Since the 1990s, IMAP (an open standard with hundreds of implementations covering virtually all platforms) has allowed you to access all of your mail, from anyw

Since the 1990s, IMAP (an open standard with hundreds of implementations covering virtually all platforms) has allowed you to access all of your mail, from anywhere, on whichever device you want. You don't have to use just one IMAP client, you can use many clients, just as you might use several different web browsers or text editors. They all access the same mail store, and the message state (read, flagged, replied to, etc) is synchronized among all the clients (this is what the IMAP protocol is for). On a decently powerful computer, searching is typically faster than any online service, including Gmail (though it depends on the mail client). Thunderbird's search is fairly poor. On OS X, I mainly use MailMate and Apple's default Mail.app client software. Both of these can search through my 500,000-message email archive (all my personal email in/out since 1995) much faster than any online service I have seen. With a dedicated mail client, you can also have all your mail without being online -- to me, this is essential for working on international flights. Being able to use multiple standards-based clients also lets you avoid keeping all your eggs in one basket. You can use the best client on each platform that suits you. I only ever use Thunderbird on Windows, where there are not many good email clients. OS X, Linux, iOS, and Android all come with better (for my needs, YMMV) email clients than Thunderbird. Finally, IMAP is a real standard with a huge body of work behind it. I look forward to even better standards emerging, e.g. something like JMAP[1] maybe, but for now we do have IMAP, and it solves every single problem that web-based email solves (indeed there are many webmail UIs that give you online browser access to your IMAP email store). But with native clients you also gain several advantages over typical webmail service from Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, etc. Plus no ads. [1]: http://jmap.io http://jmap.io