>use any number of clients to access your email.

Your car can have any colour, as long as it is black.

All native email clients are stuck in 2005, lack most basic features, and have bugs not fixed in decades. Also, most providers have poor support for new IMAP features, such as NOTIFY.

Probably the nothing to install experience. Every Android phone comes with Gmail and every device has a web browser. Do people have to install Gmail on iOS?

I'm using Thunderbird with POP3 accounts, download on my laptop then remove from the server, daily backups. My phone has K9 (the old one with the UI I like) and I never remove messages from the phone. When I send mail from the phone I bcc myself so I can see the message from my laptop later.

Why? Because I don't like to leave my mail forever on somebody's else server. They can lock me out at any time (it will probably never happen) and my mail is mine.

Would I recommend this to anybody? Of course not.

Is it a problem not to have access to all of my mail when I don't have my laptop with me? It never happened to be a problem and it's always less likely to be a problem because of all the messages that are exchanged outside email and on mobile first platforms, even for work.

The amount of configuration required to rival what's available out of the box in Web clients (especially indexing, searching, filtering, blocking, etc.) is a bit too much for someone who isn't already interested in it. I tried GNUS in Emacs and a few TUI apps; I do like having all my emails accessible locally, but for day-to-day use, web clients are more convenient. I haven't tried Thunderbird or Outlook (if it still has a local version), though, so maybe I'd have all the conveniences I want there - but since I already have them in Fastmail, I just don't have an incentive to switch.

I like using the webui because my mailbox is too large to pull down locally and it’s easier to handle through the web.

I also have it pulling to local clients that just keep a few messages. Maybe 30% of the time is webui.

Has worked well for me for 30+ years (substituting telneting in and using pine until webuis existed).

“Email in the cloud mainly” is a useful pattern.

I find myself using the web UI because it's much faster than MacOS Mail, which often gets a bit stuck when downloading new emails via IMAP. I'd prefer to use a native app, but it happened without me thinking - I just ended up going for the fastest option unconsciously.

Because Fastmail has a fantastic Web UI, have been using it for years.

Well I usually already have my browser open, and "Ctrl+T, 'fa', [enter]" loads up my email basically instantly. I don't want email notifications (or any notifications, really) so a local app just seems like it would introduce a lot of clunk for not much benefit.

I never understood why anyone would want to download an application to do something as simple as checking email.

I migrated from gmail to Migadu. They have a webmail client, but they make a point that they Do Standards.

They also let you host as many domains as you like and the servers are all EU based.

> Why are people accessing emails from the webUI. Email is SMTP and IMAP, use any number of clients to access your email.

Because the UX of most email clients is extremely bad when compared with the webui of these email providers.

A lot of providers don't give you imap anymore or it's an extra cost option. SMTP also comes with a ton of traps because of spam fighting measures.

Also monopolies and mobile devices and skill issues.

Every desktop mail client is bad in its own way. And then I have to set it up on all computers I use. Web UI just works.

Because it is really nice. I prefer it to thunderbird/(apple) Mail.

I get the same interface on my own computer as when I go on some other machine.

This is the way. Use a tui client like alpine or mutt, and enjoy managing 100s of thousands of emails in ms. I feel physical pain when I have to see colleagues and acquaintances wait for several seconds in their heavy web interfaces. I can manipulate batches of emails with terminal tools and the power of Maildir.