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Originally Posted by TenFour
The thing is that when traveling there is more to think about than just losing your data--how you get it back might be even more important, and that's where the pure web solution works well. Your laptop is stolen, you lose all your data if it is stored there. Sure, if you've also been backing up to the cloud you can restore some of it, but that is pretty awkward and slow if you have years worth of email and a slow and limited Internet connection.
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Sure, that's valid, but I think it's very rare that an e-mail provider these doesn't provide a decent web-based interface. As much as I do 99% of my e-mail work though a third-party client, I know I'd certainly never go with a provider who didn't have that as a good backup option. If I lose my device, or simply don't have access to it for whatever reason, I can hop on the FastMail web interface, and I'm good to go. Add in the ability of FastMail to also sync contacts via CardDAV and you have your whole address book in both places as well.
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Using cloud services you become somewhat hardware agnostic--your Mac dies and you can switch to using a cheap Windows laptop that you can pick up from someone, even if it is a few generations old and doesn't come with the software you need/want.
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Yup, I won't disagree with you there, and if you're talking about more than e-mail, and you're a frequent traveller, I'd pretty much say that G Suite is the only option that's really worth considering, as with that you're completely hardware-agnostic, even for things like your files.... you can live in a world where pretty much
everything is simply in the cloud, and switch devices at will. In fact, this is pretty much the whole concept behind the Chromebook.
But if we're talking purely about
e-mail services, I don't really see that there's much of a distinction between using an IMAP client and a web interface if you're travelling with your own hardware. I see that as the best of both worlds, since the IMAP client gives you offline access to your e-mail where there's no Internet access, but you still have access to all of your data from the e-mail provider's web interface should you lose your device or find yourself in a place where using it is not really practical.