This post is rather delayed, since I quit using gmail almost a year ago, and the decision was made more than a year ago, but since I’m hopefully going to start writing about my post gmail adventures, I’ll start at the beginning.

Gmail was, for a time, pretty awesome. It was certainly an upgrade from pine in many respects. The ability to open attachments without bizarre scp contortions was a plus. I don’t really need to recount the virtues of gmail, but I was impressed with it for quite some time. First (and only, really) web app to replace a desktop app for me. But Eden was not to last.

Over time, I had a growing spam problem. No matter how many Chinese emails I flagged as spam over the course of five years, gmail was convinced that this was the day I woke up knowing Mandarin. Also, based on observed behavior, gmail whitelisted all emails with the word “lottery” in the subject. This was kind of a slow burn pain.

Also, the filtering options were kind of limited. Basically, too many annoying mailing list people and not enough tools to deal with them. I could block senders, one by one, somewhat tediously, but no good way to kill a thread. This was kind of a spiky pain, really bad some days, less intense other days.

Finally, there were some service disruptions or shortages or whatnot. Every time I clicked an email and did not get to see the email just stoked the fire a little more.

Things hit the bottom after I had already made the decision to quit. When it was just personal email in gmail, I was limping along, but once we started using gmail for work and I had to start using two browsers to keep things straight, the pot really boiled over. See also my other post on that.

In the end, I decided the only solution was to write my own mail client, because there are not enough of them. As far as I was concerned, gmail was the best available, and it’s just not that good. My replacement, since named mailtanium, was built to be fast and flexible. I’ll introduce it in another post.