Gmail

Long-term owners

If for the past ~20 years nobody has come up with something clearly better, then I would say that speaks to how outstanding the product that are being copied are to this day.

Jun 2026 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• mailbox.org emailRecommended for private European email with custom domains, IMAP access and cheap paid plans; people say it works reliably. Common caveat: clunky webmail and slow support replies.45recommend
• Zoho MailPeople recommend Zoho Mail for free email on your own domain that has worked reliably for years, with paid plans around $1 a month; the most common caveat is that IMAP access needs bridges or workarounds.29recommend
• iCloud MailFree with an Apple account, and it supports custom domains and IMAP with good spam filtering for many users. Critics say it silently filters legitimate mail.24recommend
• HEY email by BasecampPeople recommend it for the Screener sender whitelist, a smooth web experience and a usable private email address. Critics mostly object to its lack of IMAP and the founder's views.23recommend
• Posteo emailCheap, simple email with encrypted address books that people have used for years without trouble. Main caveat: custom domains are not supported.21recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 1288 comments. Each links to the original.

1. If for the past ~20 years nobody has come up with something clearly better, then I would say that speaks to how outstanding the product that are being copied are to this day.

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Claude Desktop spins up a VM without no way of stopping it”

2. GMail remains the preferred email client for almost everyone, for a lot of boring but very good reasons (mostly down to reliability and spam filtering)

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Gmail to end support for "Send as" for third-party addresses, such as @yahoo.com”

3. I found the auto writing stuff pretty useless so far (suggestions change the intended tone or even meaning of the email) but summaries are very useful

   Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left”

4. It's a pretty elegant design, which is why I'm so frustrated that Gmail has been the only service where I have found comparable functionality.

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left”

5. Turns out the quality of things like self hosted spam filtering is no match for the world's most notorious data ingestion and analysis company

   Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Help Keep Thunderbird Alive”

6. the standard Gmail interface is highly optimized to cope with bad network connections, hide latency, and recover from interruptions

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Show HN: BAREmail ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ – minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi”

7. GMail and Google Maps were revolutionary when they came out, sure, but the vast majority of Google's products now are... fine?

   Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Claude Desktop spins up a VM without no way of stopping it”

8. I do wish ProtonMail handled labels/folders as one unified model like GMail does, it's so much simpler and more ergonomic.

   Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left”

9. What's clever about the "promotions" tab being automatic that it actually makes me want to read them on my own time.

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left”

10. they also completely defined their product category and today are among the most popular software products ever made

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Claude Desktop spins up a VM without no way of stopping it”

11. Tried a cleared cache load, open and usable in 3 seconds, loading my work inbox which is fairly busy and not clean.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Dead Framework Theory”

12. I do think their settings panels, and their filter management in particular, could sorely use some UX improvements.

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control”

13. Email spam isn't a day to day problem for Gmail (at least) since Bayesian email filtering was first implemented.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “AI Is Killing B2B SaaS”

14. Google really had developed only 2 good products(not including acquisitions such as YouTube): search and gmail.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Google Search is now less than half of Alphabet’s revenue”

15. Gmail can be used from any modern platform through the web and has dedicated Android and iOS apps too.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Help Keep Thunderbird Alive”

16. It needs to be much more granular than it is. For example: Turning that setting off also disables the (very, very old) Updates/Promotions/Social/Forums tabs in the Gmail interface.

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla”

17. It doesn't help that Google has been pushing people away from running their own email and into Google's services by ever tightening what it accepts over the years.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Email is tough: Major European Payment Processor's Emails aren't RFC-Compliant”

18. Surely the problem is on Google's end? And a metaproblem is that we are allowing corporations to change or ignore standards for critical infrastructure?

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Email is tough: Major European Payment Processor's Emails aren't RFC-Compliant”

19. one wrong question or query that looks like “cyber”, say me fixing a buffer overflow in library I maintain, and all of the sudden my gmail is blocked

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “Gemini 4 Argon”

20. if some wayward algorithm decides it doesn't like you, along with nuking your app and developer account it will probably nuke your 20 year old gmail

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “A new Android malware from Google”

21. Gmail gets confused about multi-item orders with different delivery dates, and I cannot click away the banners displaying on top of the mailbox.

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Gmail AI gets more intrusive”

22. Google can just block your account for no obvious reason and ask for KYC, which could easily leave you without access to your email for a week.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left”

23. I have had multiple incorrect Gmail summaries that, if I had only read them instead of the actual email, would have resulted in financial harm.

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse”

24. Tags are great but I still want my folders. Also doesn't help that the way google describes some things is unnecessarily complex or confusing.

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Canvas (Instructure) LMS Down in Ongoing Ransomware Attack”

25. I get so angry about these intrusions. There is nowhere I am more opposed to AI written slop than in my interactions with friends and family.

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “Claude Code’s suggested message feature: I think the real customer is the model”

26. The horrifying thing as they pile on "AI" features lately is realizing that most of my coworkers have a totally different email experience.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left”

27. GMail search fundamentally has an advantage over a mobile email client as Google can and does maintain dedicated indexes for your email on their servers

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “Thunderbird for iOS”

28. I've gotten everything, invoices, investment information, medical data, private photos, etc., though it has been getting better in the last few years

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Gmail might partially be to blame for receiving emails from other Sean Conners”

29. I've caught a few less-than-honest companies either selling my email address, or been breached without disclosing such, simply by using an alias

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “We are experiencing an issue with Gmail beginning on Saturday, 2026-01-24 13:02”

30. supports POP, IMAP, MS Exchange, and (though it got bugged into re-downloading the entire mailbox every day) even old-fashioned MS ActiveSync

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Clicks Communicator”

31. Some parallels to gmail, which similarly rose to dominance by offering a free tier that was leagues above what everyone else was offering.

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Why Replicate is joining Cloudflare”

32. It is useful for anyone who has a personal domain from which they'd like to send/receive without needing to migrate off Google entirely.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Gmail to end support for "Send as" for third-party addresses, such as @yahoo.com”

33. Most of us pay $60-100 a month for an ISP and another $60-100 a month for a cell phone plan, and $0 of that money pays for email.

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Google buys crashed airline Spirit's data at auction, because AI”

34. Gmail is a problem for so many other reasons, but this specific imposed change was a net benefit for the entire email ecosystem.

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “The Future of Email”

35. People who aren't programmers use Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Stripe Invoicing, etc for those various use-cases.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe”

36. so many websites use Login in with Google as a way to sign-in that I just had to keep my gmail logged in most of the time

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “An Update on Leaving Gmail for Fastmail”

37. I wish (more) standard clients aggressively supported these to give an experience as good as the Gmail UI in that way.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left”

38. I went back to using Gmail on my resume and for applications after nearly missing out on an interview because of it.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “There Are No Instances in ATProto”

39. There are plenty of good features in Gmail that are off by default, like undo / delayed send and keyboard shortcuts.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Gmail AI gets more intrusive”

40. I certainly trust more Google than anything else when it comes to protect against real hackers/unauthorized access

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance”