fine with plain text, but once you need to present any
sort of structure, HTML becomes necessary and there's no reason why email
needs to be this difficult.

------
merpnderp
Why has Gmail made it so hard to delete emails? I use various imap connections
to gmail, and they've all replaced the delete icon with an archive button.
Only the web app still has an easy to click delete button.

~~~
archmikhail
The last thing Google wants is to lose your personal data. They don't want you
deleting _anything_.

------
CaptSpify
As someone who reads all of my email in a terminal: I don't see the problem
here. I think gmail has a lot of issues, but making it harder for you to send
me spam is not one of them.

~~~
jinst8gmi
As someone who gets all my email hand-carved into stone tablets in ancient
Greek I also don't see the problem.

~~~
CaptSpify
You say that like a terminal is a step back. I see it as the opposite: I
started with email in web-based systems. Terminals improved my email
experience 100-fold

~~~
jinst8gmi
I'm saying that your usage pattern has little in common with the 99.99% of
gmail users, hence isn't super-relevant as a data point to be used in the
design of gmail.

------
enginnr
Schema has the same problems as Microformats where adoption only takes off if
the market demands it, or it gains enough momentum that people can't imagine
webapps without them.

There are countless other standards this article overlooks which have been
implemented very well in recent years in Gmail, so why does it lambast the
lack of Schema?

------
pasbesoin
Google: First 6, 7 years, one great product after another.

Since then: Slow death by "product manager", or whatever the hell they call
it.

(In league, I suspect in my personal opinion, with some cabal of out-of-
control graphic "designers". Though this is hardly the only problem.)

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Yes! I fundamentally believe Matias Duarte and his "Design department" at
Google is one of the worst things to ever happen to the company. As Material
Design has taken over, product by product, performance and usability has taken
a backseat to branding and animation.

------
zeckalpha
> Gmail is the only email client that doesn’t support <style>.

And that's a problem? Please don't put CSS in your email.

~~~
jkturbo
Author here. The majority of non-personal emails contain some form of styling
for readability. And the styling is done using CSS. The only issue with Gmail
is that they force you to inline them which makes coding email very tedious.

~~~
zeckalpha
> for readability

Really? Because I find it so much more readable if all of my emails are the
same font.

------
buro9
I like the current state of HTML emails in Gmail.

I like that it forces the use of templates that are rigorously tested and will
seldom change.

Because when I mark the email as spam... it will very likely bin all other
emails produced by the same template.

I only slightly jest, but the best emails are the ones with the least possible
styling. These are also the most deliverable emails, the ones most likely to
make it through to an inbox.

------
rockshassa
They say history repeats itself... Google is making all the mistakes Microsoft
made with IE a decade+ ago. Amusingly, Apple remains unfazed.

~~~
archmikhail
Apple makes money on hardware, making mail better on iOS won't really attract
more Android users to switch IMO.

------
pfooti
I sure would love it if the gmail client supported more modern web stuff. The
history of web development has always been a history of the Lowest Common
Denominator: I'm held back from doing XYZ because this browser / email client
doesn't support it and that represents a big fraction of my users.

It's not just the gmail client, of course; nearly all rich mail renderers are
astonishingly baroque and broken (take a look at which engines Outlook uses to
render html mail - sometimes it's the msword renderer).

Of course, we could all just agree to send plain text emails with a link to
the web page-ified rich version of the email, but that's not satisfying. I
work in the borderlands of rich email - I'm not sending advertising stuff, I'm
just sending notifications to users, but those notifications look a _lot_
better when they've got some good markup.

------
mschuster91
It's not just Google Mail that doesn't support proper HTML emails.

The Android mail client doesn't, the iOS mailclient doesn't, Outlook actually
feature-retarded between 2010 and 2013, most webmailers break on anything
that's not tables with inline styles, Lotus Notes Webmail is actually fairly
good but unfortunately depending on the platform the full Notes client uses
either its horrid internal engine or something provided by the OS that may
actually be IE7 (shit, you design a beautiful newsletter for Mac Notes, and it
falls apart on Windows; also weird weird suboptions hidden deep inside Notes
make it balk on anything but color/background-color/height/width)...

The only mail client that can render full-featured HTML5 newsletters is
Thunderbird.

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kirualex
GMail really became the IE of mail readers, that's how bad it is

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moron4hire
He complains about Gmail not making it easy for developers to make the types
of emails I hate the most. It's not very compelling.

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legohead
GMail/Google, why are you tying Google Fi to my GMail account? I got it for my
wife, who now __has __to have my GMail account setup on her phone for the
service to work.

You say you don't have family plans _yet_ , but it sounds like you will. Do
you really expect me to be okay with having my GMail account setup on my
children's phones?

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shadesof
Code School actually offers a course that (I would think) makes this a little
less painful for the uninitiated.

[https://www.codeschool.com/courses/unmasking-html-
emails](https://www.codeschool.com/courses/unmasking-html-emails)

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Animats
Why use Gmail when IMAP will sync all your devices? Android has a good IMAP
client. On desktops, use Thunderbird. What value does GMail add? Besides ads,
of course. And Google building a profile of you.

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hobarrera
Schema.org is also missing support for non-html emails.

Sometimes actions would be nice, but there specification does not define how
to use them in good ol' plain-text emails.

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wldcordeiro
I must be odd because I enjoy Gmail as it is and their Inbox app as well. Both
the desktop and mobile experiences are excellent for everything I do.

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gansai
One way of pushing users to use a new product is by degrading an existing
product. Here, Inbox is the new Gmail. Switch. Switch. Switch

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wangii
the only thing from Google I really like, at this moment, is Golang. Products
I used to love are either gone (greater) or ruined. It's amazing to witness a
long, gradual process of unavoidable increment of entropy/mediocracy. so long,
and thanks for all the fish!

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awqrre
I use Gmail somewhat indirectly... I forward all gmail emails to a non-Google
email address

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BuckRogers
I've been wondering about this and after reading that link, I think I'm going
to switch from the Gmail iOS app to using the included Mail app. We'll see how
it goes, but I do want my email as the developer intended.

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mikeg8
As someone who just made the switch in the opposite direction (I've been using
Mail for multiple emails accounts for a few years) I'd strongly suggest
sticking with Gmail's iOS app. My email experience on mobile has been much
more enjoyable, Mail was glitchy and difficult to use/organize for me.

~~~
BuckRogers
Thanks for the info. I may just do that then, or just go with a shorter trial
period. Pretty sure I can use both of them at once with no issue.

I'd love to know who and why my parent comment was downvoted.. I hate that,
you can't say anything on here without downvotes.

~~~
jsmeaton
I use the Inbox by Gmail app on iOS and I really love it. I never got into the
regular gmail app. Inbox is far better than the standard Mail client for gmail
IMO.

