<p>Gmail is the best of its time. The thing is: its time was 2009</p><p>David Braue: Gmail was born to outshine Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft Hotmail. Superlative spam catching, innovations like Gmail Labs and the high-value (and free) Google Apps bundle embodied Google's debonair anti-establishmentarianism and made us forget its sole purpose in life was to help Google sell more ads.</p><p>Companies standardizing on Gmail many of which were SMEs without the budget for Microsoft Exchange found themselves hand-holding employees on an unfamiliar and unintuitive interface built around message tags, archiving and conversation view.</p><p>Developers have struggled to keep up with changes to Gmail's poorly-defined and regularly-changing APIs, while Google's IMAP and POP3 never worked perfectly. Google restricted Exchange ActiveSync access; iOS Mail still can't deal with Gmail's ability to archive messages or delete them; and Apple's Mavericks version of Mail couldn't speak properly to Gmail at all.</p><p><a href="http://www.zdnet.com/debate/time-to-abandon-gmail/10131024/">Keep reading...</a></p>