> why would one use Thunderbird, or any third-party email client? What benefits does this offer over using the UI provided by your email provider (assuming that you aren't self-hosting)?
1. Unified single entry-point into all my email accounts. I I can search through all of them even while keeping them isolated from each other (to allow searching individually).
2. Latency: when I want to open an email it does not require a 500ms delay, as in gmail, roundcube, whatever. You may think this is not a problem, but if you perform a search and want to quickly open all 15 of the results, that latency adds up quickly.
3. Slicker UI, in most cases. Especially in searching (which is different from "filtering"). UI for adding rules to kill based on patterns is a lot easier than gmail, for example.
To be honest though, looking at my points above, it basically comes down to "searching is better on local client".
1. Unified single entry-point into all my email accounts. I I can search through all of them even while keeping them isolated from each other (to allow searching individually).
2. Latency: when I want to open an email it does not require a 500ms delay, as in gmail, roundcube, whatever. You may think this is not a problem, but if you perform a search and want to quickly open all 15 of the results, that latency adds up quickly.
3. Slicker UI, in most cases. Especially in searching (which is different from "filtering"). UI for adding rules to kill based on patterns is a lot easier than gmail, for example.
To be honest though, looking at my points above, it basically comes down to "searching is better on local client".