Thank you Google, it’s been fun
Remember those days when Google services have been compatible with just about everyone who supported open standards? Not anymore. Slowly, one by one, each service is being centralized to the browser or the respective Android app made—of course—by Google. Let’s have a few examples.
We are forced to move away from Gtalk—which is quite compatible with the open XMPP protocol—to Hangouts. Hangouts are web-only and the so-called desktop version is tied to the Chrome browser, again made by Google. No API for 3rd parties to integrate it.
Gmail is great if you use it in the browser or on your Android device. In a 3rd party client? Not so much. The Exchange server is long dead, we are left with a pretty non-standard IMAP implementation.
Everything that is possible to push into Google+ is being pushed there (are they obsessed with beating Facebook or what?). The former popular services such as Picasa and Reader are stuffed into one “social network” where nobody actually socialises and which is not at all suitable for checking the news (the photos are quite good, I admit). Google+ can be used again only in the browser or in a Android app. Got yourself a Jolla, a Blackberry or a Windows phone? Tough luck.
Google still provides great technology and does a lot of good things like Google Summer of Code. But overtime, the baggage that comes with using their services for free has grown too heavy for my taste.
Slowly Growing Frustration with Gmail
Aside from the policies and decisions of Google that goes against my beliefs, I have become frustrated with the service I used most often—Gmail.
It was a revolutionary service at the beginning and I liked it a lot. It felt light, smart and it offered a huge amount of space for free and a great spam filter on top of that. But over time, Google has added many features I don’t care for.
The Visual Clutter
The interface is full of things I don’t need. There is Google+ circles, Categories, Quick Links on the left, some kind of Google+ sidebar on the right when reading a message, categories in inbox if you enabled that. But what I really need are folders, inbox and a pane with the message body.
The occasional ad on the top of the message list might be a minor nuisance but it still distracts me. And over time I added a bit of clutter myself—the calendar widget and Gtalk. All these things keep me from doing the thing I should be doing—dealing with my e-mail.
Moreover, the design is flatter with every version, making it harder for me to find my way. Thus achieving a rare combination of what might be called “empty clutter”. The new Inbox application by Google goes even deeper in this direction—no rescue will come from there.
Trying to Be Too Smart
The last batch of Gmail updates added a sort of smart categories (Inbox, Social Networks, Newsletters etc.) which mostly work but sometimes miscategorize. I prefer to have a manual, finer level of control.
And let’s not forget the Important message tag—it never actually seemed to work for me. I don’t want to miss an important message because Google though it wasn’t and labelled it accordingly. I just filter out the icon but having to do so bugs me.
These might be good ideas for some people but what I want is just the ability to forward certain messages to certain folders (newsletters I don’t want to read right away to one folder, work related e-mail notifications from JIRA and Bitbucket to the other and so on). No need for these fancy features.
The Alternatives
Some of the mentioned problems can be remedied through configuration and the others I could probably live with. But since I bought a domain and would have to pay anyway for Google Apps to use it, I decided to explore the alternatives.
And the winner is… Fastmail
I could give a long list of e-mail providers I considered but let’s skip to the winner—Fastmail. Fastmail is an Australian company and provides e-mail, contacts and calendar all packed in one of the best web interfaces I encountered. It’s light, uncluttered and blazing fast and I must admit, it feels a lot like Gmail did at the beginning.
Everything worked as I expected, the search is powerful, creating folders and rules to forward e-mails to the appropriate folders is dead simple, they even provide a tool to migrate all your e-mail from other providers. One can only appreciate their support for standards—IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV (although CardDAV is still in beta)—which I use heavily on the go with my Jolla smartphone. Fastmail’s effort to collaborate on a modern standard for client-server e-mail exchange (JMAP) can only be applauded.
After my experience with having a smartphone made by a small but dedicated company whose loyalties lie only with its customers, I am more than happy to support an independent company which actually charges money for the service they provide and which has no other means of income. It feels more honest than making money on advertisement and finding different ways to monetize my data. We all used to pay for using regular mail, why not pay for e-mail?
Of course, you might say: “You don’t know what Fastmail does with your data.” But I don’t think they need nor want to sell my data. From what I read on their blog, it’s a tech company who cares about technology and about making their customers happy the best they can with the resources they have. And I can relate to that.