You Got Mail

When I've been offline for more than a few hours, the first thing I need to do is check mail. And before I know it - I've been sitting there in armor for a few hours ^^;
Getting the armor off is usually the first thing I want to do but now keep it on to stay warm while the room heats up in this chilly season.

Many moons ago, I started to use Outlook Express on Windows to manage my mail.
I then switched to having my mail managed online at http://fastmail.fm/ - served me well for any years but it looks like they gave up trying to improve the service when gmail came along.

Gmail recently started to support IMAP so I managed to export all previous mails to my gmail account which I currently use - currently used up 3599MB.

Used Mail.app on the Mac for a while but decided to manage all my mail online after a while - restoring and backing up mail on the laptop is a pain as each mail is saved as a single file.

What mail account do you have and do you prefer to manage your mail online or offline on your machine? How long do you spend going through/responding to mails each day?
Most of my day was taken up by mails/meetings when at Amazon and Microsoft.