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Comment by billybob | Hacker News Reader

Just curious - what's the appeal of non-web-based email? I'm forced to use Outlook at work, but I can't imagine having to install something to get my personal mail, and having to back up my personal mail. Do people do this mostly because they're concerned about their data privacy, or because it's easier to work when you don't have internet access, or what?

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My wife's old yahoo account got hacked. Watching yahoo's nonexistent "customer service" "help" her convinced me there is a giant hidden danger to webmail--she essentially had no recourse, no way to reclaim the address, no way to recover old emails, no way to stop this person from getting new emails she might receive, and no way to stop them from impersonating her.

For geeks (and perhaps geek's spouses) owning your own domain and only contracting out the email hosting to Google is probably the way to go here. If it all goes wrong then you control the domain and what happens to emails sent to it.

You having the full control over your data.

Do you really not backup your mails? Do you consider them not important or do you glorify your provider? I highly recommend making your own backups for anything you consider worth saving.

Or if you run your own IMAP server, you don't need to backup any data on the client side...

Just because I have control, doesn't mean the data is safer.

It's the practical realization that Google is likely to have a more recent, redundant backup of my data than me. The amount of effort to ensure that P(losing my backup) < P(google losing a backup) isn't worth the effort except for a few very important pieces of data.

Of course your google account could always be disabled for some reason....

That's true, and a much better reason than data loss.

If you keep your mail on the server and download it using your client, then P(losing your backup & google losing the files) is much smaller than either one of those probabilities.

Four big things for me:

1) Offline copies: Either because I have no internet access or the webmail provider is down. For my company e-mail "Google is down" or "I can't get online" is just not a good enough excuse when such an easy solution exists. Even if you primarily use webmail I would highly suggest mirroring a local copy via IMAP if you're dealing with important stuff.

2) I like being able to segregate my mail into its own space. I maximize my mail client full screen and have other windows on my second display such as individual messages or notes, address book, calendar, etc. I find this to be more appealing than opening half a dozen browser windows and clicking through different sections of GMail.

3) Nothing beats the performance of a local store. My IMAP server keeps a full backup so any one client losing its local copy isn't a problem. Searches are instant in Apple Mail, I can bounce between different folders/messages with no penalty waiting for another GMail page to load.

4) No distractions. When I have to sit down and pound through lots of e-mail being in a browser makes me less productive.

I do it because I use Microsoft Exchange for personal mail. I like having my contacts, calendar, email, and to-dos sync automatically on each computer and on the iPhone. Plus I like how Outlook integrates a Calendar, Contacts, and Email together so it's easy to switch between them versus Gmail where I need to open a new window for calendar and contact management is a pain (though after exchange, gmail is hands down the best).

I use thunderbird because I have a lot of email accounts and I like to have them all in one central place. With thunderbird I can download all mail from gmail, yahoo, my isp mailbox and all other accounts on my local pc and manage them all from one place. That's the main reason. Then there is the fact that I can easily switch mail provider without loosing my mail.

gmail can download your mail from other accounts and send outgoing mail through back through the right server.

Have all your mail in one central place without being tied to a single box with a particular config. You can even use desktop clients on multiple computers via IMAP without any hassles.

Search actually works.

SPEED! Man, I just installed and it downloads locally and indexes all your IMAP emails, (a few gigs of data in my case).

Then search in ALL of them is INSTANTANEOUS!

I wasn't using Gmail due to the non-functional search for word fraction. And my IMAP server's search took almost a minute sometimes (dovecot + extra indexing options). But this is... unbelievable.

Because one size does not fit all.

I tried Gmail and other mail clients, but I've been in Thunderbird since 2007 now.

I love the speed. I use it for work email. I like the tagging. I like the speed. I click and email opens. It doesn't matter how slow my connection is right now. It's easy to backup to an external hard drive. When my browser crashes, my email does not. I like how the folders work. The spam filter is awesome.

Buy mostly, it just feels like home to me. I don't know how to explain it, but I love being in Thunderbird, and I just can't operate without it now.

I am using Thunderbird with Gmail through IMAP. No need to backup anything. On the other hand I find it hard to do certain tasks using web interface.

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