It's impossible to serious email management in Gmail? Are you trolling?
Gmail was built by engineers to manage email efficiently. Everything can be keyboard driven. Labels work better than folders. Filters super easy to create. I receive 200+ emails a day, and Gmail keyboard shortcuts are my go-to tool. Aside from sub-optimal (usually chorded) keyboard shortcuts, every local client I've ever tried has simply choked on the volume of mail I deal with, Gmail doesn't.
I use MailPlane to get the Gmail UI but with smooth integration into OS X and multiple Google accounts loaded in parallel with the Google multi-login nightmare.
I am not learning new Keyboard shortcuts only for Gmail.
Thunderbird (and other decent desktop packages) allow me to reuse the over a decade worth of training I have with my OS's KB shortcut semantics.
In addition, using the keyboard in a browser is a mess. It is very easy to not have the current context set to a different application, and Gmail's non-standard K/B shortcuts can lead to unpredictable (and destructive) changes in other applications (for example, accidentally entering random text in a document open in my text editor). Using standard OS K/B shortcuts means that if I am doing a search, and even if my current app is not the one I think it is, it's likely to still do a search, and not enter random characters.
That's a nice post hoc rationalization but in practice it doesn't actually come up. I don't have any other app with the same semantics as Gmail. For instance, what app combines forward/next navigation with selecting, labeling and archiving? Unlike vim which I miss in native text fields, there is no context outside of Gmail that the muscle memory wants to kick in; the corollary being that there is not a comprehensive set of OS default shortcuts that maps cleanly to the set of things I want to do in email. In fact Mailplane does attempt this for Gmail so you get ⌘-n, etc, but the common ones are really not sufficient to cover a power user's email workflow—you're going to need to learn a few things specifically for your client of choice regardless of what that is.
Except that managing any number of messages between the max 100 view and the "anything-that-matches-search but you can't actually see them" is not very efficient. In any real desktop mail client, like thunderbird, I can load up and easily skim through all the messages in a folder/label. In Gmail, I can see at most 100 at a time and each load of the next 100 is terribly slow compared to scrolling the message pane in a real mail client and makes actions on the previous 100 unavailable.. This is far from efficient, IMO.
Gmail was built by engineers to manage email efficiently. Everything can be keyboard driven. Labels work better than folders. Filters super easy to create. I receive 200+ emails a day, and Gmail keyboard shortcuts are my go-to tool. Aside from sub-optimal (usually chorded) keyboard shortcuts, every local client I've ever tried has simply choked on the volume of mail I deal with, Gmail doesn't.
I use MailPlane to get the Gmail UI but with smooth integration into OS X and multiple Google accounts loaded in parallel with the Google multi-login nightmare.