[sp332]

When Gmail first launched, they made a big deal of the fact that their user testing revealed ~11 different types of user with distinct workflows. They made sure the Gmail interface supported all those workflows well. It seems like the new interface is going after just one or two, and making life harder for everyone else. I think I will switch back to a desktop email client for day-to-day use and only use the web interface when I'm on a different computer.

[manicbovine]

> I think I will switch back to a desktop email client for day-to-day use and only use the web interface when I'm on a different computer.

I primarily use Mutt because I spend most of my time in a console. I know Mutt gets a bad rap, but it's actively developed, super fast, has excellent (customizable) keyboard shortcuts, and is dead-simple to use if you're already on the command line. Plus, you can bring along your favorite text editor for composition. Mutt also handles gmail labels relatively well.

Furthermore, tmux + powerline + mutt means that I get new mail notifications from the console, and switching to mutt is a key combination away. This setup is particularly helpful if I'm emailing about technical matters, since I can split the pane and view whatever code/data/mathematics is under discussion in the email thread.

(One point of irritation is that bash doesn't seem to fully support powerline.)

[dredmorbius]

Another mutt user here. It's the best email client I've used, and that's saying a lot, covering a bunch of years, and includes recent and modern ones.

It's fast, light, and the keyboard-driven functionality works very, very well for me.

The main issues I've got with it:

Plays poorly when others send highly formatted mail. I prefer treating email as straight text. HTML-marked up email with color to indicate, say, various quoting levels, obviously doesn't work (it's fragile in any regard). I'll generally keep a secondary GUI mailer (usually KMail from Kontact, the KDE PIM) for such needs.

Lack of native tag support. Gmail's ability to tag messages is useful. There are extensions and rewrites which offer similar functionality in mutt.

Slow performance on very large mailboxes. With >10k messages, I start seeing performance fall of for various mailbox operations, especially search. There are indexing tools to speed this.

[msrpotus]

Do you have a link? Curious to see what kind of user I am (I also generally like the new interface; seems perfectly fine for me).

[sp332]

Hm, looks like I misremembered and there were only 6 types. The exact types are proprietary info but the original author gives a few examples here: https://www.quora.com/Gmail/What-are-the-six-types-of-email-...

[Fuzzwah]

I've just done a bit of googling around to try and find more on this. I've turned up a heap of references to the developers finding 6 different types of users during their 2 years of internal testing before launch. Alas no where is there actually a list of these 6 different types of users.

The doc in question was written by Kevin Fox who replied to this quora thread about it, but dodged the question claiming that the info isn't his to divulge.

http://www.quora.com/Gmail/What-are-the-six-types-of-email-u...

Weird.

[bornhuetter]

I'm pretty sure I'm not on that list. I've never liked the way the gmail web client works.

* I've always disliked conversation view, and I keep ending up turning it off whenever I try it

* The lack of ability to sort emails is really annoying

* The layout of emails, particularly when trying to reply to an email, I find confusing - in particular it would make far more sense to have the text box at the top of the page

That being said, I probably dislike it less now than when I first started using it so I think the changes have generally been positive.

On a side note, I think Photoshop is also a UI disaster area.

[therandomguy]

* I've always disliked conversation view, and I keep ending up turning it off whenever I try it

>>I hated it deeply, thoroughly till I used it for a while. Now I can't live without it.

* The lack of ability to sort emails is really annoying

>>It took me some time to rely on search.

* The layout of emails, particularly when trying to reply to an email, I find confusing - in particular it would make far more sense to have the text box at the top of the page

>>Neutral on this.