Gmail is not for me

Since I’ve had to explain this a couple times already, I’m writing up my reasons for not wanting a Gmail account.

Firstly, as great a web mailer as it is, I don’t need any of the things Gmail has to offer:

• My harddisk has 120× as much capacity as Gmail would offer.
• I’ve had threading for two years because I use mutt to read my mail and have had “sort by threads” as the default for all my mailboxes almost since the beginning.
• procmail neatly sorts messages into boxes on arrival. I’ve never lost survey of any of my mail.
• Should I be away from home, then I can use the web interface of GMX to read my mail.

Conversely, switching to Gmail would mean:

• I can no longer munge my mail with all of the Unix toolkit at my disposal.
• procmail allows me to do “crazy” things no web mailer’s filters would.
• No web mailer interface can even dream of comparing to the mutt+Vim combination.
• Currently, Gmail does not offer any other way to read mail than through their web interface. (If they did, a lot of my complaints would become obsolete, just like they’d be for GMX.)

In summary, I have too little control at Gmail.

At some point I’ll put down the cash to rent a “root server”, so I can get rid of third parties completely. I prefer to be the sole lord and master of my mail.

Referenced in My data on my system, When you want something done right.