Comment by locknitpicker
3 months ago
> Why are people accessing emails from the webUI. Email is SMTP and IMAP, use any number of clients to access your email.
Because the UX of most email clients is extremely bad when compared with the webui of these email providers.
It's also IMAP is an awful protocol with so many glaring issues its impossible for a modern client to paper over them. Fastmail invented JMAP but it doesn't seem to have taken off with any other providers.
>so many glaring issues
like what?
From memory, there are no bulk actions, so if you want to say select all emails and delete you have to send thousands of requests. If you want to rename a folder you have to send a request for every email in the folder. There is no way to set up filters that run server side, there is no way to get push notifications.
And probably a million other things that don’t hold up today.
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Try Mailspring. I’m a huge fan: https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring
That's an electron app. What does it offer that Thunderbird doesn't?
Thunderbird is great. I’ve been using it a long time, too, and feature-wise, I think Thunderbird is way ahead. I just find Mailspring a bit more... pleasant to use? And I think it’ll be an easier switch for people coming off Gmail Web, which is why I’m recommending it.
(Also... Thunderbird is not that different from an Electron app itself. It uses Gecko instead of Blink, and has a few bits of XUL here and there, but the core premise is the same. Though it doesn’t use React at least!)
I would go further and ask what do electron apps offer in the way of improvements that WebApps don't.
In mobile, webview-based apps exist mostly because they provide more ways to gather data on users.
1 reply →