Is Gmail android app secure?

Last year, I got the inspired idea of using Office Outlook as my main mail client on Windows. Due to the large quantity of spam mail, I could not continue using it as the client would download every spam mail (and attachments) to my hard disk. The risk of infection was too great even if you did not open them. But opening them is a loose term - my client opened them automatically, even after disabling previews and other moronic settings.
To make a long store short, on my desktop(s) I now use only web mail. No installed clients. However, I need to decide on what to do with my Android. I'm using now Google Gmail app and it, like all the other clients, downloads these spam messages to my phone's storage.
Should I use web mail on android as well? Are there any clients that will not download anything locally and just use remote mail (something similar to web mail)? Any thoughts on the matter?
Thank you.

In this context, I would oppose the use of apps where a browser supplies identical or near-identical functionality, for a simple reason: you don't know what they're doing with all those permissions you granted them, whereas browsers are as unprivileged as possible by default and have all sorts of security measures meant to protect you from "bad" stuff.

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Originally Posted by anon

In this context, I would oppose the use of apps where a browser supplies identical or near-identical functionality, for a simple reason: you don't know what they're doing with all those permissions you granted them, whereas browsers are as unprivileged as possible by default and have all sorts of security measures meant to protect you from "bad" stuff.

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Exactly it's basically exploiting people's need for ease to mine personal data for analytics and this happens in almost every app we use. Some of my friends work in analytics and this is a rather common method they use to mine data.