The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible to totally migrate away from. On top of that, since Google does their own thing, it doesn’t fit well into standard IMAP that most clients use.
Sparrow made Gmail a great experience, but Google bought it and shut it down. I’m still rather bitter about that. It’s the only email client that actually made me enjoy email.
This doesn’t solve the root of the problem. Google is still the backbone of a significant amount of the email and no meaningful progress would be made toward the day when I could delete the Google account.
It would require systematically changing my email at the 300+ sites I’m aware of, assuming they allow that, or deleting the account if they allow that. I’ve been making efforts here and it’s painful. Many companies don’t have good systems for that, if any at all. Even big companies like Amazon and Sony, I was told to just abandon old accounts and let them hang out there forever… I had duplicate Audible and PlayStation accounts. No way to delete them. I found this particularly upsetting with Sony, considering how many times they’ve been hacked. On some sites I also ended up in captcha purgatory.
Then there are the hundreds more who have my email somewhere. I tied to change my email 13 years ago. My own mother still sends to my old gmail account. I think she used the new one a few times, but do I really want to nag my 70 year old mother about using the wrong address? My dad is the only one who reliably uses it, because he uses his contacts app properly. Over a decade and the progress has been almost non-existent. All this effort did was make email and logins harder to manage by spreading it out.
The pragmatic approach is to go back to Gmail, since most stuff is still there. I don’t want to be in bed with Google, but at least it’s only one thing to think about.
Thinking about it, my Gmail account is also my Apple ID. I think Apple only recently made an option available to change that, but it feels risky.
The issues I had (granted this was probably a decade ago), was that Gmail uses tags and IMAP uses folders. The translation there always felt messy and cumbersome. To me, this is why I felt Gmail wasn’t good in generic mail clients and really needed one built for Gmail.
Maybe all those apps have since updated to natively support all Gmail’s features, but that is also a cat and mouse game with all the stuff they try that doesn’t fit neatly into established mail protocols.
It's possible and I migrated almost all my emails from Outlook and Gmail. That's two services.
I still have those accounts and occasionally check for emails from old contacts or service emails, but on a daily basis I don't interact with Gmail at all.
I just checked out a video. I don’t think it’ll do it for me. What I liked about Sparrow is it made email feel more like Messages or Twitter. Going back and forth in email didn’t feel so formal. I didn’t see that in Spark. They also seem to be leaning really hard into AI, which is a bit of a turn off.
The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible to totally migrate away from. On top of that, since Google does their own thing, it doesn’t fit well into standard IMAP that most clients use.
Sparrow made Gmail a great experience, but Google bought it and shut it down. I’m still rather bitter about that. It’s the only email client that actually made me enjoy email.
>The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible
You can use mobile Thunderbird with a Gmail account.
> The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible to totally migrate away from.
Not that hard. Get new email, autoforward old email to new. In old email, set reply-to as new email.
After suitable time has elapsed, disable old email.
This doesn’t solve the root of the problem. Google is still the backbone of a significant amount of the email and no meaningful progress would be made toward the day when I could delete the Google account.
It would require systematically changing my email at the 300+ sites I’m aware of, assuming they allow that, or deleting the account if they allow that. I’ve been making efforts here and it’s painful. Many companies don’t have good systems for that, if any at all. Even big companies like Amazon and Sony, I was told to just abandon old accounts and let them hang out there forever… I had duplicate Audible and PlayStation accounts. No way to delete them. I found this particularly upsetting with Sony, considering how many times they’ve been hacked. On some sites I also ended up in captcha purgatory.
Then there are the hundreds more who have my email somewhere. I tied to change my email 13 years ago. My own mother still sends to my old gmail account. I think she used the new one a few times, but do I really want to nag my 70 year old mother about using the wrong address? My dad is the only one who reliably uses it, because he uses his contacts app properly. Over a decade and the progress has been almost non-existent. All this effort did was make email and logins harder to manage by spreading it out.
The pragmatic approach is to go back to Gmail, since most stuff is still there. I don’t want to be in bed with Google, but at least it’s only one thing to think about.
Thinking about it, my Gmail account is also my Apple ID. I think Apple only recently made an option available to change that, but it feels risky.
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I hate to say it but you are right. It might be finally time to cut the gcord
And the accounts I have in many many places which use email address as a primary key?
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I've not had issues plugging Gmail into Thunderbird, aquamail, k-9 mail, maybe you could try one of those?
The issues I had (granted this was probably a decade ago), was that Gmail uses tags and IMAP uses folders. The translation there always felt messy and cumbersome. To me, this is why I felt Gmail wasn’t good in generic mail clients and really needed one built for Gmail.
Maybe all those apps have since updated to natively support all Gmail’s features, but that is also a cat and mouse game with all the stuff they try that doesn’t fit neatly into established mail protocols.
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It's possible and I migrated almost all my emails from Outlook and Gmail. That's two services.
I still have those accounts and occasionally check for emails from old contacts or service emails, but on a daily basis I don't interact with Gmail at all.
I still use emacs gnus with Gmail. You need a token instead of old fashioned imap auth, but it works fine
Spark is a good replacement for Sparrow.
I just checked out a video. I don’t think it’ll do it for me. What I liked about Sparrow is it made email feel more like Messages or Twitter. Going back and forth in email didn’t feel so formal. I didn’t see that in Spark. They also seem to be leaning really hard into AI, which is a bit of a turn off.