Desktop email clients like Outlook let you do things such as: select all email messages -> save as .txt -> feed the .txt to a python script that extracts useful data.

If we were using GSuite I guess we could use the Gmail API to get the message body data, but at the end of the day having local access is just more convenient (edit: faster).

Edit: for everything else that is not email (spreadsheet, word processor, presentations) there are also similar advantages related to having full fledged desktop applications.

Interesting use case. What exactly are you extracting from email that you’d need a python script for computing?

We do clustering on unstructured text and we output data in a Jupyter notebook. It's a proof of concept for now and the production pipeline will be a bit different. The whole Python ecosystem is awesome for this type of prototyping.

And that you couldn't easily do with Microsoft flow and office 365?

See my response to parent

The answer to this is fairly simple: Offline access to email. You need a client for this, and an arbitrary browser won't do.

Solved problem on iOS and Android with whatever mail app you want to use, but those are of course apps.

Solved problem on the PC with Outlook or "Gmail Offline", but "Gmail Offline" is a chrome-only feature so is, as far as I'm concerned, an offline email client built into Chrome, not a feature of Gmail per-se. See also: Any IMAP mail client.

An arbitrary client won’t do either. It would have to be a specific one.

So now that we’ve removed the need for an arbitrary client in both cases why can’t localStorage/etc solve this to most users satisfaction?