[abathur]

> For an example of how this can really matter: an acquaintance is embroiled in a legal dispute with an ex-employer. Thanks to Apple's sane implementation of IMAP Mail on iOS, she still has access to all her company communications there to use as evidence. Unlike on her PC, where she was just using webmail the entire time and has nothing.

I agree this is an issue, but just thought it was worth pointing out that (cloud + offline) is better than just offline.

I'm a bit of a digital packrat. Despite carefully preserving and porting my data from system to system, I lost years of email archives in the aughts because Outlook Express would prompt me to archive old mail, but I didn't realize it was over-writing the old archive until I went looking for a message and couldn't find it (when it was too late). The lost email covered all but the last few months of my undergraduate degree.

[TeMPOraL]

Cloud + offline is best. Just offline is worse, but just cloud is the worst, and that's what we're being offered 99% of the time. E-mail is a special case because the protocol and traditions around it predate modern commercialized Internet. But e.g. all the other communication services regular people use nowadays are cloud-only.