Rudi Ahlers wrote:
Simple, you need to be connected to the internet 24/7 to use something like hosted gmail :) Not everyone has 24/7 broadband internet
your mail server would need to be connected 24/7 to recieve mail anyways.
and, you can use gmail with POP or IMAP, and with many IMAP clients you can have local copies of your imap folders that synchronize on connect (and of course all POP clients do this anyways)