[JoshTriplett]

Among many other reasons: because the web interface is utterly incapable of sending and receiving unmangled patches, or more generally sending and receiving plain text without wrapping.

Also: because people might want security, such as GPG.

[thrownaway2424]

I don't think the parent post was arguing about that, I think he was arguing that if these are important features to you, why choose gmail in the first place?

[dredmorbius]

Upsides: it's ubiquitous, well-provisioned, has very high uptimes (a few outages, those tend to become national or international news), and, for now, good support of IMPAPS or POPS access for standalone email clients (which I use on my phone and desktop).

Downsides: Snooping, NSA honeypot, Chinese government hacker honeypot, etc., etc.

[pyre]

Because you already have a Gmail account when you decide to care about these issues?

[biafra]

Maybe I did not choose it? Maybe my employer did?

[hobs]

I wouldnt disagree with anything but the GPG, a dishearteningly small number of users use such features.

[eli]

Moreover, if you regularly use GPG, the GMail web interface would be nearly unusable, no? So it seems you'd be much better off with nearly any other email provider.

[wyager]

Most GPG messages I get are signed, not encrypted, and I usually don't need to check the signature. So the web client is fine, but it's still good to have desktop client access.

[sp332]

Why are other email providers better than (Gmail - web interface)?

[smileysteve]

there are some browser extensions for that