Disagree completely. I have yet to find a mail client that pairs Gmail's keyboard shortcuts for rapid mail processing with a decent GUI (not pretty, but extremely utilitarian). I use labels heavily, I use multi-stars, and I control everything by the keyboard. I guess the old-school UNIX mail clients can match the keyboard efficiency, but they don't have as useful a GUI. Maybe if I was on Linux there is a client to prove me wrong, but I'm on OS X, so an X GUI is not going to cut it.
Even better is having it all available via IMAP and available to you in every mail client you use (desktop or mobile) as well as being able to carry your real mail client, mail, configuration, macros, extensions, etc on a USB drive or in the cloud (Dropbox, etc) using Thunderbird Portable so you get the same experience everywhere you go.
If this is a issue for you, a console-based client is a reasonable substitute. Terminals and SSH are pretty universal too (less so than web browsers, though). [Yes, you need to download putty on windows machines, but it's not that much of an effort.]
No, you use offlineimap to dump the mail to the host(s) you need to access it from, and GET SHIT DONE.
Or you aggregate the mail to a single system you access via SSH and GET SHIT DONE. So long as you're using Web protocols to talk to your mail, cut out the complexity of the browser and leverage ssh & screen.
Similarly, if you deal with mail from multiple systems, you can relay/forward it, or aggregate it via multiple retrieval systems (offlineimap is great and synchronizes sent/read mail from numerous locations), but older POP protocols can also work)
I have a daily mailstream that runs in the thousands of messages (many boxes, much complaining, many people, other stuff).
I need an email system that surfaces stuff that matters, fast, effectively, and efficiently, and lets me find, process, and adjudicate mail practically.
If you've never used an efficient and powerful console/CLI mail client such as mutt or mh, you have no idea of the power this provides.
Plenty of Googlers get thousands of messages per day and they use Gmail. There are filters and importance heuristics built into Gmail to help with huge volumes of email. To say "nope, you can't do it that way," flies in the face of reality.
I can filter out the stuff that I don't necessarily need to look at with GMail.
What I can't do is invoke programmatic tools on the web interface itself (at least not without learning a slew of web API stuff).
As opposed to being able to process my local Maildirs with shell tools.
How do you, say, generate stats or view diffs on 84,800 gmail messages? I can do that, trivially, with mutt (tags and commands/pipes) or from the shell outside of mutt.
I still find mutt's filtering notation (~f ~t ~N ~U ~d ... ) to be far more useful and far faster for most use-cases than GMail.
I'm accessing that corpus via both tools right now. Mutt is generally the more useful of the two. One of the advantages, again, of offlineimap is that I've got the option of doing either. And while I'll fully admit that there are some mails for which a full GUI client is more useful, plain text still wins in most instances. And even where I'm not in mutt (say, on an Android device), straight text virtually always wins.
I'll also admit to using GMail's filter rules to classify my mail, though they have problems, most notably the inability to un-archive specific messages, or to re-order / order filters at all. At least so far as I've discovered.
They're still generally better than Microsoft's pants mail rules.
In my daily life there are 10 devices I might use to access email. Instead of spending time to configure IMAP and/or SSH on every device, I just log into Gmail and get shit done the same way in all 10 places.
And there are the devices on which I get shit done.
Mail app on my phone, with filter rules, keeps most of the useful stuff front and center.
It's trivial enough to copy an ~/.offlineimaprc and ~/.muttrc across Linux systems (or Macs FWIW) for everything else.
Sure, if I absolutely need to I can log into Gmail through a web interface on another system. With user/pass auth, that means, though, that I'm extending my security envelope to include whatever exploits that machine may have. Given I've got the Internets in my pocket these days, that's pretty much never necessary.
If you can suggest an e-mail client that's we'd find as nice to use as the Gmail web interface, then maybe. I ditched the desktop clients - both GUI and console based - for a reason: All of the ones I've tried have interfaces that suck.
Thousands of messages a day, though most of it filtered so it never shows up in my inbox.
I'm a technical director at a media agency, but the vast majority of my e-mail is stuff that goes to my personal account, related to various open source projects and my other things I do in my spare time - my work e-mail is maybe 5% of my total e-mail volume.
My use case is accessing my e-mail from 10+ different places, some of which I don't have decent shell access from (such as my phone, where a console based, key based client is out of the question), combined with heavy use of labels and priority inbox.
I gave up on console based e-mail clients about 12 years ago, when I co-founded a webmail service. Never looked back.
I take it that most of that email is stuff that you can safely ignore, much of it generated by humans, the remainder perhaps automated reminders/responses, etc.
In my case, most of the messages are system alerts, logs, notifications, etc., along with human-generated messages, reminders, etc.
Some I can ignore, some I've got to have at least a gist of what they contain. Trending patterns in others can be very valuable.
For all of these, a console client generally offers major wins over webmail, as I've described.
I think "multiple machines" may also mean your friend's computer. Are you going to insist that he install PuTTY just so you can check your mail? Because god forbid you'd want to use a browser there, or at the library, or at work where SSH outbound is blocked, etc.
I'm currently using a setup where I can see incoming mail in a taskbar (unread count and subject), press Win-o to spawn mutt, enter to open first unread, z to archive, and qq<enter> to close mutt. With this, a lot of email is dealt with in six keystrokes and under two seconds total (no interruption in workflow).
I'm not saying that you wouldn't be able to do this with a web-based mail client, but I think that the machinery to do that would be less natural. (My sense of what is natural might be warped, though.)
Also, there is much to be said about the ability to customize your mail client to suit your needs. The very fact that people are complaining about Gmail's new design shows that a lot of people are relying on Google to tell them how they should manage their email, and try to adapt their needs to the tool rather than the other way around. This is not a technical limitation of web-based mail clients, but most webmails I know aren't really hackable.
> I'm not saying that you wouldn't be able to do this with a web-based mail client.
In fact, using gmail should take fewer strokes than that. Assuming you have a keyboard shortcut to spawn a gmail window, enter will take you to the first message, and 'e' will archive that message. Command-Q/Alt-F4 to quit.
Labels can be applied with an 'l' and the label name, next/last message is 'n'/'p'.
Go to Labs and enable Custom Keyboard Shortcuts, then go to town! I changed a bunch of my shortcuts, for example an operation I do quite often is "select all unread, them mark as read." But I couldn't remember the shortcuts they assigned - they didn't seem mnemonic at all. I changed them to SU for Select Unread and MR for Mark Read. Bingo!
> It would, of course, be better if they let you customize the shortcuts and sped up the loading of the initial page.
Those were the main things I had in mind (along with adequately customizable desktop notifications). As for shortcut customizations, the Labs feature isn't as good as a configuration file in my opinion (slower to edit, harder to share, harder to diff, etc.). As for the loading of the initial page, I still wonder why it takes so long... You could probably get a nice setup by keeping a Gmail window open and assigning a shortcut in your WM to display this window, but it's not a common feature in WMs.
I'm not sure it's universal, but I have "Custom keyboard shortcuts" available under Labs that let's me customize as desired. Click on the non-intuitive gear-shaped icon in the upper right corner to check if it's there for you too.
I'm not going to go so far as to say "should", but I will throw in that I use Gmail for personal use (1-5 emails per day) and Outlook at my day job. Outlook 2010 has proven itself stable & valuable when I am getting 100+ emails per day and keeping many of them, as it is pretty good at managing a lot of email.
(If you are big on "Inbox Zero" that's not an important feature, but here email backlogs often serve as another type of reference, complimenting our wikis. It sounds awful, but in practice you wouldn't really want to commit a lot of information to a wiki that is priceless for a week and trash thereafter)
Gmail was actually OK for heavy use for a long time. And I've never found a mail client that I actually like - more like clients that suck less than others.
