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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

I never really understood why anyone would want to use GMail but NOT use the web interface. I mean, it's cool that they offer it, but I don't recall it working especially well.

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A lot of people have more than one email account (personal, work, school, etc.) and not all of them are Gmail accounts.

Currently, the easiest way to manage multiple email accounts at the same time is by using a standalone IMAP client. Five accounts in the sidebar that I can access with a single click, with Unified Inbox at the top!

Gmail's web interface only lets you access one email account at a time. You could have delegated accounts, but they open in a separate tab, and the whole concept of delegation only works for Gmail accounts anyway. Or you could forward everything to your Gmail account and call it a day, but some employers might have a problem with that, especially in light of Google's apparently comfy relationship with No Such Agency.

Personally, I use my Gmail address to subscribe to public newsgroups, but I wouldn't let anything private ever touch a Google server. With a standalone IMAP client, it's very easy to maintain this kind of separation without having to suffer any noticeable inconvenience.

Gmail can get mail from other accounts via pop or imap.

I have multiple accounts and what I've done is forward everything to my personal gmail address, and use gmail's "send with" email to reply with those addresses (obviously it's still going through gmail's servers though).

You might want a greater seperation of your inboxes, though, so your results may vary.

Among many other reasons: because the web interface is utterly incapable of sending and receiving unmangled patches, or more generally sending and receiving plain text without wrapping.

Also: because people might want security, such as GPG.

I wouldnt disagree with anything but the GPG, a dishearteningly small number of users use such features.

Moreover, if you regularly use GPG, the GMail web interface would be nearly unusable, no? So it seems you'd be much better off with nearly any other email provider.

there are some browser extensions for that

Why are other email providers better than (Gmail - web interface)?

Most GPG messages I get are signed, not encrypted, and I usually don't need to check the signature. So the web client is fine, but it's still good to have desktop client access.

I don't think the parent post was arguing about that, I think he was arguing that if these are important features to you, why choose gmail in the first place?

Because you already have a Gmail account when you decide to care about these issues?

Upsides: it's ubiquitous, well-provisioned, has very high uptimes (a few outages, those tend to become national or international news), and, for now, good support of IMPAPS or POPS access for standalone email clients (which I use on my phone and desktop).

Downsides: Snooping, NSA honeypot, Chinese government hacker honeypot, etc., etc.

Maybe I did not choose it? Maybe my employer did?

Desktop e-mail clients have more features than the web interface. Also, you get to keep a copy of your e-mails, so if Google removes your account (it may happen) you don't loose anything.

If you think desktop clients have more features than Gmail's web interface, you either haven't explored the features Gmail offers, or the set of features you care about is specialized.

That's a Universal Argument: if someone names a feature, you have two outs. Either Gmail has it, or it's "specialized".

Here's one feature my email client has: automatic spell-check, such that emails are disallowed from being sent if they have any spelling errors (with an override, of course). Gmail has a manual-trigger spell-check, while the browser has automatic spell-checking, but neither have a personal (jargon-customized) dictionary built up over decades nor an automatic modal dialog if the message to be sent has a mistake.

I guess automatic spellcheck override dialogs are specialized, eh?

I prefer Thunderbird's search to Gmail. I also have 4 email accounts I use and having them all in one client (and being able to move mail between them) isn't something I would be willing to give up.

Privacy, security and lack of ads aren't "specialized features"

Also, you get to keep a copy of your e-mails, so if Google removes your account...

Or, more likely, if you're offline for any reason at all. All web tools disappear in a puff of smoke if there's a problem between you and your ISP. Or, more rarely, between your ISP and their peers.

You can use gmail offline in the browser now. I do this most mornings on the subway. It's read/write and very similar to having a desktop app.

It's worth mentioning Gmail Offline. I actually like that interface more than the regular one.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gmail-offline/ejid...

Non-tech people use Gmail because it's free, portable across ISPs [though they don't use the term "ISP"] and a gmail address is socially acceptable in a professional setting, unlike Hotmail, Yahoo, Mac, or AOL...hmm...a CompuServe address, now that would be nerdtastic.

Anyway, I can't see why a tech savvy person wouldn't just have a domain and email hosting service instead of gmail and being locked to Google's whims, e.g. the ability to download could be a first step to shuttering gmail since gmail doesn't provide the core tracking data Google uses while creating specific privacy headaches - I.e. gmail is problematic to monetize efficiently.

> I can't see why a tech savvy person wouldn't just have a domain and email hosting service instead of gmail

Maintaining your own email server to the same level of reliability (backups, etc), speed, and functionality as gmail would be a lot of work. Not every "tech savvy" person out there wants to invest the time and resources needed to duplicate what gmail gives them for free.

[Also gmail's web interface is very, very, good, and it's well-integrated with other google products, which are very popular.]

Why does Gmail not provide valuable tracking data? It has tons of very personal content, it has contacts, so I don't see what's missing if you're in the business of compiling personal profiles.

Biggest problem is when you have like 10 email accounts to check. A desktop client having them all in one place makes it MUCH more convenient.

I suppose my criticism applies to all web based email services. I don't use the web interface because its sucky, slow, bloated and consumes hundreds of megabytes just to show a couple of web-pages. The searches are slow as hell for me - I expect results to complex queries (contains X, doesn't contain Y, within specified date-range .. etc) in under a second - as what I get from native email clients which do indexing.

I don't understand people who use the web interface. I guess many people are used to the general suckiness of web-apps.

It actually works pretty well, at least in Thunderbird. I don't use gmail for my personal email, but my employer uses google apps. IMAP access lets me have both accounts in one interface.

I know plenty of people that use it via IMAP exclusively, myself included. OS X & iOS Mail.app works just fine, I enjoy the spam filtering and automatic filtering.

I have 6 Gmail accounts I use on a regular basis. I also like having archives of all my emails going back decades.

However, I use POP3 and SMTP with a desktop client, not IMAP.

Mobile devices?

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