Versus, say, 1GB for Outlook and variable amounts for Mail.app depending on usage. It's not 1993 — these days email includes a full text search engine, rendering complex content, etc. Since even a phone comes with considerably more than 250MB of RAM, if you don't want to use the resources you paid for to make things faster or better, wouldn't that be an argument for using pine or mutt in a terminal window?
> if you don't want to use the resources you paid for to make things faster or better, wouldn't that be an argument for using pine or mutt in a terminal window?
I rather think that pine, mutt or gnus in a terminal window (or even X) would be faster and better than a web client.
I read my mail in emacs using notmuch these days, and the full text search engine is a couple orders of magnitude faster than Google's Inbox; the complex content rendering is faster than Firefox or Chrome; everything is better and nothing is worse.
It's not an email client. It's a web browser using the features of a web browser to give you email client features. There is no expectation that it have a similar footprint as a binary tailored for the job of being an email client.