Quote:
Originally Posted by Grhm
(Re e-mail clients - personally I have never seen the point of them - I can think of nothing an individual might reasonably want to do with e-mail that can't be done using Fastmail's web interface.)
|
The most obvious advantage of a local client is being able to access old emails when one doesn't have an internet connection. As connections have got faster and more stable that's less of an issue, but I still remember using a dial-up modem.
The email client I used to use had some facilities that I miss, eg
- the ability to process mails loaded from a file, on a one-off or scheduled basis. These could be emails exported from other mail clients, or emails generated as notifications by other software but not sent outside the machine, or (as I did for ages when getting used to that client) emails fetched by another client but duplicated during that fetch and fed into the second client as well
- the ability to edit any part of an incoming mail's content. I most often used that to change misleading subject headers to something meaningful to me, and to edit the references headers to separate from a parent mail a sub-thread that I wished to keep separate.
- the ability of a filter to write selected mails to a single external file (one after the other) or an external folder (as separate files) which meant those mails could be processed by external programs then reloaded using the first feature. One could eg use that to strip most of the headers off mails being archived, as although disk space is cheap etc halfing the size of an archive still helps speed things up, notably backing up the archives and searching them.