Why I Never Moved Off Gmail's Web App

I have never used a separate email client. Notion Mail shut down and it did not affect me, because everything has always been in Gmail's web app and phone app. What I do have is a pile: somewhere between 100 and 500 mails sitting in my inbox waiting for something. That is the actual problem, and switching client would not have touched it, because the pile is mine and not the app's.

I have not used Thunderbird, Outlook or Notion Mail itself, so this is not a comparison of clients. It is why I never needed one, plus the problem that stayed anyway.

What a client would and would not have fixed

When a mail tool closes, the advice is always to pick a replacement. Before doing that it is worth separating what the tool does from what you do.

A client changes how reading and writing feel: keyboard shortcuts, offline access, several accounts in one window, snoozing, a different idea of what an inbox is. Those are real, and if you live in mail all day they are worth paying for in time and money.

What a client does not change is the volume arriving or the decisions each message needs. My 100 to 500 waiting mails are not waiting because Gmail's interface is slow. They are waiting because each one needs a reply I have not written, or a decision I have not made, and a nicer window around the same message does not make the decision.

That is why Notion Mail closing was not an event for me. I had nothing to migrate, no filters to rebuild, no second place my mail lived. Using the plainest option costs you everything interesting about the interesting ones. The benefit showed up on the day one of them disappeared.

The one thing I should have set up years ago

Filters, and I say this as someone with hundreds of unread mails who still has not done it properly.

Gmail's own help page describes what a filter can do: "send email to a label, or archive, delete, star, or automatically forward" your mail. Read on 2 October 2026. The page does not state a limit on how many conditions or actions a filter can have.

Archive is the one that matters for a pile like mine. Mail that should never have reached the inbox can be labelled and taken out of it before I see it, which is different from me seeing it, deciding it is not important, and leaving it there. The second one costs attention every time I scroll past it. The first costs nothing after the five minutes of setting it up.

What I would actually do, in order

1. Sort the inbox by sender rather than by date, and look at who sends you the most. It is rarely people. It is usually three or four services.
2. Write one filter per service that labels and archives, so those never land in the inbox again.
3. Leave everything already in the pile alone for now. Fixing the inflow is a different job from clearing the backlog, and doing the backlog first means doing it again next month.
4. Only then decide whether the remaining mail needs a better client. If what is left is people writing to you, that is a workload question rather than a software one.

I have done the first of those and not the rest, which is the honest state of it.

One reason to care about Gmail specifically

If you stay on the free Google account, there is a connection between your mail and everything else you store that is worth knowing.

The 15 GB on a free account is shared across Drive, Gmail and Photos, and when it fills, Google's documentation says you cannot send or receive mail. I wrote about hitting that in paying for Google Docs by deleting files. For anyone with a few hundred mails and years of attachments, that is a slower moving version of the same risk: the mail does not stop because of anything you did to your mail.

So the answer to "which client after Notion Mail" was, for me, none. The question that was actually worth my time was how much of my mail should have reached me at all, and I am still mostly losing that one.