Gmail is an email service. Like the fediverse, email is federated.
By changing your email provider, do you really lose anything? You can still contact your friends, contacts and even various customer suports. You also can recieve emails from popular social media apps. If you degoogle from atleast one Google app, maybe Gmail could be the easiest and least life changing one.
While, Youtube could easilly be one of the most difficult to degoogle from. Not like literally but emotionally. Like deep down you know you can find mostly all you might need on something like Peertube but not all the entertainment media like on Youtube. You will also become a social outcast if peertube is the only app you use. You might not understand channels people mention in day to day talk from youtube or references.
If you use exclusively fediverse apps and sites, Chrome could be almost just as easy to replace as gmail, longterm. However If you use Youtube it won’t surprise me that Youtube downgrades your performance and user experience in what ever means neccesary on competing browsers.
It’s the hardest to replace.
There’s literally no other service that has a web email client that’s as nice and as feature rich
I need filters, multiple SMTP sending profiles, import from other IMAP accounts, easy account switching, delayed sending, labels. Nobody offers all those feature in a web client.
Maybe zoho mail is the only one that offers a similar interface
If you know an alternative please tell me because my Google one subscription is due to renewal next month and I really want to move away but I can’t find an alternative.
And the Gmail webui isn’t perfect too, mobile viewing sucks with an huge banner “why u no add this Google account to your android phone so we can track your actions better??” That’s on top of the page that can’t be dismissed.
And the “archive” button that doesn’t actually move it in an archive folder but is more “hide this email forever and make it impossible to find it again”
All of this is only relevant if you use the web client. I don’t. I have email accounts both on gmail and on other providers and normally access all of them with Thunderbird and K-9 Mail.
Or as spy-rich
Protonmail. or tutanota are some of the best alternatives.
I have a proton mail account and the interface is nowhere as feature rich. It’s comparable to yahoo mail but definitely can’t replace Gmail.
Not to mention that it doesn’t even support IMAP so on mobile I would be forced to use their app.
Tutanota isn’t based on sogo, which is extremely barebones? Later I might register a free account to have a look
I just get why you would need such an advance interface for a simple emailing service where you just send and respond to emails. If the emails send, shouldn’t the be enough? It’s not like you need a crazy search API like Google’s to even come close to comparison with them. The email experience really isn’t impacted that badly. unless i’m missing something here.
it depends what you use the email. Email notifications from facebook and various spam? Roundcube is absolutely perfect for that.
Work with 100 emails per hour? You must use some advanced client or everything is buried once you go to eat for lunch
it’s not about search at all. In fact, i am forced to use thunderbird to search on gmail because search is completely broken. If you are searching for all the emails that “Matt - [email protected]” sent you, if you search for “matt” or “username” on gmail, you won’t find anything. You have to find “[email protected]”, which is ridiculous