this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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Can I ask why people still use dedicated email software? I'm sure there's a reason. Maybe just familiarity, but I've never once opened my email inbox from anything other than a browser. It seems like a royal PITA.
Thunderbird is pretty neat tho
I don't disagree, but I don't use it either.
if you have more than one email account, then one of these applications becomes critical. Also, in all the years thunderbird has been out it's UI/UX has gone largely unchanged unlike the microsoft and google browser clients that seem to change every few years
I much prefer a client for usability reasons. My email provider has a poor web ui. I guess I'd need to change my email address to get round it. I tried the google web enail which was also bad. But google never care about UX. It also needed to refresh a web page on each click, where the client app is instant.
I can work offline.
People have their preferences for UI and UX. I use Aerc because I like modal editing (ie being able to write my emails in vim) and keyboard nav. Using a desktop email client rather than webmail client from a provider gives me that freedom.
Besides, I don't actually have a webmail client I can use lol. I host my own email and host the IMAP server but I don't host a web interface.
Familiarity, better integration in the desktop, generally many more options (including extensions) than web versions, UI better adapted to a desktop computer, better at managing multiple accounts, are my reasons. I like Betterbird personally.
I can see the use case for gmail at least. I tried to access web interface from India and it loaded like for 2 solid minutes before showing up completely unresponsive. I could have had it 10 times faster with a dedicated IMAP client.
It's odd, since they used to have a rather nice HTML web interface specifically for low-peformance devices, but it's since gone away.
Ultimately Email is old technology, all the web frontends just get in the way more or less.
I use an email host that has roadmapped switching their frontend to one I don't really like, so figured I'd get ahead of the curve and switch to a client that was open source and compatible with the typical standards — so I could learn it and never have to deal with another client again.
Ended up using Thunderbird, even for my old inboxes at the typical web companies.