The thing from Gmail I would need is a scheduled send function that works reliably even if all my devices are offline when the send time arrives.
That and an equally good or better search function.
It also needs to fix the “Snooze” / Remind Me feature. The fact that it does not remove the Mail from the inbox when it’s Snoozed kinda defeats the purpose of the functionality.
It appears a scheduled send using the Apple Mail app depends on the Mac mail app remaining open. I created two test emails and sent one from the browser and a second from Apple Mail. Only the first email appeared in the Scheduled “folder” on the Gmail server.
To schedule emails when all your devices are offline it looks like you would need to use Gmail in a browser or the Gmail iOS/iPadOS app. AFAIK Google Advanced phishing and malware protection is also only available in a browser or the Gmail.app.
Yep, and that’s what I do. I don’t mind the web interface, probably because I’m used to it.
Looks like this only works on the new iPhones and perhaps iPhone 15 Pro… it’s a shame that iPhone 14 Pro misses out on this.
As a general principle, the device sending mail - which has to have all of your email sending credentials - needs to be online. Period. in the case of Gmail, that device is a Gmail server in a data center somewhere.
For any desktop client to implement an off-line “send later” feature, they would need a server side component that stores your credentials. I do not see Apple implementing such a server, especially for non-Apple accounts. And quite honestly, I do not see many people in the “power user” category being OK with such a server. 
That’s what Spark does (and iirc, Outlook). To provide additional features, they store duplicate copies of all your emails on their servers, doubling your attack surface. I’m not generally a fan of Google, but it seems likely that their security team has a lot more resources and depth of expertise than Readdle’s does.
I do not for my life understand why anybody likes the so called “smart categorisation”?
I want control of my emails, and when I categorise them I create folders for that. There is nothing smart about starred emails or other categories that Gmail creates. I have spent hours looking for emails that vanished without my consent. I utterly hates it.
However, your mileage may (obviously) vary. 
I understand. One of the most common problems that I used to deal with was users that could not find an email message, or a file on a file server. One user, if memory serves, requested more email folders after she used up her 250 default limit. And she often spent hours looking for an email. I rarely spend more than one minute searching for an email.
The secret of finding a message in Gmail is search stacking :
The thing is that search usually works, but sometimes, by no apparent reason, it doesn’t (TBH it was a couple of years this happened to me). I can see the mail in the mail list, but it still doesn’t show it while searching…
When that happened I usually found the mail in question among one of the Gmail default folders. However, turning off that in Gmail (IIRC you have to change the account to a regular IMAP account) get rids of Gmail stupidness.
Odd, I’ve never experienced that in 20 years of using Gmail. But very little about computers surprises me anymore.
I don’t use an imap client or the default Gmail “folders”. I have three rules that keeps everything that can wait out of my Inbox and labels them as Review.
Agree. As a workaround, I archive the message after setting “Remind Me”. This way, it appears in my inbox when the time comes. This works for me on 18.1, haven’t tested it on 18.2. BTW, I use Gmail account.
I have 172000+ messages in my work Gmail account with hundreds of labels. Every project, every area of interest has its own label (with multiple levels of nested labels). I never lost an email and the amount of magic I can conjure when some people say: “This prospective client XX…” and I answer “Well we worked with them in 2017, in the project YY with so and so” puts me on a demigod level between colleagues.
But! The amount of work, classification is painstakingly hard to the point that I am convinced it’s not worth the effort. Because in the end GMail’s search is good enough. What most sensible people do (unlike me) is just archive everything and forget about categorising stuff, search is good enough.
This is actually a problem, if you want to see it as such (I do, because I like to keep files and emails in order).
When Apple introduced Spotlight with OS X, I noticed that many people started to get more disorganized. Ie, they didn’t put files in the correct folder, and they didn’t care to organize their emails. I have clients that have 15.000+ emails in the Inbox (90% of them unread of course). To me, this is equl to total chaos and my head would explode if my Inbox looked like that…
Imagine another people trying to sort that up if you get sick or whatever… 
However, it’s of course up to each individual how they want to arrange their stuff. But search is just maybe to good these days… 
+1
I think the problem will lessen as the generations that grew up with search become the majority. Besides, who knows what changes to data storage will occur in the future?
Even an LLM based search would do wonders.
The problem typically isn’t that folders are objectively better for a use case. The problem is that search is so finicky. Ever search for “disputable” and not find something because the word was “disputed”? Or search for “disput” to try to outsmart the system, and discover that it doesn’t find it because it is trying to match whole words?
That literally happened to me today. An LLM would theoretically make short work of that, if properly configured.
When LLM–powered search gets to the point where you can say, “give me everything from Frank related to the Jones project,” and it can reliably deliver all of the emails and documents, I think we will see lots of people moving away from from folder structures.
How is everyone liking Mail in iOS 18.2?
Went back to Spark. I like that I can quickly archive OR delete an email with one click while within the email itself.
And everything just seems simpler, faster, and more consistently formatted.
I’m not a fan of the new default “Categories View” thing, but maybe in time. Way too cleaver. Easy to get back to the old way (not what “cool kids” want me to use) “List View”.