Webmail vs. Offline Mail: Which Is Best For You?

Reader Paul Morris writes: I noted in your piece about cleaning your hard drive a comment about email clients hogging a lot of space. For years now, I have used a web-based email client and hog their disk space.  I would be interested to know your take on web-based mail vs. local email clients like Outlook.

Interesting dilemma there: webmail vs. offline mail readers. Let's look at some pros and cons for each, then I'll tell you what I do.

WEBMAIL

Pros - Online mail services like Yahoo! Mail and Gmail have some nice advantages: You don't have to buy any extra software to use them, and your mail doesn't take up any space on your hard drive. Your email system can't be used by spammers to send outgoing messages (if your PC is infected with a virus). Of course, you can get webmail on any computer, and for the most part, webmail is free and, with 1GB and up on all of the services, you'll have plenty of space for your files.

Cons - ...or you may not. I regularly clean out my mailboxes and easily hit 1.5GB. If I didn't clean them out constantly, I'd be in the range of 10GB of email by now. Webmail is only online. If you're traveling, or your internet connection is down, you won't be able to get your messages until you reconnect. This can be a problem if you have a critical piece of information (say, your hotel reservation number) sitting in your inbox where it could be unreachable when you need it the most. I also find webmail to be slow, and browsers are generally less stable than offline mail readers.

OFFLINE MAIL

Pros - The big ones here are that offline mail can be accessed whenever you need it, online or off, and that it can be much more easily searched with tools like X1. I use my mailbox as a semi-permanent archive of all kinds of files and information, so being able to search it at a moment's notice has many advantages. Offline mail also leaves no permanent record on someone else's servers: Every time I write about using an online backup service, people complain about security of those files... yet no one seems to mind storing all their email online. As for Outlook, I also greatly appreciate its integrated calendar and detailed address book, which makes it super-easy to schedule follow-ups by just dragging an email message to the calendar, for example. A final benefit: In an emergency, you can always go back to webmail, as almost all POP mail vendors also offer web interfaces.

Cons - An offline POP account usually costs money (my offline Yahoo! Mail service is $20 a year), but not always. Outlook will run you $100 or so, though. Downloading email takes a while, and Outlook can choke on big attachments. Of course, all that email takes up lots of space on your hard drive. Many people dislike Outlook (especially due to some of its vulnerabilities to viruses), though Microsoft has done a fair job at patching these issues over time. And for most people, you're tied to one PC for getting email, of course.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Well, you've probably figured out I use offline mail, specifically Outlook. Calendaring is a huge issue for me, as is having instant access to my mail whether I'm online or off. I also greatly prefer the flexibility and customizability of an offline mail reader: I send out newsletters, create mailing lists, use message templates, auto-flag certain topics... all of this is much easier to do with Outlook than with a webmail service. Overall, I just prefer the offline tool's interface and utility. (Heck, Gmail is so primitive you can't even sort your messages by subject.)

Of course, my situation is different than yours, I'm sure. So which do you use: Webmail or offline mail... and why?