In my experience people tend to use webmail for personal and native for business. I guess because native mail clients can be a pain to setup unless you understand IMAP , Port numbers yadayada. Also people don't use personal email much apart from in a few instances whereas for business it is the defacto communication method.
Using the gmail web interface for work email would drive me nuts.
Email can be pretty important to me so it's something that needs to be omnipresent on my desktop.
This is where thunderbird integrated with Ubuntu/Unity is perfect. When I have a new email I get to see the sender and subject instantly on the top right of the screen, the notification icon lights up and the launcher icon tells me how many unread emails I have.
If I were using gmail I would have to keep a tab open and would spend half of the day OCD switching tabs to check if I had anything important.
Of course you could fix this by adding notification features to gmail that integrate with the desktop and showing it in a window that is distinct from my other browser windows.
But then is it really a web app or is it a desktop app that happens to be written in JS?
Using the gmail web interface for work email would drive me nuts. Email can be pretty important to me so it's something that needs to be omnipresent on my desktop.
This is where thunderbird integrated with Ubuntu/Unity is perfect. When I have a new email I get to see the sender and subject instantly on the top right of the screen, the notification icon lights up and the launcher icon tells me how many unread emails I have.
If I were using gmail I would have to keep a tab open and would spend half of the day OCD switching tabs to check if I had anything important.
Of course you could fix this by adding notification features to gmail that integrate with the desktop and showing it in a window that is distinct from my other browser windows.
But then is it really a web app or is it a desktop app that happens to be written in JS?