> 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.
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It's also IMAP is an awful protocol with so many glaring issues its impossible for a modern client to paper over them. Fastmail invented JMAP but it doesn't seem to have taken off with any other providers.
>so many glaring issues
like what?
From memory, there are no bulk actions, so if you want to say select all emails and delete you have to send thousands of requests. If you want to rename a folder you have to send a request for every email in the folder. There is no way to set up filters that run server side, there is no way to get push notifications.
And probably a million other things that don’t hold up today.
Deletion is done by marking messages with deleted flag and then expunge to delete flagged messages. AIU rename exists: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3501#section-6.3.5
Push notifications: https://github.com/freswa/dovecot-xaps-plugin
Sending those thousands of requests is something your mail client does for you. Deleting 5000 emails takes a few minutes, but how often do you do that? I can select a bunch of emails in Thunderbird and just do stuff with it just fine.
For server side filters I just set them up in Fastmail using the web UI. That's the type of action I do once or twice a year, so totally OK to hop on over to the web app for just that.
I have no idea what you mean by 'push notifications'. I have Thunderbird open on my desktop, and it shows me when there is email. I have K9 on my smartphone, and it shows me when there is email (I don't have it set up to display notifications, but that seems possible). That's basically all I need to do email.
Try Mailspring. I’m a huge fan: https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring
That's an electron app. What does it offer that Thunderbird doesn't?
Thunderbird is great. I’ve been using it a long time, too, and feature-wise, I think Thunderbird is way ahead. I just find Mailspring a bit more... pleasant to use? And I think it’ll be an easier switch for people coming off Gmail Web, which is why I’m recommending it.
(Also... Thunderbird is not that different from an Electron app itself. It uses Gecko instead of Blink, and has a few bits of XUL here and there, but the core premise is the same. Though it doesn’t use React at least!)
I would go further and ask what do electron apps offer in the way of improvements that WebApps don't.
In mobile, webview-based apps exist mostly because they provide more ways to gather data on users.
> I would go further and ask what do electron apps offer in the way of improvements that WebApps don't.
If there was a way to run Mailspring on the web, I’d switch in a minute! I’ve tried to port it one time, but it got a bit tricky.
Mailspring uses a native module for syncing the mail, which would have to run either on a server somewhere or in a web worker. I think the web worker makes more sense nowadays, and would make it an offline-first app, but there’s a catch: how do you connect to IMAP/SMTP from a web browser?
Running the sync engine on a server is possible, but you have to have a server. It could make sense, though, if you’re running your own email server and want a killer webmail app to go with it.