Why would anyone use this over Proton Mail or the gazillion alternatives if it treats people like shit.
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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It sucks that Gmail is pretty much the best app that works with, well.. Gmail accounts. At least from what I’ve found. Especially with the 2FA thing where it asks you to press “yes” in Gmail after signing into Gmail from a different browser.
Spark and some more sensible form of 2fa will do. I’ve found Spark superior in every way, what do you prefer about the gmail app? You can use your hardware keys or totp apps with gmail, and it’s much more portable.
It’s mainly due to the lack of knowledge, I don’t know what hardware keys are, nor do I know what a totp app is, so it’s more of a convenience thing for me and not pretending to know what something is or how it works
“If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”
If it works for you, awesome :)
If you ever feel like looking into totp (time-based one time passwords) some common ones are authy or google authenticator. In case you ever feel the need to start investigating, or some account tells you to use an authenticator like that.
Oh? You can set an Authenticator like Microsoft Authenticator for Gmail accounts? I know about those apps I just didn’t know what totp meant
I think I tried that but it defaulted to Gmail, I keep forgetting how to actually change that, or at least make google keep that setting. It took forever for it to click in how to change login settings from pixel to iPhone (you know the google app popping up with the “press yes to authenticate”
The whole process just really confuses me.
Yep! Sorry for unsolicited acronym, I realize that’s a really annoying thing to get in reply comments.
Any time an app tells you to “use Google authenticator” you can use any authenticator. That QR code they give you to scan for setup can be read by lots of apps. I personally like authy, and it is a very easy cross platform switch when you bounce from android to iPhone or whatever. Keep copies of your backup passwords tho! No matter which app you choose, either print them out or put them in a password manager or whatever Very Secure Method you like.
That being said if you’re happy with your setup that’s awesome and no need to fix what ain’t bugging ya.
What’s so great about the gmail app (aside from the 2FA thing you mentioned?) Personally, I’m reasonably happy with the iOS mail app (I mean, it’s bad, but it does its job and it doesn’t advertise to me, so I guess that’s a win)… But I guess I do most of my emailing on mu4e.
Nothing really, just the 2FA I find to be really useful and I’m too lazy to switch over my 2FA settings too.
I can’t seem to get the iOS mail app to work for Gmail, it always, and I mean always pushed notifications like a minimum of 30-45 minutes late for important emails. Maybe even longer, and that’s a minimum.
There’s other email clients I’ve wanted to use: outlook was one and spark was the other. I liked outlook, but again the 2FA was important, and Spark felt like it was a tad bit too gimmicky for an email client (having AI to write an email for me, I mean I guess that can be useful but I’d rather take the time to write it myself)
The mail app does not support push notifications for gmail and also does not support IMAP IDLE (my naive understanding is that IDLE keeps a socket open and potentially the radio as a result which would impact battery life), so it fetches emails on a timer. AFAIK the only ways to get push notifications is with iCloud email and with an exchange server. I know you used to be able to set gmail up as an exchange server account on iOS, but I’m not certain if gmail will still pretend to be an exchange server these days. This is probably my biggest complaint with the mail app — like I said, it’s not great :), but it’s good enough for my purposes right now.
That’s fair! :) I feel the same about the Gmail app, it’s not great, but it fits my purposes well enough. I saw the ads OP was talking about, I know I’ve seen them for years by this point, but I never really took notice because they’re so (in my humble opinion) discreet and not really noticeable.
Edit to add, hope you have a good day/night!