In the industry or at those companies? Google and MS have never cared about IMAP. Google has always done it’s own thing and wants you to use their product. Unless 3rd party email apps are written with Gmail in mind, they never work well with it. That has always been the case and nothing has changed.
MS email (Hotmail/Outlook mail) will work in 3rd party apps, but Outlook the app is really designed for their mail services and no-one else’s. Windows 11 is removing the email program and replacing it with Outlook, which does not really like 3rd party services. Windows 11 in general is trying hard to keep you in their ecosystem, to the point of annoyance.
The only thing that seems true in the industry is that all the big players want you completely in their ecosystem.
This is the tragedy of “desktop versus mobile” software engineering.
As far as I am aware, not one email client on iPhone or iPad will even let you store your entire email archive. The reason, I believe, is storage. Which was a fine reason in the early days. Much less so now. I bet some iPad users would love all their email locally on their 2TB devices.
Meanwhile, a “desktop” OS means giant ‘round and brown’ storage, right? So the merest hint that you want an email account means it can, will, must download the entire account, attachments and all!
I’d like to keep Outlook on my personal Mac for the occasional time it would be useful for work email stuff, but that means, as you describe, storing an entire year of emails, complete with numerous emailed report attachments. So I make do with the Outlook web interface. Which is different from both the Mac app interface and both are different from the Windows app interface.
It might partially be self-serving desire. Isn’t Microsoft Exchange and GMail the top two email providers whilst also both being, essentially, proprietary?
Gmail is the world largest email provider with 1.8 billion users. Some sources list iCloud mail as #2 with 850 M. It’s hard to determine the number of Microsoft users because many sources don’t break it out of Microsoft 365. Outlook.com has around 400M. As I recall Microsoft has always used the MAPI protocol to give their Outlook client extra features. Seems like the option to use IMAP or POP was added later.
Gmail has never been proprietary AFAIK, it started out in 2004 as pure webmail and added IMAP in 2007. Google Chrome didn’t arrive until 2008.
Gmail, Google’s email service, uses a variety of software technologies in its stack. At its core, Gmail is built using a combination of programming languages such as Java, JavaScript, and Python. It also leverages other technologies like Google Cloud Platform for its infrastructure, Bigtable for storage, and various internal Google technologies for security and reliability. Additionally, Gmail utilizes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for its web interface, and it also has native mobile apps for iOS and Android built using their respective technologies. Overall, Gmail’s technology stack is quite extensive and continuously evolves to meet the demands of its large user base.
“Fixed Apple email” — would that include the ONE feature I insist on from any mail client? When I close, archive, or delete an email, that is not a prompt to show me a different one. I’d probably just use Mail.app if it weren’t for that.
My understanding, too. I don’t know what their API is, nor whether it’s supposed to be a “standard” but I do know I have never come across another email service that promises to be “Gmail compatible” and I have also not seen another email service that uses labels, which is the core difference between Gmail and “everyone else”.
Personally, I vastly prefer labels to folders, and as Google have shown, you can make labels act like folders anyway. But IMAP seems to be stuck in 1970 or whenever it was invented.
It seems that IMAP had labels after all but Google decided to implement labels as IMAP folders, for their own reasons. From a mail client perspective, implementing labels over Google’s IMAP implementation is tricky.
As someone with a fairly vanilla usage of e-mail (at least on the personal front; work is very tied to Outlook), what is the issue with IMAP being an old protocol? It has worked for me for decades and other than bouncing between mail clients I don’t think the way I use IMAP has significantly changed.
There is none as long as you imagine e-mail like something similar as what it is now. Even IMAP has had revisions too and has provisions for server-side searching, tags/categories, and even a protocol extension mechanism. What we are seeing with Google and MS in regards of their own email implementations is your typical “embrace, extend, extinguish”.
Ah, it’s too new! It’s only been there (I think) for 21 years. Give the industry time to catch up.
I had no idea it was built into IMAP. Well… if some reputable service can offer me such labels as well as great server-side search and a fair multi-account price (I detest the thought of paying three times the base cost when two of the accounts get so little use) then I might well be swayed away from Google.
For my GMail account I use Mail.app because I limit my use of Google “products” as much as possible. Prefering DuckDuckGo as the search engine, OpenStreetMap to Google Map. The only Google service I use directly is Scholar.
The only time I use GMail in a browser is when it stubbornly and continually marks something as Spam that should not be. Spend as little time in there as I can to mark the false-positive as not spam.
