Back in the day, you had to have a native email app to send and receive emails. Most of us kept growing offline archives of our emails, and if you ever lost a backup or hard drive, chances are you’d lose all of your emails for good. Syncing was mostly unheard of, and POP3 was state-of-the-art.
When Gmail first came out, its offer of 1Gb of online storage seemed too good to be true. Suddenly, you wouldn’t have to store all of your emails offline to keep from losing them. Plus, with its efficient interface, you could actually be productive in an email web app.
Mobile devices have brought us back to the start. Sure, you can use Gmail or your favorite email service in your mobile browser, but with spotty and slow cell connections, it usually works better to use a native email app. With Exchange ActiveSync and IMAP, you can keep all of your messages synced, so it really doesn’t matter how you access your mail.
That’s why we’re curious how you usually access your account. I personally use a mix of Mail.app in iOS and OS X, and Gmail.com in Chrome. I appreciate the convenience of being able to get the same mail in any app, but if I had to choose just one, I’d stick with Gmail over any one particular app. How about you? Is your email a cloud-powered native app, or do you email with a web app directly?