Reply at the top or reply at the bottom?

[Buddha Buck]

On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 4:35 PM GWB <gwb at 2realms.com> wrote:

> The test of this reply is tl;dr.  Skip it if you don't need it.
> VaxMail, mailx, and other older clients (pine, elm) work fine, but
> gmail's browser client has the advantage of being largely OS agnostic
> with decent spam detection.  The huge disadvantage is that you are
> trusting google with your data, but who knows, maybe with encryption
> that is less risky (but my guess is that Google can decrypt any data
> on their servers).  Pick your poison.  I pay for google business to
> host our domain, so that if they become too intrusive we can just
> change our mail server settings and move elsewhere.  But most people
> are pretty much stuck with whatever their mail host (and employer)
> offers.
>

I feel it's useful to distinguish between Google's mail service and their
clients.

Google's mail clients (mail.google.com, inbox.google.com, the Android and
iOS apps for these clients) do not provide spam detection, nor do they
store your mail.

Google's mail service (which their clients access) stores your mail and
provides spam detection. It also provides an IMAP interface, so if you are
using Thunderbird, pine, elm, etc, you can point your client at the IMAP
interface, and still use Google's mail service.