What are the advantages of using an email client instead of a web based interface?

As someone who's invested a great deal of effort into creating http://inky.com, a next-generation email client, I'd turn the question around: why would you want to use a web app for something as private and heavily used as email? The main advantage a web app offers is the ability to use it on any device -- even one you don't own. But in practice, are you really checking your email on a public terminal at the library or in an airport anymore? With the explosion of mobile computing, virtually everyone (in the G20 countries, at least) has his or her own personal, portable computing device. And most of these run native apps now, which offer a more fluid experience that is better integrated with the host platform than what a web app can offer. In the early days (~2009), http://inky.com was, in fact, a web app. But the iPhone changed our thinking about the long-term viability of web apps for complex tasks like email. The primary advantage of web app deployments accrues to providers, not consumers: since the web app is by its nature a "thin client," all the computation and data is stored in the cloud. This is great for data mining and advertising companies, because it makes it incredibly simple and seemingly natural to scan your personal information and target you with the residual information derived from this analysis. But how does it help you, the consumer? (Note that, in contrast, an "app" like web search needs to run in the cloud because the data set it operates on is too large to fit on your personal device; that's simply not true of email.) In other words, what benefit are you deriving from giving up your fast, native, fully integrated mail client in favor of a web app alternative? You cite integration with GDrive, Google Docs, and (I assume) Google+. But many native clients do integrate with cloud storage services -- not just GDrive, but more mainstream ones like Dropbox and http://box.net as well. And you don't need Google Docs when you have native alternatives like MS Office or free alternatives like Libre Office -- and these arguably work better than Google Docs anyway. If it's easy setup you're after, http://inky.com already offers this: you don't need to know your server names, and you only need to set up your accounts once, just like with GMail; every new device you install http://inky.com on "knows" about all your accounts out of the box. And we do this in a way that preserves your privacy and security. And, of course, with a native mail client you can check mail in accounts other than GMail and Google Apps, without simply forwarding all the mail to Google's servers. You can manage all your accounts from one app, keeping them all in sync. So, for example, if you flag a message in your http://outlook.com account in http://inky.com, then return to http://outlook.com, you will see the message flagged there too. Everything stays in sync, unlike with a simple forward-all-your-mail system. This means you can "go back" to your account provider's user interface any time you want or need to, rather than getting locked into a single vendor's ecosystem. And there are obviously corporate security implications to forwarding all your work mail to Google or any other third-party provider; many companies simply won't allow this. As well, as founder of an email company, I personally hear all the time from users they they do not want their private mail communications either accidentally or intentionally mixed in with their social feeds. These people very much want to keep their public (Facebook, G+, Twitter) personae separate from their private email persona. From a technical standpoint, we learned from the web app version of http://inky.com that it's possible to pretty closely emulate a native look and feel in a web app. But it takes an enormous amount of effort and, in my opinion, ends up feeling "off" compared to a true native app. Users spend hours a day in their inboxes; the experience needs to be fast, fluid, and essentially unsurprising. This is still hard to achieve with portable web technologies. Shedding the HTML/CSS/JavaScript legacy is one of our main priorities with http://inky.com; the forthcoming iOS and Android clients will have completely native UIs. All that said, though, I think negative reactions to web app mail UIs mainly come from people who have gotten used to native clients like Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail, etc. If you've only ever used GMail, you're probably likely to remain happy with its user interface -- for a while, at least. It's what you're used to, after all.

One HUGE reason (WRT Gmail) is the ability to sort. Google refuses to add this ability. Even Yahoo allows you to sort on a column. Others: Speed No Limit on size of the mail archive. You can create multiple archives if necessary. Overall flexibility and functionality is much better on a stand alone client.

1) Email client lets you backup emails on your machine as opposed to let gmail manage the archiving 2) If you have setup your email client , you will be able to see/search some amount of emails without an active internet connection. 3) If suppose the Gmail web interface is down , the email server might still work , in such a scenario email client might still continue to function

I use a combination. Part of it is that I like the feel of a native client. I used to use lots of automated color coding and rule based sorting that works well in desktop clients but I've moved away from that. The nicest thing about a desktop client is that you can get customized features and support for any number of accounts and any number of formats.

1) The desktop email client is much faster than the webmail interface due to the fact that the IMAP protocol was designed to be very efficient and only transmit the minimal amount of data necessary to perform the task of processing email. 2) I can use the desktop email client when I am not connected to the internet. This allows me to process email while I am on an airplane, regardless of whether WiFi is available. 3) There are lots of add-ons I can use to the enhance the functionality of my desktop email client. My favorite plugin is Mail-ActOn, but there are other useful plugins too. 4) The desktop interface is the same for all of my email accounts. With webmail, I see a different interface for each account. 5) With the desktop interface, I can easily move individual emails and folders between accounts. 6) With the desktop interface, I see all of my emails in all of my Inboxes in one place. With webmail, I need to visit multiple website in order to process my inboxes. 7) The desktop client provides an intrinsic backup of my email. If my provider suddenly goes out of business or deletes my account from their server, I have still have my old emails. 8) My desktop email client allows me to configure the look and feel of the interface to a much larger degree than my webmail interfaces allow.

Mix of both mainly due to using my smartphone to check when I'm away but I like desktop email clients like Thunderbird mainly because 1) I can access it offline 2) easier to backup important emails on my hard drive 3) I find the interface of Thunderbird easier to navigate. But that's just my personal input!

The advantages of Email clients are :- If you have multiple email accounts email client can be a tremendous time-saver. You messages are stored on your computer that is an another advantage of Email Client. And the most important benefit of using Email clients is that you can access your mail even you not connected to internet or offline.