Letters to the Editor
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If you want your emails given to the US government, go with Yahoo.
Google, on the other hand, is the only tech company that has thus for put up any struggle against turning over customer records without a warrant.
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Labels and Folders
A brief defense of labels versus folders:
Let's say you have a folder you keep funny political e-mails in. Maybe you call that folder "Funny Political E-mails". Let's also say you have a folder in which you keep all e-mails from your brother, Steve. Maybe you call that folder "Steve Stuff". Then one day Steve sends you a funny political e-mail. Where do you file it?
You could copy the e-mail and place one copy each into the two separate folders, but why waste the disk space to store two identical copies of the same e-mail in two separate folders? With labels, on the other hand, you can assign a "Steve Stuff" label, and a "Funny Political E-mails" label, and when you do a search for either label, the e-mail will be included.
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tags v. folders
If e-mails cannot co-exist (without copying) in multiple folders, then tags are superior. If they can, then for all intents and purposes the difference is non-existent.
I frequently tag e-mails with multiple tags, so that they can be both topical (say, planning a trip with my folks (tag: yosemite)) and archived (tag: family). Also, it allows e-mail sent to multiple lists (blah-user, blah-devel) to be tagged with both and able to be found under either tag (or with a search limiting to only one of the two (or more) tags).
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Yahoo versus Gmail
Yes, Yahoo mail has ads. But I pay so little attention to them, that the ads are essentially invisible. I only see what I want to see.
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the same thing for almost any users
I use both and find no real reason to prefer one over the other. It's in everybody's interest for both of them to continue to compete and develop.
I slightly prefer Yahoo for the tabbed interface, but the lack of outgoing ads is a huge advantage for Gmail. Otherwise I find them essentially the same. I am indifferent to the conversation grouping and the IM capacities, and I don't use folders OR labels since I just rely on the ability to search through all my email on either service.
The main problem with Gmail is the snobby tech types who fetishize every product of the biggest internet company around, and actually look down on others just because of their email address. They are worse than Apple people... Ordinary folks will do just fine with either one.
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Gmail (small) con
Gmail Chat and certain other apps don't work on Safari - only Explorer and Firefox.
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Gmail V. Yahoo
The biggest reason I use Gmail over yahoo is that you go directly to your inbox on login. I hate the intermediate screen.
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RE: Gmail (small) con
Gmail Chat and certain other apps don't work on Safari - only Explorer and Firefox.
This is Safari's fault. It's an incomplete implementation in WebKit.
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Yahoo small cons
You have to have premium service to mass-forward e-mail. (I wanted to send a bunch of stuff I had stored in Yahoo to my Gmail when I first got it.)
I think the Yahoo contact tools are harder to use.
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Small con re: labels
Labels are indeed more useful if you want to apply multiple tags to one conversation. However, one thing that vexes me about them is the inability to make sub-labels (although to my knowledge, Yahoo! doesn't let you make sub-folders either, does it?). So if I want to make a general category of "college stuff" and then a sub-category for "financial aid", it's no dice. On a related note, Gmail annoyingly insists on alphabetizing the label list rather than letting you sort it yourself. Because I'm super anal-retentive I've come up with my own solution to both of these: lettering/numbering each label and creating blank labels to serve as category headings, so that my list looks as follows (Yea, I know I need help):
A: College==========
A1 Financial Aid
A2 Campus Jobs
B: Articles=========
B1 Political
B2 Humor
B3 Random
etc.
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tags and folders
I have accounts on all three--Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail. Yahoo is my main account, Hotmail is where the spam websites make me sign myself up for goes to die, and Gmail was opened for the express purpose of email-intensive projects--for example, I recently devoted a good deal of time to finding a new apartment and new roommates, relying primarily on Craigslist and on my university's classified page to both place ads looking for such and respond to ads others have posted which fit my needs. The threaded email feature is great for this--I can see at a glance exactly which person this email is from, what they've said in the past and what I've said to them, without having to search through folders and match up email addresses. If my respondent is the sort that likes to delete the quoted text from their replies, I can still easily see what's been said in the past.
On the other hand, in the several weeks of this particular project I've already lost several emails, simply because they got pushed down to the bottom of the list by the massive influx of new correspondence. As far as I can tell (and I'll be the first to admit I'm not overwhelmingly tech-savvy), there is no way, in Gmail, to neatly file completed correspondence out of the way without deleting it--which is what I did at first, until I found myself responding to the same ad a second time, with no positive record of the previous (dismissed) encounter because upon dismissing I had deleted it. So now I keep all exchanges in Gmail to avoid wasting time by repeating a process I've already completed to the point of rejection, but risk losing track of exchanges that have not been completed if the respondent doesn't email me back.
In Yahoo, I can get email I'm done with (but want to keep for future reference) neatly out of the way with folders, allowing my as-yet-incomplete correspondence to linger at the top of the list (and, by extension, the top of my mind).
I also really like the exclamation point used in the official spelling of Yahoo!, though it leaves me feeling a little uncertain how to punctuate around it.