What problems does she have with the web interface?
For example one thing I like in FastMail is that in the message list you can finger swipe an item to the left for Delete and to the right for Archive. In Gmail doing that is not accompanied by a drag, so it isn't intuitive and you can only Archive, but not Delete. I like my Inbox to be clean and I prefer to delete junk, no reason to pollute my archive with nonsense. And when viewing a message, FastMail's UI also has arrows for jumping to the next message, which I like.
Another thing that bothers me in Gmail is the message details. In FastMail's UI you get more details.
And also, Gmail's mobile UI has virtually no preferences you can adjust and you have to switch to the desktop version for it, whereas FastMail's mobile UI has most settings in the desktop version.
Honestly I don't know. All I know is she basically refuses to use it because it's too much work.
It sounds like the FM mobile site meets your requirements, especially with respect to inbox zero housekeeping (that I don't practice). I think that's a long way from claiming that the gmail mobile site doesn't work, as the other poster stated.
I think it's nice that there is more than one email service. I don't think they have to be totally ordered by some objective criterion.
One thing that _really_ annoys me about swipe-to-archive on gmail is that, if you do it accidentally, you can't swipe back to undo -- you have to actually tap 'undo'.
My muscle memory just seems programmed to swipe back in the direction I came; and this seems much more intuitive. It's such an annoyance that I've now disabled the swipe functionality.
Does Fastmail implement this better? Or maybe I'm just strange...
Hey, yes, in Fastmail it is properly implemented - it behaves just like the iOS email client, or others: you have to swipe all the way (either to the left for archive or to the right for delete), but if you swipe back, or if you simply release without going the whole way, it will just cancel the action. And you get the swipe animation, so it's intuitive. Which is not something you see often in mobile web interfaces :-)
I, too, would be interested to know what issues someone could have with the Fastmail mobile interface. I'm not even sure how they could make it simpler - it's pretty great.
For example one thing I like in FastMail is that in the message list you can finger swipe an item to the left for Delete and to the right for Archive. In Gmail doing that is not accompanied by a drag, so it isn't intuitive and you can only Archive, but not Delete. I like my Inbox to be clean and I prefer to delete junk, no reason to pollute my archive with nonsense. And when viewing a message, FastMail's UI also has arrows for jumping to the next message, which I like.
Another thing that bothers me in Gmail is the message details. In FastMail's UI you get more details.
And also, Gmail's mobile UI has virtually no preferences you can adjust and you have to switch to the desktop version for it, whereas FastMail's mobile UI has most settings in the desktop version.