Re: Google Dropping "Less Secure Apps" for GMail May 30th 2022

On Tue, Mar 8, 2022 at 12:22 PM James H. H. Lampert via MIDRANGE-L
<midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

One of the biggest irritants with GMail's web-mail interface (and to a
lesser extent with SmarterMail's), not to mention with a whole bunch of
email readers (especially mobile ones), is the business of making both
top-posting and including the complete text of what is being replied to
(both strongly discouraged by most list-servers, and absolutely taboo in
some) the norm, and making bottom-posting under severely abridged
previous material difficult or impossible. Not to mention frequently
making it difficult or impossible to send plain text emails, or to
disable HTML rendering (HTML email is evil).

The Gmail web interface is certainly not without its problems, but I
actually find it to be one of the better *web* interfaces (i.e. those
that you open in your web browser). It is certainly no worse than
average.

Abridging quoted content, bottom-posting, and plain-text mode
(hallmarks of Usenet-era correspondence) are not at all difficult in
Gmail's web interface, which is what I am using now. Granted, those
things are against the grain, and definitely not *as* easy as quoting
entire threads, top-posting, and HTML mode.

The Gmail mobile app, on the other hand, is egregiously bad on all
those counts. I do not have much experience with other mobile apps,
but I have to imagine nearly all of them are basically just as bad.
And I chalk that up mostly to the physical constraints of mobile
devices. As much as I hate most mobile apps (especially in the
"productivity" genre), I am not sure I could do much better if I were
designing them.

John Y.