So I finally decided to try to wean myself off the gmail interface and use mail.app instead. Mail.app is a fantastically written program, and its smart folders are so fast even for thousands of messages. I successfully downloaded all my 100megs of gmail email to my powerbook so far.
Everything seems to work alright except for one corner case. If I send email from Mail.app, using my gmail account, but addressed to my gmail acount, it doesn’t show up in the Mail.app inbox, although it shows up in the gmail web interface. I’m not sure what’s going on here.. maybe time to file a bug report with gmail?
The only thing I’ve found really annoying about Mail.app is that it’s filter and search conditions don’t allow for compound boolean logic. For example I can’t say (Account is gmail AND From person A) or (Account is school AND From person B).. this would be really helpful to consolidate all my email from the past even more, but I’m not complaining too much. It seems like it has enough to at least replicate the gmail experience locally.