this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
236 points (96.8% liked)
Technology
83406 readers
4206 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
One client, all my emails in one spot, don't have to deal with stupid UX changes being forced on users.