Desktop is King
Still can’t decide which email system is better: desktop or web-based? Robby Slaughter recently tackled this subject on The Marketing Tech Blog. In his view, there are several main reasons why desktop email reigns as king.
When it comes to speed, timing, features and control, Robby Slaughter, principal of Slaughter Development, argues that desktop email is better equipped and more efficient than web-based email. Below is a shortened version of his entire guest post:
Speed
Many of us now have to process hundreds of messages in the course of a day. Every time you deal with a message on a web-based email program, you have to wait for some distant remote web server to handle your request. It might seem like Hotmail is pretty snappy at deleting messages, but it’s not nearly as fast as doing so in Outlook or Thunderbird or Mail.App . . .
Timing
. . . Your desktop email works exactly like traditional postal mail. You can process messages whenever you like and wherever you like, no matter your proximity to the mail carrier.
Features
. . . The Google Blog recently announced that if you’re using the Google Chrome browser you can now drag-and-drop attachments to your desktop!
Wait: drag and drop attachments? Let’s see, that’s been available on desktop email clients since at least 1997. And speaking of Google, they appear to be the only web-based email client that has officially offered “offline use” for nearly a full year. That’s a feature which has been part of every desktop-based mail client since approximately 1979.
Control
Call me paranoid, but I just don’t like the idea of trusting all my email to live in the cloud through some free provider. Once in a while disaster strikes. With a desktop-email client, you automatically get to have at least two copies of all of your messages.
Are you looking to become more efficient with email? Think about registering for our upcoming Productivity Series Session, The Battle For Your Inbox: Managing Email Productively. It’s coming up on Wednesday, October 6 at 2PM. For further information, you can also contact Slaughter Development today!
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September 20th, 2010 at 8:29 am
I agree with the comments on efficiency and security; however, those aren’t always my primary concerns. I’ve learned to handle gmail with pretty spectacular ease, plus I’m rarely working on the same computer. So a desktop version is less than helpful when you use 3-4 different machines in a standard business day. My gmail is available and manageable whenever I have a moment to process it, I have yet to lose an email in 5 years of use, and filters are fabulous things!