Mail client on my laptop at home. Mail client on my phone when outside. Webmail when I’m without a laptop and need to read/write long mails.
Personal Gmail: browser or iPhone client.
Work mail: they force use to use Outlook. It sucks the big one.
Each to their own, but that’s the reason I like it so much. Better than folders, as you can have more than one tag for email. So if I have an “Aunt Joan” tag and “Antique Clocks” tag, and Aunt Joan emails me about an antique clock, that email will be stored in both “folders”.
I also use Gmail for file storage.
I have two email addresses; one for work, one for not-work (color me confused as to why you’d need more than 2 or 3, especially if you’re checking each one individually). At work, we use Outlook on an Exchange server, so that’s what I use there. At home away from work, I use Outlook Web Access, or my iPhone.
My not-work email is Gmail, and I’ll use the web interface if I’m at my computer, or my iPhone if I’m away.
iOS 4 provides a fabulous unified, threaded inbox, so I usually find myself checking my phone rather than logging on to the web interface, even at home.
I use Gmail exclusively. Love the threaded conversations, which until recently was not available in any mainstream desktop client.
Love the HTTPS connection.
Love the real-time push notifications on both my desktop and my phone.
Love the way it’s part of a living, thriving ecosystem of Google services: a unified contact list across my email, online voicemail, and cell phone; integrated cross-platform HTML .DOC and .PDF viewing; no disk space issues; fast search; Flickr/YouTube/Picasa/Google Voice/etc. previews right in the email; the whole “archive” vs delete/foldering motif; an “undo send” 5-sec delay that helps with misclicked button; integrated Google Chat and history saving, etc.; the ability to start a draft on my phone and finish it on my desktop a moment later.
- Gmail lets you check and send mail from other accounts. I manage my personal, school, and work accounts (5-6 total) all from one Gmail account. And Gmail lets me do this from any computer I log in from.
- Gmail with Google Gears allows offline synchronized access to messages.
- Convenience of cloud email access outweighs privacy concerns for me personally.
- I have not seen any desktop application keep pace with the features that Gmail Labs and overall Google integration offers. The GUI isn’t as good with Gmail, I agree, but it’s good enough. The other features keep me there. That said, I would love to see a native Windows client that has all of Gmail’s features and keeps the interface local and the data in the cloud.
Last but not least, Hotmail and Gmail have both outlasted 5-6 different ISPs and schools in my lifetime. I’m far less concerned about them dying or charging than I am about your generic local ISP going out of business / being bought by another company / changing storage policies / imposing disk space quotas.
You’re on the list.
I need some way to put the smirking smiley in the tiny size. Also the list in question is “people who are not getting any chicken casserole.”
What you want is a small lightweight tool called PopPeeper. I can guarantee you once you use this, you’ll abandon everything else. It reads POP, IMAP, WebMail Services like Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and a host of others.
And it’s free
You pretty much have to have a GMail account if you want to use Google services. On top of my normal GMail account, I also have a Google Site account, which I manage under a different address . The hotmail address we’ve had forever, but I wanted my own personal address, so I could subscribe to threads, and get Facebook updates without cluttering my wife’s email, so I use the Comcast account for that.
Add in the Yahoo.com account, and some other throwaway accounts I use to register for online stuff, and I probably have over 10 email accounts out there.
I get way too much e-mail not to have local filtering, labelling, and foldering, plus webmail is far, far too slow on the page refreshes and UI. But I use webmail when I travel if I don’t have a laptop or iPad and just need to scan for a given message.
Using online mail, like Yahoo and Hotmail, gained such a stigma that I can’t bring myself to progress to something like G-Mail, so I have stuck with my, now woefully outdated, local client of Eudora.
Plus, I have my own domain, and as I am increasingly becoming a social hermit I only get about three emails a month anyway, so it’s no big deal; I don’t think I’m missing out on anything by sticking with the legacy.
My first Yahoo account I got at the beginning of high school (hard to believe that I’ve had an address that long). The name is such that it’s embarrassing enough. Later on in HS I got a second one for some reason, also a non-professional name. Next I got a Gmail account in my name, and later a second one for some reason. Up until a week ago, I also had 2 academic/work emails (one just forwarded), but one died.
I check the work one as said above, yahoo manually. I have a Firefox plugin “Gmail Manager,” which puts an icon in the corner where I can see if I have any new emails, and check and switch addresses with a click or two.
I use Pocomail as my main email client, but I also have two GMail accounts. Further, I have my own domain, which is basically only for catch-all forwarding, so I can change the account to which my domain email is forwarded very easily.
Thunderbird on my laptop, webmail anywhere else.
Mildly unhappy with both of those at the moment - Thunderbird has an unfixed known bug where the preview pane won’t stay turned off, and although I can’t fault 1&1’s web hosting services, their webmail solution is utter shite.
This sounds very interesting. Could you give me more details? Is it an Apple Script?
I could kiss you! I never knew this was possible. I had the first part done (store sent messages on server), but I didn’t know about the second part (Use for->Sent). Now my sent messages are visible in the Apple Mail program locally and when I use webmail! I have to check if they will be still shown in the Sent Items folder if I am using my laptop and disconnected from the net but I’m pretty sure they will be. Thanks a bunch!
I use yahoo online 99% of the time.
I have a gmail throwaway account I check once in a while. I have two ISP emails, one of which is forwarded to my yahoo, another one which is set up with Thunderbird. I check that even less frequently than gmail.
I don’t really like yahoo. I have a netbook, so the screen resolution with the new mail is awful. It’s only marginally better in classic. I have had this email for 10 years. I don’t really want to abandon it (and really can’t, because everything is linked to that account), but I don’t feel like paying for the upgrade to use with Thunderbird or mail forwarding.
I just put webmail, even though I use Outlook at work. I guess I didn’t think about work use, just private.
The main reason I don’t use a client is that I have a roommate, and he’s the one who is named on the internet bill. An earlier carrier we used would have charged us for two separate email accounts, so I never bothered to get a client, just used webmail. Supposedly, the one main account allowed for several different aliases, but it was too much of a hassle, since I’d have to use his machine to check my mail. It didn’t allow two instances of the account up at the same time, or something.
My email use isn’t very high, so I really haven’t felt the lack of a more versatile email program.
I really see no reason to use anything but webmail. I can use it anywhere. If there’s something I want to save, I can, but that’s rare as all get out. The only reason I don’t delete my emails is that I’ve got enough space I don’t need to. And I can’t really think of any feature I’m missing.
I’m really surprised that so many of you use old-fashioned email. I really can’t think of anyone I know outside this message board that uses it. Some people were holding on for a while, but even they eventually got Yahoo Mail or Gmail. (Hotmail seems to be something you only use if you got it a while back.)
In the current job I use Lotus Notes, but that’s valid only for this particular mail account and it’s used for other things as well. It’s also not something I have a choice about, and something which changes when I change jobs. My last three jobs were set up so that company email was accessed via browser.
For my own mail, I’ve been on webmail since it became available. I have two gmail accounts, one of which is used for gaming-related stuff, for any non-work-related webpage signups and for some family stuff, the other one for general purposes.
After seeing how many people use exclusive webmail, I thought I might be missing something, so I just tried gmail again this morning out of curiosity, since I thought that it might be the fastest webmail system around. I forwarded a couple of e-mails from one of my accounts to my gmail account. I was quickly irritated by the delay when switching back and forth between e-mails in the inbox. Using Apple Mail (the mail client) at home, I can use the up/down arrow key to switch between e-mails, and even e-mails I have not read yet display instantly. A .PDF document is previewed in the mail window. Pictures show up with no delay. With gmail the time to switch to a new unread e-mail with attachments or pictures was maybe five times as much. To see the .PDF document, I had to click on it and open it in an ew window.
Using the mail client (on my desktop or laptop, which is the way I read my personal e-mails 99% of the time) is so much faster and convenient (once the e-mails have been downloaded, of course) that I can’t see myself using webmail at home. I can click on a document in the File Explorer (Finder on the Mac) view, and go to a menu item to send as an e-mail attachment - that won’t work with webmail. Many of my applications (like the photo organizer) have a built-in command to send via e-mail - that won’t work with webmail. I can drag any e-mail attachment to my desktop or to a File Explorer window to save it directly in a folder. It just seems much more convenient. Plus, no ads cluttering up the window when I read an e-mail! And the “compose e-mail” window has no vertical limit size.
The main advantage of webmail, from what I can see, is that it is available anywhere, but since all my mailboxes are IMAP, I still get that advantage when I am not on one of my home computer - I can use webmail just fine away from home.
Really? What don’t you like about their webmail solution? I thought it was actually one of the better ones. It’s a little slower, but the user interface is much better than any other webmail I use.
Is that an assumption, or did you hear that somewhere? Separate from access speed, I’ve had problems with Gmail taking forever to get mail from the server. There would be situations where a group email was sent out to an address which forwards to my gmail. People would start talking about the mail, and I would assume that it didn’t get sent to me, until I receive a copy several hours later.
As far as the keyboard shortcuts go, there’s a way to turn them on. I don’t use them so I don’t know if the arrow keys are not in there, and maybe you already figured that out, it’s under settings.