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Comment by greggman3 | Hacker News Reader

To each their own but I find it hard to fathom using a non-cloud based email system. I regularly access my email from 7 computers.

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By “non-cloud based email system” you mean anything that isn’t gmail via a web browser?

I regularly access my “non-cloud based email systems” from 8 different devices.

I have native apps for email on the various machines I own (between phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops that's at least 5). And, in a pinch, I can still use webmail.

I'm not sure why "cloud" matters for email -- it's always been hosted on a server somewhere.

If you use POP for your mail client, your client downloads the mails from the server that then deletes them and you only have them on your computer (Unless you use Gmail that does some hybrid thing storing the old emails but marks them as read I believe)

POP3 doesn't automatically delete the emails it fetched (with RETR). It has to emit another specific command (DELE) for this purpose.

So, keeping or not keeping mails on the server is a matter of configuration in your client. I think all clients propose this choice and some will also add extra options like deleting only after a number of days since fetching.

You could use POP but I don't see why you would.

Email via IMAP is the original cloud based system.

That aside, the reduced latency of native email clients makes them much more pleasant to work with than webmail.

On the other hand I can't understand how people can only use webmail. Do you only have one email account? I've got a personal email on a server I'm running, a backup gmail, a school/work account, and the root account for the email server. Even if I wasn't too lazy to set up webmail on my email server, I still wouldn't want to go to three different websites to check my email, I'd use a mail client to bring all of them into one place.

I have a web based email app for incidental access but for any "real work" gets done through Thunderbird

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