mark++

I spent about 24 hours with my “fully-featured” client-side mail application and new Gmail+IMAP support before I went back to mail.google.com. The web interface is just better.

Rant 1: My Love/Hate Relationship with Exchange

The MS Exchange protocol is so much better than POP/IMAP that it makes me want to cry. I’m no MS fanboy, but I don’t know of an open alternative that comes close.

• When I send mail does it go to my local sent folder, or the IMAP folder?”
• Why do I even have these local folders? What good are they?”
• How do I search all the server-side messages?”

All of these questions arise because desktop mail apps are designed around the old POP model — they assume that you might want to bring mail down, locally. I don’t. I want to leave it in the cloud where it belongs. The Exchange guys apparently figured this out a long time ago.

Rant 2: Net Apps == Web Apps

Years ago I used client-side RSS readers on multiple machines. My list of feeds was always out of sync. I also read many articles twice. First Bloglines and eventually Google Reader solved this for me. The web app is ideal here. I don’t fly much so I don’t care about offline access (although Gears delivers this too).

Email is the same. 99% of the email experience is being on the net. Sure you can do some things offline, but not much. So why waste time on the sync problem? Just assume the network, move the whole application to the server side, and you are done.