That web gateway has to be maintained and that is one of the biggest drawbacks over a hosted service like Gmail. If you don't constantly upgrade your server and

That web gateway has to be maintained and that is one of the biggest drawbacks over a hosted service like Gmail. If you don't constantly upgrade your server and your software one day you'll get rooted by some exploit bot. Sure, if you have the time and patience to constantly maintain your servers, and you think your web gateway's UI is as good as Gmail (I don't) then go for it. I want to spend my time doing actual work though. > but opening a pdf with google docs is about 5x slower than downloading the pdf and opening with evince And yet I keep using their preview feature because it somehow feels faster than opening it in a native app. The actual stopwatch time doesn't matter, it's the perception. I think this is the reason why people like Gmail so much: it feels fast, it feels comfortable to use. It's not so much the features; strip out a few features and I'd still use Gmail.