> Put gmail and facebook into a real desktop qt program and a 10-15 year old laptop would be glad to run them
Depends on how much mail you keep.
I use GMail's storage as it's intended, I don't delete anything other than spam. Over the course of however many years I've been using it my mailboxes have expanded to the point that simply keeping track of the current state of things causes Mail.app to drag my '08-era Macbook Pro to a crawl. That's a native app built by the designers of the platform. Thunderbird wasn't much better. Simply opening either one up basically maxes out 4GB of RAM, and unfortunately the model I have doesn't like 8GB.
I stopped using a local mail client and went back to webmail pretty much because of that.
Depends on how much mail you keep.
I use GMail's storage as it's intended, I don't delete anything other than spam. Over the course of however many years I've been using it my mailboxes have expanded to the point that simply keeping track of the current state of things causes Mail.app to drag my '08-era Macbook Pro to a crawl. That's a native app built by the designers of the platform. Thunderbird wasn't much better. Simply opening either one up basically maxes out 4GB of RAM, and unfortunately the model I have doesn't like 8GB.
I stopped using a local mail client and went back to webmail pretty much because of that.