I am extremely biased. I’ve been involved with Gmail as a product for some time. And I’ve had a Gmail account since 2004, when Gmail first came out. And yet I’ve become conflicted lately.
When Lion came out, I decided to check out the state of the art in ostensibly user-friendly (read: GUI) email clients. I don’t pretend to know much about how Apple Mail It was purely curiosity. But a number of issues have cropped up in my mind.
Gmail can get really bloated, memory-wise. I was surprised when Mail took up less than 200MB; I assumed all mail clients routinely took up at least twice as much. Gmail often takes up something north of 500MB. (I suppose Chrome doesn’t help, if only because its multiprocess model necessarily involves a RAM tax.) Part of this is that I keep it open all the time, or rather I used to; now I feel obligated to close it now and then to keep my RAM clear. On balance, I don’t want to care about RAM, but in practice I feel I have to. I share a laptop with my -girlfriend- wife, which means Gmail effectively occupies 1GB or more. Running a Minecraft server on my desktop machine means I’m consistently down by 1GB, at least until I move it off.
The idea of having my mail on every machine is less of a concern now. Chiefly this is because I have a smartphone; if I don’t have a laptop with me, I always have my phone. IMAP means that changes on one client propagate elsewhere automatically, whether it’s on the phone, the iPad, or a full-fledged computer.
I can use an email client offline. This doesn’t happen that often, admittedly, and when I am completely offline I’m typically on vacation. Still, there were a couple of occasions recently where my connectivity was poor enough to make Gmail sluggish. A mail client simply had to download my messages once and I could read and search all of them without hitting the server via my flaky connection.
An email client is consistently faster when it comes to common UI operations. This is not to say that Gmail is slow, at last not most of the time. Most of the time, it’s fast enough. But when it’s not, it’s quite frustrating when a simple search takes longer than it really should! Contrariwise, once a client downloads my mail, I’m not subject to network delays. Yes, the client can be slow due to limitations of my machine, but those same constraints apply to the browser as well. Furthermore, the difference between searching my mail via Gmail and on my own machine continues to narrow, at least for me.
With Gmail + IMAP, I have the best of both worlds. I can check mail via a browser should I need to, but should I have the need, I can use the client. This is the strongest point in favor of retaining Gmail, modulo other logistical issues: it does’t have to be either/or.
That said, there are some significant drawbacks, at least to Apple Mail in particular as well as Gmail/IMAP.
Gmail/IMAP integration isn’t that great. Or maybe I should say that IMAP itself isn’t that great. It’s a folder-based paradigm, which treats emails like files. I think that’s ridiculous. IMHO, people only think about emails that way because it’s been thrust on them, and it’s not like most people understand the filesystem paradigm in the first place. Labeling/tagging a message is a “copy” operation, which is dumb. Archiving a message means “move to All Mail,” which is silly, too. Overall I’d say the mapping is somewhat leaky. I’m not sure it’s anyone’s fault in particular; I prefer Gmail’s model, but I wouldn’t expect Apple to sign on to that model wholesale.
Your -filters- Rules don’t sync across multiple machines. It seems that previously you’d have to pay for MobileMe to get this, which is/was ridiculous. Perhaps iCloud will fix this? It would be surprising if it didn’t, esp. considering they’re offering a full-fledged email service as far as I can tell.
The keyboard shortcuts aren’t nearly as good. Although there are hitches now and then, for the most part I can drive Gmail entirely through keyboard shortcuts. Mail’s keyboard shortcuts are merely OK.
All this really amounts to in terms of my behavior is that nowadays I often have Mail open on my personal machines. I don’t shy away from using Mail on iOS devices, either. Beyond that, I still use Gmail for chat and I use it for most email operations that aren’t simply reading or deleting. The thought remains that I could, if I really wanted to, make the switch. I’m just not sure what it would take for me to do it; certainly I have no reason to now or in the near future.