Mia for Gmail App Reviews

The app doesn’t work unless you’re willing to make your gmail account “less secure.” After installing and entering my gmail account & password, this said it was “unable to authenticate with the current session’s credentials” and I got an email from Google titled “sign-in attempt blocked.” Apparently this app doesn’t meet Google’s requirements for being secure-enough to be trusted to access Gmail accounts. In your Gmail account, you can turn off that security check to allow this app to work, but I’d rather see this app update to jump through whatever hoops Google requires than flip some switch in my settings that says it makes things less secure.

The only reason I have this app is because I don’t have enough room on my computer for all of my mail in mac mail. This app keeps telling me that it can’t make a secure connection or that it can’t authenticate the session’s credentials. I have deleted all of my mail accounts and reinstalled them, changed their passwords and am still getting these error messages. The real kicker is that the messages only occur while my computer is at home, and doesn’t happen when I am at work.

The original Gmail Notifier would automatically become the default app mailto links for every browser installed, and would direct those links to be opened by the default email account setup in Notifier. This doesn’t do that.

This app is terrible. It is stuck in a crash and burn loop and according to activity monitor using 98% of my cpu constantly. All i did was try to open it. No way to uninstall or even force quit the process, had to use the terminal to stop the process loop. If i could give this negative stars I would. Not sure how this passed apples approval process, but i would rather punch myself in the face than try and debug this again.

I just wanted a simple menu bar email notifier that showed my unread mail and allows me to quickly visit my gmail inbox, and so far for the short time I’ve had it it seems to be working great for that.

Was hesitant to try this, given the authentication issues others were reporting. But it looks like it supports OAuth2 now. Sure enough, it promtped me for my 2FA code and synced without any security alerts from Google. So far so good. One small critique. The menu bar icons arent well done. They look clipped and distorted. I use Mail Mini to monitor a separate Gmail account (I prefer separate icons), and its icons are much simpler with better dimensions. So I just opened the package contents and swapped them out for the Mail Mini ones. Now Mia looks better and my menu bar is consistent.

Unless your needs are very basic I dont suspect you will be using this as a replacement for a full featured email client. However it is a great replacement for Google Notifier. This is exactly what I needed. Due to differences between traditional email servers and gmail I have never been thrilled with the experience of using standard imap desktop clients with gmail. To get the most seamless and frustration free experience with gmail you really need to use the web app in my opinion. But without a mail application running in your dock to notify you of new messages you may accidentally close your browser tab and forget to check your email for some time. If you need to provide timely responses to email this could be bad. Mia for gmail solves this problem for me. I did not use the previous version which had a lot of negative comments about the authentication. I can say that with this version I had no problem authenticating to Google using Google preferred oAuth 2.0 mechanisms.