Letters to the Editor
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Hotmail Con
The new system only allows you to view 25 messages at a time making it very difficult to sort through recent messages.
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text messaging
What's the big woo about sending email to cell phones? Most wireless providers use phonenumber as email address. Eg, for verizon sending email to phonenumber@vtext.com will result in the email arriving at the phone as a text message. You can send it from any mail client.
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Yahoo! Con
I've used Yahoo! for 7 or 8 years. It's never lost any mail, unlike another account I have. My problem is mail to Verizon users. Yahoo! mail to Verizon used to bounce back, saying the domain is unknown, now it just disappears without a trace. And I deal with Verizon users.
So I have a Google account now. I also like going straight to the in-box, but addressing could use some work. Make addressing as flexible as Yahoo! and it'll be great.
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@shacker
Shacker said:
- Multi-selecting messages in an inbox. Try to Shift-click to select a range of messages, or Cmd- or Ctrl-click to select a bunch of arbitrary messages for deletion. Every desktop mail client can do this, but the only webmail systems I've seen that can are Apple's Mac.com mail and the obscure Roundcube system found on some web hosts. Maybe Yahoo! can - I haven't tried the new one; but I know GMail can't. Again, this is a total show stopper.
- Hotkey support in general is spotty at best. Again, showstopper.
Gmail and Yahoo can select multiple messages; Gmail's had this feature from its first version. Hold down shift, click the first message, click the last message, then do the operation you want. Gmail is even better at this than desktop clients because it selects conversations, not single messages -- so you can move a whole thread to the archive with only one selection.
Gmail and Yahoo and live Hotmail also have lots of keyboard shortcuts, more even than many desktop clients.
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IM
It's certainly cool that Yahoo! Mail and Gmail have their chat clients embedded in their email interface. That's a big plus over Live Mail. And between the two, Yahoo!'s Messenger is more robust.
Not that it seems many people care, but Live Mail's screen is probably the most aesthetically pleasing. It's the most "designed" of the three, I would say. As with everything, in my opinion, Google and Yahoo! put more of an emphasis on functionality than making things look futuristic and cool.
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@lycoris
lycoris, Gmail allows you to either delete (trash) or archive messages. The idea is that you handle your incoming email by either marking it as spam, deleting it if it's not something you have any use for but is not spam, or archiving it.
If you use keyboard shortcuts, trash is # and archive is y.
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Multi-select
Gmail and Yahoo can select multiple messages; Gmail's had this feature from its first version. Hold down shift, click the first message, click the last message, then do the operation you want. Gmail is even better at this than desktop clients because it selects conversations, not single messages -- so you can move a whole thread to the archive with only one selection.
Hmm... that certainly doesn't work for me in GMail (using Firefox). Single-clicking a message (with or without Shift) causes it to open immediately, so there's no way to initiate a multi-select. Again, can't speak to Yahoo!
As for conversation threading, I don't understand how GMail's threading is better than Mail.app's threading. In fact, I think Mail.app's is *far* smoother, the way you can expand and collapse threads with Cmd-arrow, the way it skips to the first unread message in the thread, etc. I haven't used Outlook for a decade, but assume that most desktop mail clients handle threading similarly. No?
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@shacker
To select multiple messages, click on the check box next to the messages, not the subject line.
And here's why I prefer GMail's threading over Mail's: I can use it on any platform.
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Some more pros and cons
The article mentions that Hotmail gives 5GB of space and allows POP. I have not found either of these features on my account, which I check frequently. Can someone please confirm if their Hotmail account has these features?
I am an email buff who tries out new things that happen. Over the years, I have noticed Hotmail to be just a lame follower of Yahoo and recently Gmail. The functionality offered is never BETTER but they just improve it enough to not lose their current users.
Yahoo pros
It allows you to make disposable email addresses, which I find very useful if you have to give them to unreliable websites on the internet
Gmail
I believe no one mentioned that Gmail allows you to forward email messages to another email. You can either forward all messages or based on filters. This is something I find VERY cool.
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I prefer Gmail because
I can use my desktop mail client to access my gmail accounts for free - Yahoo wants me to upgrade to Plus to do that.
The other reason is a lot more subjective and maybe just shows I am old or elitist, but to my mind a Yahoo address has become the equivalent of an AOL address, and I would be embarassed to give someone an email ending in @yahoo.com, particularly if I was communicating with them in a professional capacity. Same goes for HotMail. I have accounts with both, but they are reserved for instances where I don't want to give out my "real" email address. Gmail suffers from 0 stigma, and actually seems to make people think more highly of you, maybe because of the invitation only history of the product.
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Whatever happened to MSN.com?
I've had MSN.com e-mail for seven years on an old (year 2000) computer. There have been some rough bumps and grinds along the way, but works fine for me and has worked perfectly for some years now. Who needs anything else?
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One more correction on Hotmail
Hotmail is NOT in Beta. It went live last May. However, the Outlook connector for Hotmail IS in Beta. See http://mailcall.spaces.live.com/ for more information (plus a handy lesson in office jacking via sheetrock from those whacky, fun-loving Microsoft drones.