As much as I would hate a services based future, where we rent the processing power we need, I have to admit its upon us. All my email is actually located on servers that I have no control over. I cant even download most of it for archival purposes anymore. I have the following accounts:

1. Gmail (Now my primary)
2. Hotmail (Secondary)
3. Yahoo (for mailing lists)
4. Work email

Of the four, only two can be downloaded on to my local machine. The work email can be accessed through POP and IMAP, and Hotmail which can be downloaded through Microsoft Outlook. I rarely find the time now to start up the email client, so most of the time I am just using the web browser to check my email and then signing of. And as it is my use of Windows is infrequent, since I use Linux at work, so hotmail cannot even be downloaded usually.

The work email is easily accessible through pine over ssh, which if you think about it is still very similar to the web interface. You just do it over a different medium but its still accessing email remotely. Nothing is on my local PC. Thats so sad, its not even funny. And I'm not the only one. There is an alternate web based way of accessing work email as well, which most people around me tend to prefer. People who use POP and IMAP are dropping down, and I can see that in my server logs. The future, at least for email is through web based remotely accessible email.

However, there is still hope. For RSS I still prefer to use clients like RSS Bandit and SharpReader, so maybe the future isn't all web services based. I certainly hope its not.