Good, will keep with it

Having been through a few email clients, bouncing between thunderbird, Apple mail, Postbox, and even the Microsoft Outlook, all of them have some weaknesses. The main motivation being that the Apple Mail client built into OS-X installs at times has some horribly broken behavior with large imap accounts, and since almost all my email is hosted by Google (main gmail account, and three domains I use Google Apps for) if there is wonkiness, then I am miserable.

I have at times just relied on the web app, but it is a pain to keep tabs open on my browser.

Enter Kiwi for Gmail. It encapsulates the gmail native web interface into a stand alone application. It appears to use Safari to render, and it is pretty slick. It does make it a lot easier to properly archive and label email (the Google system uses labels in lieu of actual folders, and that is what the different versions of Apple Mail breaks).

I currently have 5 accounts, and it is pretty good to work between them for my accounts. It uses the classic Gmail interface, not the newer “Inbox” paradigm, but I am not entirely sold on that evolution. It supposedly integrates well with the Google Drive for sending large files. Not something I use, so I have no experience with it.

Since it is just a web interface, there isn’t a locally cached store of email. Many people might think this is a negative, but it isn’t for me. It did allow me to clear off almost 15 gigabytes of cached mailboxes, a not trivial percentage of my MacBook Air’s SSD.

The bad:
Alas, the program gets frozen a coupel times a day, and unresponsive. A quit/restart and all is back to normal, not a terrible deal. FWIW, Apple Mail crashed a couple times a week with a couple of my Google Gmail accounts, so I am not complaining too loudly.

When I bought it, it was mentioned that a major update was coming soon, so I will come back and re-review when that drops on me.

Gander666 about Kiwi for Gmail, v1.8.97