Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chrisfinazzo 262 days ago
Why are people surprised by this? (No, really)

IMAP "defeated" POP long ago if you wanted to use a third-party client but still access mail from anywhere.

By definition, this doesn't work in a POP environment, but that's increasingly an outdated mindset.

For historical reasons (intertia, and being early enough that I was able to acquire a "firstname.lastname" address), I don't plan to leave Gmail unless things really go south. My personal domain (Fastmail) is used for other things and I've never anything other than Mail.app and their own web interface.
1 comments
tracker1 261 days ago
This is about importing email from your non-gmail account INTO your gmail account. POP is simply the easiest way to do this, and just from GMail's own IMAP interface, it's pretty clear that IMAP is NOT reliable for this task...

The details in TFA are that you can add an external IMAP account to the gmail client app in Android. This does nothing for the gmail web ui, meaning you need something else for your external email.

Wouldn't mind exploring something akin to a web-based, self-hosted Thunderbird mail client giving a server hosted web UI for multiple email and nntp services. If if synced to desktop/mobile apps and/or had a decent mobile web UX, that would be gravy.

link
chrisfinazzo 256 days ago
I see the appeal of using Gmail to manage all of your mail, including the fact that you can still send through external SMTP servers, but it's just not for me.

Native clients continue to improve, and the mismatch between how I handle Gmail on iOS vs (for example) Fastmail shows that they're so wedded to this particular mindset that it's unlikely to ever be fully solved.

I look at people like my Dad -- early 70's, who spent most of his career as the "desktop infrastructure" manager at a midsize insurer -- who still wants to have Outlook available because he likes how Outlook does mail. It's just how his mind works. IMAP exists, but it's an implementation detail that's separate from the specific client features they add.

    Wouldn't mind exploring something akin to a web-based, self-hosted Thunderbird mail client giving a server hosted web UI for multiple email and nntp services.
Self hosting your own mailserver is almost always a bad idea unless you're really a dyed-in-the-wool mail nerd - I worked for one at a small startup one summer during college, but they're a rare breed.
link