Show HN: Gmelius – No Ads and Better User Interface for Gmail

TL;DR Selling a product which basically remove ads from another service does not sit well with me, should be two separates products.<p>I REALLY hate ads on web-based gmail client, but I suppose they are a necessary evil.<p>The an ads-removing feature send the wrong message.<p>I may buy (or donate for) a gmail-client-enhancer. I may buy (or donate for) an ad-remover plugin (well, I already use ABP and ghostery, and donated for the former) But I wouldn&#x27;t give money for a gmail-specific ad-remover, that doesn&#x27;t feel right (even if I am using ABP, maybe the &#x27;specific&#x27; part?)<p>I may be wrong, but distributing it at two separate plug-ins may be better. Removing the &quot;ad-removing&quot; part would be the easiest way, because interested people almost all already have ad-blocker.<p>Even if you chose to let it in, not making it a major marketing point would be smarter. just let it there as an option (activated by default or not, I don&#x27;t know).<p>PS: Attachment icons would be real nice, though, I love that feature.<p>PS2: Yes, I know, using ABP and not wanting to pay for that app because of this feature sounds like hypocrisy, in fact it is, but that&#x27;s how I thought about it (I have build-in hypocrisy), and I may not be the only one.

I use a native app for my gmail so I&#x27;m not the target (although I&#x27;d certainly be interested if I were using the online interface), but here&#x27;s some feedback on your homepage:<p>-Make your headline a different color other than white, because it&#x27;s very hard to see with that background image.<p>-It took me scrolling &quot;below the fold&quot; to find out what it is this product does. I&#x27;d change your headline to something more concrete, like &quot;Gmail, the way you want it&quot; while also finding a way to move up some of the product-specific content higher up on the page.<p>-You also have way too much text and the two paragraphs that start with &quot;Gmelius, pronounced &#x27;Gmail&#x27;-&#x27;jus&#x27;...&quot; seem unnecessarily long and distract me from finding out more about your project. I actually read that and just skipped past that whole block of text and later realized I had also overlooked your donation box.<p>-There&#x27;s also too much text explaining the features, making those screenshots look tiny in comparison. I think you could just get rid of the descriptive text and keep the feature titles, like &quot;Restore the old compose window&quot; and &quot;Experience Gmail without ads&quot; without losing any of the message.<p>-Minor point: That red download box should explicitly tell me it&#x27;s not supported for Safari, if you&#x27;re detecting my browser. Right now it says &quot;Free Download for Safari&quot; in bold text with &quot;Browser not supported&quot; in a lighter typeface underneath. Like I said, minor, but I found it a bit confusing.<p>Hope that helps!

Kind of ironic that a page that offers to hide adsense on gmail uses adsense on its own site to support itself. It&#x27;s almost as if they knew gmail couldn&#x27;t exist without adsense and yet still offer their users to hide those ads while cashing on adsense themselves. Maybe the right word is shameless, not ironic.

This is probably a good approach to the permanent &quot;How to fix email&quot; problem.<p>&quot;Add-on&quot; is the keyword here. Instead of disrupting your workflow by offering a distinct native app developed from scratch, this simply enhances an already great experience. I consider Gmail&#x27;s UI very efficient and actually quite close to perfection (speed, reliability, labels, filters, multiple inboxes, keyboard shortcuts...). Gmelius just corrects the small annoyances that remain or have appeared lately.<p>This reminds me of a sentence in Dropbox&#x27;s YC application: <i>&quot;With Dropbox, you hit &quot;Save&quot;, as you normally would, and everything just works.&quot;</i> The worflow isn&#x27;t altered. It&#x27;s just better.<p>Of course, Gmelius is <i>just</i> and add-on, with no clear business model. But maybe that&#x27;s all we need after all.

I&#x27;ve always loved the idea of making Email better vis-a-vis the hyped rants of replacing Email. Sorry! Email is going no where and neither do existing email services &amp; mail clients completely suck at managing email. Yes, there are some gaps in them and that&#x27;s what we should try to solve. The whole approach of solving the problems with existing email services &amp; clients vis-a-vis the idea of completely replacing it.<p>We built MetisMe around this philosophy of making it very easy to search and share attachments inside Email. www.metisme.com .<p>The next thing that we&#x27;re targeting upon is can we give more context to the content which is already there inside Email.

Heh, I suppose I was one of the early adopters of this one... IIRC, I have been using this since 2010 or so. This is one of the first FF addons (along with Adblock and Stylish) that gets installed on any new FF installation for me. Wonderful utility, thanks Florian!<p>I think I emailed him at some point if it would be possible for him to offer this for Yahoo! Mail as well. Since then, Yahoo have modified their own UX for the better, but the request to extend this to Yahoo mail still stands from my end (pretty please, Florian) :-)

I&#x27;m not too familiar with web development, so please forgive my question: Is this just a style sheet that the browser knows how to apply, or am I giving you read access to my e-mail?

Just installed it! Really happy with the options page which allows me to enable and disable only the options I want. For example: I actually prefer the new email compose for my work inbox, because I usually have to go around searching and referring to other emails while writing.<p>Anyway, it is already looking much cleaner and nicer, and I hope it saves some time and makes my emailing experience more efficient. I&#x27;ll try it out for a week or two, and you will hopefully get a small donation from me :)

If header is removed, you lose the option to Undo after performing some operation. That should be fixed.

Couldn&#x27;t have this served its purpose as a simple Greasemonkey script?

This is an excellent service&#x2F;Chrome extension that I have been proudly been using for over two years (I think...) I donated then and I will donate now again. Keep up the great work. It is wonderful.<p>edit: two years

I&#x27;ve been using &quot;Minimalist for Everything&quot; [1] for over a year, which comes with a great set of rules to clean and customise GMail&#x27;s interface.<p>This seems to go further (and allow icons to be customised, which I&#x27;d like) - look forward to trying it!<p>1. <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/minimalist-for-everything/bmihblnpomgpjkfddepdpdafhhepdbek" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;minimalist-for-eve...</a>

Wow, a lot of these are things I would do myself (remove the styled font garbage, the hidden email addresses, ads, bring back the good compose window, cleaner print). I have doubts about a browser extension modifying a page working long term, though. Especially when they remove ads and thus place themselves as a negative to Google. I&#x27;m more tempted to just switch to an email client.

Old Compose. <i>OWWWW YEAH</i>

Looks like a great product!<p>One annoyance I have with the page itself though: The top three links are pretty pointless.<p>Download does nothing unless you scroll down but then that hides the header.<p>About scrolls down a tiny bit and features just a bit more. The features is probably the most useful of them all but even then it&#x27;s cutting it short. Why not make the header fixed and actually give some point to those links? :)

I feel like I&#x27;d install this extension, only for google to break it in a few days (via code changes or take-down notice)

Genius ! I ticked nearly all of the options as I had grown to find the Gmail interface a complete PAIN. Thank you so much

In the settings interface, &quot;Gmelius gives you the possibility to regain some space and to clean your inbox by removing or disabling:&quot;<p>... it&#x27;s not entirely clear in the UI whether checking a box there ENABLES or DISABLES the feature, because normally<p>[x] feature means &quot;enable this feature&quot;, not &quot;disable this feature&quot;

&quot;Move attachment icons from the right to the left of your inbox&quot;<p>-- sold!!! ... and a bunch of other ones I like too :)

Really nice. For me the best part was allowing me to turn off all the crap related to chat. I don&#x27;t use Google Talk&#x2F;Hangouts and don&#x27;t know anyone who does (might be a regional thing). Being able to hide everything related to chat and status instantly made Gmail much cleaner.

I&#x27;ve been using Gmelius for quite a long time now (a year? more?). I couldn&#x27;t be happier. Every time I happen to open my gmail in another browser, I&#x27;m shocked at just how weird it looks with all the extra clutter.<p>Thanks for the awesome work!

Gripe: One of the options that I selected reverted Hangouts to the old Google Chat system without explicitly saying so.<p>EDIT: It was the Old Compose feature, which admittedly is in beta. Still, I&#x27;m not a fan of losing the group chats I have open.

&gt; To be clear and to the point, Gmelius will never access, read, store, alter or transmit your personal data.<p>I&#x27;m a trusting person, so I believe them. But privacy is a big issue these days. Not sure a one-liner is enough to assuage doubts.

There are a lot of chrome extensions to improve Gmail UI. Most of them have the same features as these ones.<p>I went through your list of features, but didn&#x27;t find anything I&#x27;d really be interested in. Not for me.

I understand people&#x27;s dislike for ads. But how is it possible for Google to provide a free and robust email service to millions without any revenue model? I am asking out of sincere curiosity.

The YouTube video helps explain the product a little bit better. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D44zaBoaKu0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=D44zaBoaKu0</a>

I don&#x27;t know one person, who is not &quot;happy enough&quot; with Gmail as it is. I think therefore it would be better if title and starting screen of the website show what is the problem.

Interesting ideas. Attachment icons seem nice. Other than that though the rest of the features aren&#x27;t helpful for me (or at least not enough that I&#x27;d want to install it.)

I love having the old compose both for writing new mails and replying back. Thanks! Any chance you could setup a donate option that doesn&#x27;t involve paypal? :)

Does this not support the latest safari? Looks awesome and would love to try it but it says it is incompatible with my browser, Safari Version 7.0 (9537.71).

Is it possible to have the extra half of labels auto-expand, when chat is hidden? There is a lot of extra space in the sidebar now.

Personally i am already very happy with the GMAIL interface. The ads are a very minor distraction. And none of the features they show have much appeal to me (except the attachment icon perhaps).<p>But then again, that&#x27;s just me.

It&#x27;s like PowerToys for Gmail.

Is it compatible with Firefox 24?

Cool greasemonkey script, bro

I use it. Love it.

what does the premium offer?