At the risk of adding more fuel to the fire, I'll simply note that a) I sometimes use Gmail while we visit folks in South Africa who are still on 56k dial-up. Initial log-in can be a bit slow, but generally you'd be surprised at how efficient/quick it is w.r.t bandwidth. (As an aside, with the amount of mail I receive on a daily basis, using a conventional "download then read" client on a 56k dial up link would be totally impractical for me, while by contrast the web-interface allows me to actually keep on top of my mailbox in a reasonable manner.) b) Gmail does a lot of in-browser caching, so re-opening a mail you already opened recently does not instigate another network round trip. You can test this by viewing a bunch of emails, then setting your browser into "Work offline" mode. You'll see that Gmail will happily re-open emails you've already opened without requiring a re-fetch. c) As the web matures the trend towards web-applications being able to store data locally and run off-line should increase, further improving bandwidth efficiency on the one hand and end-user experience on the other. (See fore example this presentation on HTML 5: http://slides.html5rocks.com/#slide1 ) c) Stating the obvious but you can turn downloading of images off by default in your browser, which will of course further reduce the actual bandwidth usage by essentially reducing your web browsing to a text-only stream (which of course to boot will be compressed between web server and web browser.) d) Using Gmail means you don't waste bandwidth unneccesarily downloading mails with big attachments (PDF files, Word files) unless you actually want to, and also prevents you from having to download hundreds of spam messages and/or your entire inbox before viewing specific emails, which can eat large amounts of bandwidth. (There is of course IMAP as well...) e) Actually having access to your email from places you wouldn't normally have access to it (on holiday, at conference) is a benefit you don't neccesarily have with a conventional client. (You'll only have it if the client is on your laptop and you have your laptop with you and you can connect it to a network allowing internet access. )
As for me, I use gmail but with Thunderbird as mail client on my desktop. In this way I have the best of both worlds. When at home I'll download my mail as normal, when abroad I have an interface accessible from anywhere with internet access. I absolutely agree about programmers having to be aware of the bandwidth costs involved with every operation they do, as bandwidth isn't free. However, the internet is after all, a network, and the argumentation ostensibly against web based services (especially potentially relatively low bandwidth ones like gmail) on the basis that they consume network bandwidth per-se, seemed a little OTT to me. YMMV. Walter
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