I can only agree!
But I would not be able to sleep tonight, were I not to drop in the obligatory reference:
2 Likes
My brother can’t understand my position on these matters. He showed me how he does his work email. He gets a job, many emails are exchanged about the job, then that job is finished. The job gets a folder, under a folder for the client it was for. I can totally see why he always files everything and has no trouble finding things later (which he rarely needs to do more than a week two after it’s finished).
I’ve never worked in such an environment. Everything happens at once, everyone wants something different, but often there is overlap (“Oh, you did what? Well that would explain this other thing, then!”) My role in technical support is heavily reactionary and even when we do get to do something “productive” there is every chance we will have to put it aside at a moment’s notice.
My office desk is pretty much clear most of the time. What does clutter it isn’t usually “work”, but drink bottle, headset, phone, etc. I used to have a much more messy desk but between refusing to use paper if at all possible and moving desk enough times I got sick of moving everything, I have almost nothing there now.
My (work) digital life is a mess because that’s how it grows. The two things I do to keep sane are:
- Always put stuff where it’s searchable, and
- Always strive for never having to revisit any problem.
1 Like
this may incur a lot of adminsistrative task and may lead to mis-filed emails. Gmail’s strength is its search function. I do not even bother to file or label , unless I may not recognise and find a obvsious keyword that I could use for searching.
2 Likes
I totally agree. Gmail’s search and spam filtering are the reason I’m migrating off Workspace to Gmail and not, like I’m making the rest of the family do, to a Hover mailbox. 
I’m also lazy, so that counts for a lot of “don’t file it, find it.”
Hey @BradG are you still using WebCatalog? How is it? I’m really intrigued to explore anything that reduces my RAM usage… mail app is killing me at the moment!
Note that these web wrappers make more sense if you want to juggle several GMail accounts at the same time using the web interface (you can also check Biscuit, or Ferdi. If you are only using a GMail account I believe you will get similar memory usage using GMail’s web interface in a Safari tab.
Also, Mimestream is totally native and is blazingly fast (free as in beer while in beta).
2 Likes
I am – very happily. I have it over on separate “space”, so it’s in a different context for me, relative to everything else. That is one benefit of just accessing it via a browser tab, as suggested by @pantulis – the wrapper has it feel like a stand-alone app (to me, at least).
Like that the various accounts remember the last search/view I used on a “per-account” basis.
Also seems as if the gmail shortcuts work natively – but don’t hold me to that, since I was never a heavy gmail user in the first place. Bottom line though, I am keeping on top of personal emails, and it’s not using up space on my local system – all server/web-side, which I don’t mind in the least.
Might not be the solution for somebody who is a heavy-user, but suits me perfectly.
1 Like
Awesome thanks mate - I’ll have to check it out! I see a fair few use cases for it!
Maybe oxymoron, but is there an alternative web interface from a 3rd party for Gmail?
For uninteresting reasons, I am using Gmail now as a primary email service.
I prefer not having any email client locally and completely hate the Google Gmail web interface.
Ideally, would like a 3rd party client that runs nicely with Gmail as the back-end, but the client web interface is the only thing I interact with from a browser, not Gmail itself.
Asking too much or does this exist?
Nope - that’s an app that has to be downloaded and run on macOS
Other than outlook.com and Zoho (checks Gmail through the CRM iirc, but you can use it as email), I can only think of interesting paid options like Superhuman, Hey and Akiflow.
You could run your own or buy webhosting and use an open source email web app with pop3 or smtp integration with Gmail, but that’s fraught.
Curious what else is out there.
It’s been a while since I tried, but I thought Outlook (and pretty much everything not specifically
designed to work with Gmail) had issues with the way Gmail works. Basically everything is designed for IMAP, and Gmail doesn’t use it, so it causes issues. As someone trying to use Outlook on my PCs for 3rd party email, Outlook is very cumbersome. It wants you to use MS services (unfortunately a common theme with MS products today, “No Windows, I do not want to back up my computer to OneDrive, I told you that last week!” 
).
If you don’t like Gmail’s web client, I think the best answer is don’t use Gmail. Tons of options out there otherwise, paid and free.
AFAIK the answer is No. I’ve been a Gmail user for nearly 20 years and the only choices I’ve seen are a browser, a regular IMAP client, Mailplane, and Mimestream.
I use the brower as is, but you can customize the look a bit if you want:
Ahh … yes, I misinterpreted your first sentence.
You could sign up for hey.com. You can use it in your browser. And you can easily use it to receive and send from your gmail (or gsuite) email addresses.
That said: some people love it, some people hate it. I loved it, but grew to hate it.
It’s also very expensive.
Two other options.
It’s a browser extension which radically improves Gmail’s web ui.
A web-based alternative for gmail accounts. They’re going heavy on the AI email composition - which doesn’t appeal to me, but it is an option which works inside the browser rather than as a separate email client.
1 Like
Just a follow-up FYI:
For email in general, my inside contacts at Google and Microsoft tell me that IMAP is being de-emphasized in the industry because of cross-compatibility issues and security problems.
Outlook, which I have been using, forced a new UI change that passes email through their servers. Supposedly to facilitate client-side feature parity with competitors by adding send-later and other features that require server-aware features and email processing.
Separate from the argument of concerns being forced to pass all your mail through Microsoft servers, on a pragmatic level, they broke long-standing IMAP support.
With FastMail, Outlook cannot do Computer Science 101 CRUD features. (That’s Create, replace, update, and delete) with IMAP folders any more.
Over a year back and forth with Microsoft, including pulling favors with insiders, they finally admit they believe Fastmail IMAP is broken and not conforming to standards and more iportantly, too low a priority for them to do anything about it.
I can’t understand how a UI re-write would break long-running code they already had working, but that’s Microsoft for you.
Since I hate, hate, hate the new Outlook UI, moving away from Outlook+FastMail back end has lead me on this quest.
Co-incidental, I am running out of SSD space on an older Macbook laptop (only bough 512 MB SSD 4 years ago) and part of my crusade for storage optimization (I recently filled up my 4 TB SSD on my Mac Studio) I decided if I went to fully webmail I would no longer have to have TB of mail data synced/stored locally.
Gmail works for me in almost every other way, but the web UI/UX is not that good (I think everyone knows that Google, on the whole, is a great cloud/server company but terrible at user interfaces), hence the hope that some expert here knows a product I couldn’t find on my own - A web-to-web front end for GMail.
Sorry for mixing topics here, but trying to give some insight into this quest. On the storage side, I am getting burned by Apple’s move to restrict cloud services, e.g. DropBox to only working from the system drive and forced to keep it’s files in Application/CloudStorage folder area.
(I don’t want to deal with hard or soft link file system workarounds). Until, or maybe never, iCloud offers user controlled, manual selective syncing like DropBox, I can’t consider iCloud as an alternative.
Thus, using a nice external plugin SSD (like the 4 TB Crucial drives I have started using for video offloads), is not a solution for sync’d data folder hence the desire to prune my 4 TB system drive as I don’t want to buy 8 TB SSD’s in my next MacBook or MacStudio purchase.
2 Likes
I hadn’t heard that but I’m not surprised, it dates back to the mid '80s.
I only rely on iCloud for syncing Safari, Goodlinks, Drafts and Photos (and I sync to Google Photos as a backup). And I am still able to sync my Google Drive files to an external SSD.