[Sirtel]

Hmm. I've always wondered why people use desktop clients. I've never used one; I access all my email online. The main reason for this is the size of my inbox - over 70 GB now, it would be hard to find enough space for it on my computer, even with its 1 TB drive (mostly full by now, due to my huge collection of hi-res wallpapers, movies/TV series and ebooks; I just love to hoard digital stuff). Also I live in a city and power failures or internet outages are very rare here, so that's another reason. For backup I do download my inbox regularly and store it on an external drive.

I guess a desktop client may come in handy if you use several email accounts, but I only really use one Gmail account for 99% of my email, so there goes the third reason for using a desktop client.