What do you use to read and write emails?

Thunderbird. It sucks, but it sucks considerably less than Outlook (which may take 20 minutes to start up at times, doing some database checks or whatever it does, and which consumes a major part of your computer's resources) or any other mail program that I've seen.

I try to avoid email when I can, as I find it to be a rather antiquated medium.

Well no, just the protocol is antiquated (like pretty much all protocols on the internet) and the people writing the clients aren't putting a lot of effort into it either (or so it seems, there is no single good email program that I know of, nor a single one that interoperates with any other program in a seamless way).

Nor is there any effort in trying to improve it because that obviously contradicts interests of both major companies and governments. Government wants to read your mail, and so does Google (and others).

There is no working encryption, which should actually be standard (please don't mention PGP and such, stay real). There will never be either.

Instead, government-certified companies are starting to sell fuckshit like De-mail (that started this year in Germany) which makes a big deal about using TLS-secured connections to the server and the "trustworthy" company sending out legally binding return receipts in your name. But of course there is no end-to-end encryption, and the same "trusted" companies forward your mail directly to the NSA.
In other words, you are to pay €€€ for getting no benefit over regular email and the quite possible inconvenience of Telekom or United Internet alleging in a legally binding way that you've received a particular email although you haven't. Which, seeing how incompetent they are at other basic things (like, keeping a deadline, or fulfilling an order), is quite possible.

Still, email - as it is - is very useful. You can't tell your electric supplier or your insurance company on Twitter or Facebook that you want this-and-that. Email does that just fine. The general idea is good. In practice, it could be much better, but it only isn't out of choice.

Do you check for emails every now and then or do you keep a client open for instant notification?

Both. It depends.

Do you care about google reading your emails (even business ones) when you use gmail?

Gmail != business. Other than that I don't care about Google reading my emails since the US spy agency pigs read them anyway.

Outlook is too bulky for my taste, rather using Gmail directly and native mail app of Windows Phone 8

You can't tell your electric supplier or your insurance company on Twitter or Facebook that you want this-and-that. Email does that just fine.

I want to live where you live. I can't tell my electric supplier or insurance company anything via email; I have to use the phone.

(I can't even log in to my electric supplier's website without being asked, on every single page refresh, if I'd like to fill out a survey about how "well" they are doing. They've gotten something like forty 0-star, scathing -- though mainly copy-pasted, I keep the basic responses in a note on Simplenote -- responses to this survey from now. A few more every month when I pay my bill, which I have to do manually if I want to use a credit card, because the only way to do automatic payments is to turn over my bank account information which isn't happening.)

I want to live where you live. I can't tell my electric supplier or insurance company anything via email; I have to use the phone.

Called the coroner, had them email me a scan of the death certificate (I was actually surprised they really did that, to be honest... some guy calls on the phone and says "we talked yesterday, I'm this relative of Mr. X..." -- but this seems to be no problem for handing out sensitive documents).

Once I had this, I sent email with that scan to two insurance companies and the automobile club, also sent the death certificate and the sale contract (having sold the car) to the IRS to get back the remaining 7 months of vehicle tax.

Got back written confirmation (on paper) from each 2-4 days later, IRS taking 4 days, everybody else two. Still waiting for the money, though (but no doubt I'll get it).

So yeah, email is awesome. Not only did I not have to travel 400 kilometers to get hold of that stupid piece of paper, and I didn't have to make a photocopy, I also didn't need to print anything on paper, nor did I need envelopes or stamps, or walk to the mailbox.

Grrr... just now I discovered that Google is being so fucking smart again, doing stuff that you don't want.

There is that category feature where they categorize your mail into "updates", "promo", "social" and whatnot. Which you can hide, but can't turn off. Now it so happens that you also don't delete emails any more when you think you did. Which I just found out by accident.

I just went through 220MB worth of emails dating back to 2012 which I had deleted but which Google didn't delete although I said so (well they probably never delete them anyway, but they also didn't delete them from my account). They were "gone" by all means, not appearing in any IMAP folder (that is, under any label), but still taking up user quota.

Having figured out what the issue is, I had to manually go through them all again since it is not easy or straighforward to list all categorized mails without also listing the ca. 10% of them that you haven't deleted already (for good reason, since you wanted to keep these).

That's an hour of my life lost only because some fuckhead thinks he knows better what you need than you do. Feeling inclined to toss GMail right now, if only it wasn't so much trouble updating the address everywhere...

@samoth

That feature is there due to all the folks who "accidentally" delete the wrong Email - It has actually saved by 'bacon' a couple times when I have mass deleted Emails .

@samoth

That feature is there due to all the folks who "accidentally" delete the wrong Email - It has actually saved by 'bacon' a couple times when I have mass deleted Emails .

Well, they could make this optional (if not opt-in, then at least opt-out) for those people who know which mails they want to delete.

Thing is, I quite likely did accidentially delete some mails that I acutally wanted to keep, right now. Going through the category and deleting hundreds of mails in bulk (some of which at first glance look exactly like others that I didn't delete, like "Your order at Amazon...") this is bound to happen. Mistakes mostly happen in such bulk updates where everything looks the same. They don't happen when you look at one or two mails.

I use the default Mail application from OS X on one of my jobs. In my last job I stuck with Gmail simply because I have no problem using my real name account for professional use, and we tend to use Hangouts anyways. I just reserve a registration-related email that is for commercial or promotional use for Yahoo Mail, as it's a simple way to divert all the junk mail.