and you use a Mac, this is a very helpful thread:
And it’s not just the typical Google bashing, either. I use Fastmail for many of the reasons listed, but there are good counter arguments. One of the main TidBITS guys uses Gmail and is happy with it. But you won’t be surprised that he doesn’t recommend using Apple Mail.
The guy at TidBITS who uses Gmail uses https://mailplaneapp.com as a client. Mailplane has been around for nearly 13 years. If you use Gmail on a mac, I recommend you check it out.
Another great option for the Mac and iOS is https://sparkmailapp.com. The free version is plenty for my uses — and I have five email accounts, some Gmail and some Exchange.
TidBITS IS Adam Engst. Smile.
I’ve been with Mailplane since version 1 and use it to to keep three inboxes and a calendar open at work, and two inboxes and two calendars open at home. The developers have always interacted courteously with support requests and been willing to make test builds available to users in bad need of a fix when something comes up. Recommended.
Do you use this on iOS? What do you do with the default email app? Just don’t use it, hide it in a folder?
Yes, on Mac and iOS. I think you need to keep the Apple Mail app around because that’s where you find the setting for your default email app.
A couple of things I like about Spark:
I’ve found spark slow to launch and iffy when it comes to running in the background and keeping me notified promptly. It is not something I want to rely on when running through an airport.
You can delete the Apple Mail default app on iOS and really on MacOS too, but on Mac you have to disable SIP. If you google dosdude1 he also provides custom images of MacOS that expose more functionality than the default.
Regarding OP I have never had an issue with Gmail for iOS. Google’s iOS utilities in fact, I think work a lot better than Apple’s. But Apple has never really been a software company and they have drug their feet when it comes to platform independence.
Eric, so what would be your recommendation? I have some Gmail account and other Exchange accounts for work, so a Gmail-only app is a nonstarter for me.
For features/reliability/integration Google owns it. There is no better set of services out there. I bear no love for the company but their utilities are unbeatable.
I’m still a big Mailplane fan, but I’ve been trying Mimestream for a couple days for my work email and want to recommend it. Its premise is essentially a Mac app that feels like Mail, but loads its data from Gmail so it has fast search and doesn’t need to sync email to display it. For some it should be the best option. The developer is a single person but comes from the Apple Mail team and passed Google’s Gmail API security review.
Coming from the Apple Mail team… does not inspire confidence. Nevertheless, your recommendation does bear some weight. Still, I don’t know why I wouldn’t just use a browser and gmail’s interface. Plus, I really don’t want non-standards-based protocols to take over email. 
That’s my biggest problem with Gmail. It ain’t email. They definitely break IMAP protocols.
And then when Apple people “like” my SMS messages…ugh.
It’s true in the sense that it’s hard to access your own email via IMAP (singular, it’s just one protocol). But it’s not true for the format, you can see it when you click on “Show Original” in the web interface, and it’s not true for the transmission of the email between two parties where there is basically only one protocol, SMTP. And gmail does SMTP quite well.
I happen to have worked with IMAP (and SMTP) quite a lot. IMAP is a protocol designed to access your email and that’s it. It makes it easy to store mail in folders and to synchronize these folder with your local computer. The server can be implemented very efficently with IMAP since it just does that, store each email in a file in a folder named with the name you gave the folder. This worked well in the 1990s.
But then people start to have LOTS of mails. And one problem with this structure was that it was very hard to search in the emails. You need an index for that and IMAP servers didn’t have them really except for header fields.
Google never worked that way, their systems are not organized in “folders” in the sense of the filesystem. They have and always had append-only storage and always lots of indices to access this storage. For Gmail this means that everything is a search: If you put a message in a “folder” it just gets a “tag” with that folder and if you access it, the system searches all your email with that tag. Google can do such a search very well, with predictable response times and throughput. That’s why they are so good (at so many things).
BTW Microsoft never cared about IMAP either, they have Outlook and Exchange and have always used their proprietary PST (file) format. It’s so bad it’s hopeless to implement it independently. They sort of opened their protocols in 2007, but nothing gained traction.
IMAP showed its weaknesses already during the Blackberry time: For efficient notification and retrieval you had IMAP, but for sending you had to use SMTP. If you answered with a one-liner to a larger email with quoting it you had to download the whole message via IMAP, compose and then re-upload it not once but twice: To send it via SMTP to the recipient and to store a copy for yourself in your “Sent” folder in IMAP. Somebody proposed a protocol extension for this use-case, but I don’t it got really widespread implementation.
JMAP wants to make IMAP available via web protocols: https://jmap.io/ developed by Fastmail. Fastmail is an email provider and also the biggest contributor the open source Cyrus IMAP server.
(sorry probably more that you want to know…)
I really hope JMAP takes off, from what I’ve read.
Not sure, JSON isn’t really great, and HTTP (1.1) is also on it’s way out. We use GRPC a lot internally and it works great. It’s protobuf (<-> JSON) and HTTP/2 and has a schema description.
Younger people don’t use email as much so maybe it’s all not that important anymore.
I think email is incredibly important, but that’s another conversation. I just want updated and improved standards for it, and JMAP is one of the only realistic options I’ve seen.
I agree, I’m just not really excited about it. (For instance, they have “Vacation Response” in the spec… 
)
That’s what I use the delete button and folders for, which are two of the things that Gmail screws up.
I like IMAP for synchronizing across devices. Full local storage and searching, online backup. Mail hosting service was never expensive, difficult, nor unreliable.
I’m considering moving completely to Exchange, but the only phone apps I like work best with IMAP. Also, I don’t like losing control of spam services. Built-in spam filters seem way too restrictive and hard or impossible to configure.
I like Outlook as a desktop client. Happy to pay for it.
JMAP does look interesting.
I don’t feel it’s necessary, but I suppose it’s because I don’t mind waiting a few seconds for mail, having to refresh again, or wait for a search. It’s mail not a live telephone call.
I recommend K-9 for an Android mail client. Very configurable for complicated mail setups and also for UI.