Dear Google,
Let me first say that I’ve been a GMail user since nearly the very beginning of the public “beta”. I’ve been extremely happy with the service. So much so, that I’ve abandoned all desktop email clients. Second, let me say that the GMail experience on the iPhone sucks. I’m sure you’re probably working on something, but I still intend to enumerate my issues with the current offering.
My first attempt was to use the built in GMail profile for connecting to my account. The issue is that it’s not nearly customizable enough. It really should only download my inbox. I subscribe to a few mailing lists that get a lot of traffic. This is absolutely fine on the web interface because they’re automatically filtered into a label and out of my inbox. Those emails are absolutely worthless on my phone, but I can’t seem to figure out how to keep them off of it using the POP access method.
It’s so worthless, that I’m willing to give up the convenience of using the built in app and use the GMail web interface. It works for me on the desktop, why not on the mobile? Well, first, I lose the ability to see if i have new messages or have my phone make some noise when I get new emails. Second, the GMail web interface is pretty much unusable on the iPhone. It’s a fantastic desktop experience, but it just plain sucks on the iPhone. I’m referring mostly to the inbox. The layout is so wide that you can’t really zoom in in a meaningful way. There are invalid characters at the beginning of every subject line. Because of the zoom issue, the checkboxes are largely unclickable.
So, I decided to go with the mobile version. It is mostly usable, aside from that there is no button to mark a message as spam. It’s still a very sad way to access my email on such a device. There are a ton of possible solutions to this issue. First, allow me to only download mail in my inbox through POP. That’s an easy one. What I think everyone would prefer would be IMAP access. I know that’s a tall order considering how GMail doesn’t really comply to the folders data model of IMAP, but I’m sure you guys are smart enough to figure something out. Another option would be to just create a special view for the iPhone. There are already half a million of them out there. It’s worth it.
In any case. I’ve been looking for an alternative to GMail for the first time since I signed up. I’ll give you some time to figure it out, but I may have to leave you if there are no solutions in the next few weeks.
-dave