- The search is very good, even searches within attachments.
- You can have large attachments.
- Doesn't run out of space and is free.
- Spam detection is flawless. I've rarely had anything important fall into spam. Alternatives like spambayes are not nearly as good.
- The threading is excellent. Most competing products suck at this.
- The keyboard shortcuts are comprehensive and save me tons of time. Most competing products suck at this.
- Labels and filters are super powerful and save me tons of time. Most competing products suck at this.
I don't like any of the non-webmail alternatives, simply because they are not webmail, and you can't get to them from everywhere.
Alternatives seem to be:
- http://openwebmail.org/ (pretty bad)
- http://squirrelmail.org/ (also pretty terrible)
edit:
Looks like mailpile is closest to what I want, with a open source and modern python stack, super clean and simple UI, focus on the right features. But it's fairly alpha. On the other hand, they seem to have gotten some 160k of crowdfunding, so the main developers seem dedicated.
Fastmail also seems to be the best non-open alternative around, imho.
edit2:
Somewhat disappointed that mailpile seems to have reinvented the wheel multiple times by not using an existing web framework / search server.
