Recently an article posted on Lifehacker was trying to indicate that e-mail clients, historically, are dying out; I disagree.

While you have your social websites, where you can leave your statuses, brief messages, your thoughts or events, this is not e-mail. And while people have access to the iPhone’s and their portable browsers over 3G networks, they’re still not an e-mail client.

Right now web browsers, currently, cannot compete with your traditional e-mail clients as an application. Some people will be content to use the cell phone or portable browser or Internet appliance to browse the web; there’s just something about having an e-mail client loaded on your personal PC. Having control of where your information is stored you compose your information and how you choose to view the information.

Web-based e-mail is convenient and you don’t access to an e-mail client, and that’s the truth. I’m not going to argue the fact that web-based e-mail can be convenient, but they believe it’s offered is not what you consider convenient. There may be some exceptions to this rule but most of the web-based e-mail providers are limited by what current Web browsers can do.

Since the article was written in based upon Thunderbird, I’ll use this as my example. Thunderbird is one of the most popular free, open-source, e-mail clients on the Internet, it’s extensible, flexible, free, fast and performs the functions that need to; it can even be portable. The point of my comments are that Thunderbird can be made to be personal; fitting the person that’s using it.

With web-based e-mail providers your information is stored on a Web server somewhere, typically most of these places don’t have any way of archiving your information and they could close down tomorrow and you would be without that information. Anytime you don’t have access to the Internet you don’t have access to your e-mails or way to compose those e-mails.

So while the argument is being presented at Thunderbird is dying, I would say no. Is the popularity of portable devices with Internet service growing? My answer is yes, but the reason people are using web-based e-mail through those devices is because they can’t load/run e-mail applications.

Thanks for reading!
Enjoy.

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