Gmail has ads inline that are hard to distinguish from real emails. What kind of self-respecting person uses that when they have the technical knowhow to spend time on hackernews (i.e. options)?

1. web is too slow compared to any decent desktop client. thunderbird navigation/deletion/message opening is basically instant from human perception, web version operations are visible to human eye.

2. doesn't cut trackers

It's bad enough so many of us have to get our emails through them. Adding even more tracking on top of that… No, thank you. I don't want all my scroll positions on all my emails to be logged in their database forever.

It cannot do PGP, by design, just for a very obvious fault. It won't let you use your own domain and web storage. Sorry, no contest.