From Gmail to MobileMe
When I purchased an iPhone 3G (upgrading from the first gen), I also purchased the companion MobileMe service, and I’ve been giving it a test run since. At the time, I was hoping for a replacement to Google’s Gmail, but unfortunately, it’s not quite there yet. I thought I’d take a few minutes to offer some tips to the MobileMe Email team, as well as start a discussion on email services in general.
First, I thought I’d outline the reasons for an alternative to Gmail. Let me preface this by making it clear that I love Gmail - it’s a great service, but one that has some inherently odd choices that make it less than ideal for an email-heavy user. Some of Gmail’s most irksome quirks:
- No such thing as folders. Instead, everything is tagged, which doesn’t lend itself well to being used inside my mail client
- The “All Mail” special tag appearing in my mail client via IMAP, which appears as though I receive two of every email
- Removes duplicates of messages, which means if I send a message to myself, it will never appear in my inbox (instead, it’s always in my Sent Messages tag)
- Not completely reliable.
In terms of reliability, it’s very important to me that the service is always available, and always fast. I want to receive messages moments after they’re sent - not hours later. When checking for messages from my other accounts (via POP), Google uses some heuristics to determine how often it should check for new messages. Unfortunately, this often means it won’t check for an hour or so, which can be very annoying.
So, I’ve been on the lookout for a Gmail replacement for some time, and thought I had found it in Apple’s revamped MobileMe service. When it was launched, it appeared that Apple was doing email right, but as I’ve learned from using the service first-hand, I’ve merely traded improvements in some areas, for problems in others. For instance:
- It can’t check foreign email accounts. This wasn’t a complete deal-breaker, as I have some clever auto-forward email recipes setup which largely solves this problem.
- There’s no way to send mail as a non-MobileMe email account. You can create multiple “personalities” that give you different @me.com addresses, but there’s no way to send as a non @me.com address. This is a huge problem, and means I can’t stop using Gmail until this is added to MobileMe.
- It drives me crazy that the web interface often refreshes the entire page. If I leave it open in a Safari tab for a little while, then return, it seems to refresh. That’s annoying.
- Another annoyance factor is that whenever I return to the email interface (or whenever the page refreshes), all of my folders are expanded. I have a LOT of email, and I keep them fairly well organized into many different folders. I’d like the system to remember what folders I had kept closed.
I should mention that I am a big fan of the push email functionality I get with MobileMe (and is a major reason why I’m still using the service). Also, the email web interface is clean and intuitive (and matches the Mail desktop app, which scores major points with me). Compared to the other major email providers (Gmail, and Yahoo Mail, for instance), the MobileMe email interface wins hands-down.
Apple’s MobileMe is a fantastic service, but I just can’t switch yet. So many different great features are all aligning to make for a killer email product, but the annoyances I’ve outlined are show-stoppers for me (and why I can’t dump Gmail just yet). I’m more than happy to pay the MobileMe subscription service if Apple could just get these last few details smoothed out.
What’s your take? Have you considered switching from Gmail to MobileMe?
