In my experience, they're usually far more customizable. Clients I've used include KMail on Linux, The Bat! on Windows and Mozilla's Thunderbird, all of which offer myriad options to customize the appearance and behavior of message list, message pane and folder lists, though the first two apps much more so than Thunderbird. You also get to modify things like toolbars much more freely, and OS/toolkit theming usually also beats the GMail theming system.

You could argue that GMail has a higher customization potential given the fact that you can muck around with the document client-side (though Thunderbird extensions are similar, and if you really go down that road: I can also change the source code of KMail and recompile it), but we're talking in-app options here.

And so I find the notion that "GMail has impressive configurability because it has the options described in the article" amusing. Somehow the world has forgotten just how sophisticated an experience a regular old desktop app running in the context of a regular old desktop environment can be.

I'd also argue that regular old desktop toolkits and libraries still require a lot less investment of effort to achieve such levels of sophistication than the web development environment does at the moment. Like I said, thought-provoking.

Also worth noting is that Thunderbird's layout can be thoroughly customized with a bit of JavaScript hacking via its extensions interface, just as Firefox can. While TB may not have tons of visual options by default, it can still get them via third-party extension.

Aye, that's what I was talking about with "Tb extensions are similar [in their capabilities] (to GreaseMonkey-style site hacks)".

Hmm, didn't see that part. Maybe you edited? Maybe I just skimmed it. Sorry. :)

I edited quite a bit (awful habit), but that part was in the original version :).

On the other hand, if you don't like one you can get any other that fits your bill.

You can do this with Gmail just fine since it supports both pop3 and imap out. But I join the chuckling at the notion that "this demonstrates gmail's flexibility". If it was really flexible and customizable, I would still have the old theme.

> You can do this with Gmail just fine since it supports both pop3 and imap out.

Gmail's IMAP works, though it's had a number of minor-but-irritating bugs for years (these bugs even affect the official applications too). I wish they'd fix them - I get that it's not in their interest to support nonstandard clients for which they receive no ad revenue, but that's no excuse here, because they still cause some of the same problems on the Android and Blackberry apps.

This article, dated February 2008 (four years ago!) is just as relevant today as it was then. The duplication of messages with broken synchronization is what bothers me the most, as I use offlineimap to handle my mail: http://weblog.timaltman.com/archive/2008/02/24/gmails-buggy-...