https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients
2. Please consider avoiding Google (and Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple) as your email provider, due to their mass surveillance practices, both for commercial ad targeting and for US government political policing. There are several other reasonable webmail providers, if you really can't give up the web interface.
I use the mail client on iOS out of principle but still end up opening the gmail app when I actually need to find something.
A state actor will have less trouble breaking into a mail server I run, and I don’t really believe too much in the idea that other countries apart from the US are immune to police overreach.
Signed: someone who has multiple email addresses, has tried all the fancy alternatives (fastmail etc) and who desperately wants this stuff to work because having 3 web tabs to check email is annoying.
Only if they have a good reason to target you, personally.
But if we are talking about mass surveillance, attacking a large provider is incredibly *cheaper*: spend one million dollars on 0-days to gain access to one million mailboxes, or one billion to intercept submarine cables and backdoor CPUs and gain access to one billion mailboxes.
There is no way to attack somebody's personal, custom mailserver with a budget of $1.
I would actually make the opposite statement, i.e. generally, webmail clients are significantly inferior to desktop clients in most respects: Feature set, responsiveness, flexibility etc. And of course, being potentially somewhat secure, as opposed to guaranteed no-security with webmail.
As for search functionality - I'm not sure you're right, but I'll grant you that some webmail providers, like Google, provide speedy search.
I’m sure it’s something about my configurations but every time I mess around to figure it out it doesn’t work.
Generally my use of email is “look at stuff from right now” or “look at stuff from 6+ months ago”
(Here “wrong” means “does not find the email I am looking for”. Usually a failure mode of just not showing much of anything)
I have considered moving email accounts, but also don't have enough motivation for all that entails.
I have 2FA required on regular logins for example, which can be a Yubikey or authenticator app token. At the same time, I have app passwords, used by my emacs-based email setup. Mu4e gives me instant search-based access to my saved email, and pretty good security elsewhere. Is that an option?
Well, Google has your email, to read and use and pass on, so I'm not quite sure what this "advanced protection" can mean.