I use an email client because I don't want to deploy PGP keys to the server -- then there's no point.
It's interesting though: on mobile, everyone wants a client application. On desktop, people wonder why bother with client software when we have a browser. "Reddit for Desktop"? Hah, doesn't even exist! But "Reddit is Fun" for Android? People died on that hill.
The Reddit thing is also mixed with the fact that Reddit's mobile web interface is complete shit. You can't even collapse threads (or it's so hidden as ot be useless), which is something the desktop web interface does. It might not be the best example of why mobile users want an app, as it's functionally worse using their mobile web version, probably on purpose to force you to their app so they can monetize you... and now we understand why they did what they did and why people didn't want to use their official app, as the way they monetize you is to inconvenience you with more ads.
I wonder if it's to do with desktop usage more linked to typing compared to mobile usage pattern framed around clicks /taps...
(I'd rather use the web interface on mobile and desktop, so I'm not sure the original criticism applies to me, either.)
On mobile, it's a different story, the screen real estate is small, and users can't operate both/one hand(s) comfortably like on desktop. Therefore, if you don't design the app smart enough and make users not comfortable, you're screwed up.
1. I want a full synced copy of everything that I can access indefinitely, even if there are network connection problems or if the remote server goes down.
2. I want to ensure everything gets backed along with other personal documents on my computer.
3. I want sufficiently-expressive tools for searching e-mails and filtering new ones that come in.
Same here. I started using e-mail around 1993 and for the next decade went through a series of e-mail programs that used different storage formats. Some of that mail I still have as plain text archives, but a lot got corrupted due to character encoding conflicts and other problems that I was unable to resolve.
Since around 2005, I’ve been using Thunderbird to back up all of my e-mail locally, including the Gmail accounts that I normally use through the web interface. Several times recently I’ve been asked about something that happened ten or fifteen years ago, and I was able to find the relevant e-mails in my Thunderbird archive in a few seconds.
That reminds me that I'd better make sure me-of-2033 will still be able to open these, er... taptaptap Mork [0] mail formats.
> Several times recently I’ve been asked about something that happened ten or fifteen years ago, and I was able to find the relevant e-mails in my Thunderbird archive in a few seconds.
I had a funny moment where one of my siblings was like: "You should see this comic!" and I said: "That author name looks familiar... Oh hey, that art-style and name rings a bell... Oh look, I e-mailed them under another screen-name once when they were working on something entirely different 15 years ago."
This is the feature that I love best about Thunderbird. It downloads all my mail locally into plain text MBOX files so I can use things like grep to quickly extract whatever information I need and I can even send the result to some other tool. Is there a web interface somewhere that lets you use regular expressions for searching your messages?
A shame really, desktop should provide a better experience.
Why v52, you might ask? Because I don't have time for updates to break my shit and v52 is the oldest version that supports TLS1.3. I do not like the new interface. At all. It can die in a fire.
I've been using a web/online only client for a few years and agree with the parent comment. Fastmail's web UI works better for me than Gmail or Outlook.