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Comment by bubblemoth | Hacker News Reader

I've always been interested in using a desktop client for email, and a few times I have installed and configured one.

But I've always gone back to the web client. What are the advantages of using a desktop client over a web client?

For me personally, I am actively monitoring 6 different accounts across 3 different services. There's no way I'm pinning, at minimum, 3 different tabs in my browser to accomplish something that Thunderbird or Spark handles much more effectively.

In addition to what others have already said, one can back up their emails and archive them wherever. This is useful not only for account termination but also for migrating to other email providers. Combine this with using a custom domain and one can have much more control over their communications. One can choose whether to leave emails on the server or move them locally and manage backing them up locally or even push an encrypted backup into the cloud.

Thunderbird can encrypt emails very easily to at least keep the body of the email hidden from machine learning. There are how-to's and videos for creating and managing encryption keys.

You need less resources. Your data is always with you. You can add extensions that make things more suitable for your workflow.

A random selection of benefits that I see on an almost daily basis:

Combining multiple accounts from multiple providers in the same interface is a lot easier.

Alt + Tabbing to your mail client is a lot easier. It's absolutely brilliant in something like i3 where I pin my mail app to a desktop, and so my mail is always a single key combo away.

Having multiple open message/compose windows is a lot easier.

Stuff like multiple mail selections using your keyboard and even mouse is a lot easier.

Notifications work better and can be controlled in a much more granular way.

There are a ton of automations that can be made a lot easier.

Attaching files to email is a lot easier. Most OS'es/file browsers can make it a single right click process.

Rules can be far more powerful.

Downloading means you can access your messages (maybe even all messages) at anytime, whether you have access to the internet or not.

You can maintain email hygiene much better. For example, I have my email check set to once every 15 minutes, which means I will only be able to see new email once every 15 mins at most. Until I really got used to not checking and refreshing every time, I had even more aggressive strategies where I blocked network access to the email app and had to manually enable it and manually download emails, each time I wanted to check emails. There may be better strategies or alternatives, but the point is that you have a lot more control.

The downsides of desktop mail clients: Search tends to be slower and often worse.

No easy access from other computers.

Some missing "advanced" features (e.g. the GMail style promotions tabs, etc., and the additional live features GMail often provides)

Labels don't work well with most desktop clients (although GMail focused clients do an excellent job, but personally I don't prefer them because I have many non GMail accounts that I also want to use in the same interface).

IMAP syncing is slow and silly. I wish we had a better protocol. This doesn't make much of a difference in practice unless you're trying to use email as an IM application.

> IMAP syncing is slow and silly.

JMAP might help a bit with that, but that still has a few design choices I don't understand.

If you use gmail, one advantage is that you won't lose years of emails if Google randomly decides to terminate your account.

Is this a known thing? I'm convinced it's the case, especially for emails from the 2000s. My email usage dropped in the 2010s, so I don't have as much important stuff stored in there, but there are periods of my Inbox history, where I know I was using Gmail heavily, that have basically little more than a handful of emails anymore.

It has happened, so it's a known thing.

Better PGP integration

To be fair there's not much to do with it. Market share wise there's Thunderbird followed by a large chasm and then maybe Protonmail and other clients with plugins.

S/MIME is significantly more widespread, but has a cost of entry, it's fairly undocumented and quite a few clients have buggy implementations.

It's blazing fast in comparison, you have much more flexibility in configuration, you can do neat things with your data that's all there, etc...

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