Nothing funny about feldspar

Which uses the least computer/bandwidth resources, reading your mail through the web (e.g. gmail or yahoo mail) or reading your mail locally?

I can see that for messages you want to read, it’s probably more efficient to read it locally. After all, you only have your mail program’s overhead to worry about. If you read online, you have the browser’s CPU usage as well as the cruft ads and frames associated with the website. This assumes that the message content itself takes the same amount of time to download to you.

However, for messages you don’t want to read (spam, interminable mailing list response threads that you keep holding off unsubscribing to because sometimes, sometimes they say something useful), you have to download the messages just to see the titles even though you already know that you don’t want that penis patch. Or that “Greeting card from classmate!” I suppose it would be better to use IMAP instead of POP so you’d get the best of both worlds, but I’ve never been satisfied with IMAP. Could be I was doing it wrong.

I “solved” this issue for myself by trying to do both. I use an online account for online stuff, and I keep my personal account very private (though I still get spam through dictionary attacks). But is this really more efficient?