Webmail Review

just before lunchtime on Thursday, the 14th of August 2008 by Chad

So I’m a bit bored and decided to do a quick review of the big 3 webmail services, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Microsoft Live Hotmail.

Gmail is easy. I’ve had a Gmail account for over a year as a backup account. Don’t do much with it, and never thought I would. Just never liked the interface all that much. It’s ugly in my opinion. Just doesn’t feel friendly. And the whole “beta” thing is getting really frickin’ old I think. 7 gig of storage, but meh… I’ve been keeping mail on my Exchange server for over 10 years that I need, and I don’t have that much used. Integrates with GoogleTalk, which was all hyped up but I don’t know anyone actually using it. But basically, I think it’s an ugly interface, the ads are intrusive, and the “tag” feature is overrated.

I’ve had a Yahoo account for a good many years too. Again not as a primary account but just to see what it was like. Up until recently, it was uglier than even Gmail. They’ve come out with a newer interface recently that is a good bit better. But weird that it doesn’t detect Firefox 3 correctly and won’t let me use the advanced interface unless I’m in IE. Again, the ads are overpowering and annoying. The new style interface is fairly usable, has calendaring, contacts, and notepad. Not great, not bad though. Much better use of the dynamic HTML and Ajax than Gmail I think. It lets you add RSS feeds to your mailbox which is interesting. Except no OPML import I could find, and the few feeds I tried to add manually gave an error message. Works like Gmail in that it integrates Yahoo messenger into the interface also, allowing you to chat directly from the web page. Interesting in that each item you’re working on shows up as a tab.

Last is the new Live Hotmail from Microsoft. The interface is very close to using Outlook I think, and it has mail, contacts, and calendaring, but no notepad like Yahoo, except as a subset under the calendar. The calendar doesn’t seem to be 100% integrated yet. Works with FF3 in the advanced mode, and uses Trend Micro for security. I’d love to see a way to customize the today screen as a user portal, right now it seems to be static for everyone with just some MSN content. I’m not able to integrate my Messenger contacts in, but when I signed up for the account, I didn’t select that option, I chose mail only. Actually using the interface is simple and easy, an the layout is pleasing. Still hate the ads, but you only see one ad compared to Gmail.

My conclusion is that Live Hotmail feels the best to use for straight email. Yahoo has a few more features like RSS feeds and notepad and gives more of an integrated portal feeling. Gmail’s interface was probably groundbreaking at the time, but now feels tired and old.