1. Threads are collapsed into a 1-dimensional list making moderately complex discussions hard to follow.
2. Deleting many messages is very slow. With Thunderbird I can mash <Delete> while scanning subjects and pause for a second to see the actual message body. I get a lot of email that I need to sort through or be aware of so my morning generally consists of quickly (15min) going through up to 100 conversions and getting quick status updates or just deleting uninteresting threads. For whatever reason doing this in GMail is a complete slog. (I'm not sure why, they have the <y> shortcut to archive and have a preview pane but it is just way slower, maybe they need to precache a few messages on either side of the current one?)
3. Threads are based on subject meaning that unrelated messages get grouped together. (Apparently this was changed in 2019 (https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2019/03/threading-ch...) but I've definitely seen this issue for at least a year after that announcement when I stopped using GMail)
I do admit that most of GMail is pretty good. But for me these limitations are enough to really impede my workflow. I've found that Thunderbird is the least-bad option for me. However Thunderbird's performance is quite poor. I do have 350k messages downloaded locally but even opening my empty inbox sometimes causes lockups. IIUC this is because Thunderbird is mostly single-threaded but apparently there is progress slowly being made here. For example composing messages used to frequently lock up for a few seconds but I haven't seen that in a couple years.
> 1. Threads are collapsed into a 1-dimensional list making moderately complex discussions hard to follow.
You can disable this - it's called "Conversation mode" and you can turn it off. Many of my colleagues have it off as they find it unusable due to their workflow (they often end up with threads with 50-100 emails in them & conversation mode makes it painful).
(Be aware that Conversation mode is required for some tools/plugins/extensions to work though.)
1. Threads are collapsed into a 1-dimensional list making moderately complex discussions hard to follow.
2. Deleting many messages is very slow. With Thunderbird I can mash <Delete> while scanning subjects and pause for a second to see the actual message body. I get a lot of email that I need to sort through or be aware of so my morning generally consists of quickly (15min) going through up to 100 conversions and getting quick status updates or just deleting uninteresting threads. For whatever reason doing this in GMail is a complete slog. (I'm not sure why, they have the <y> shortcut to archive and have a preview pane but it is just way slower, maybe they need to precache a few messages on either side of the current one?)
3. Threads are based on subject meaning that unrelated messages get grouped together. (Apparently this was changed in 2019 (https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2019/03/threading-ch...) but I've definitely seen this issue for at least a year after that announcement when I stopped using GMail)
I do admit that most of GMail is pretty good. But for me these limitations are enough to really impede my workflow. I've found that Thunderbird is the least-bad option for me. However Thunderbird's performance is quite poor. I do have 350k messages downloaded locally but even opening my empty inbox sometimes causes lockups. IIUC this is because Thunderbird is mostly single-threaded but apparently there is progress slowly being made here. For example composing messages used to frequently lock up for a few seconds but I haven't seen that in a couple years.