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How Does Gmail Stack Up In The Webmail World?
Wrecks writes "Flexbeta compares several email services that promise 1 GB of storage to see how they measure up to Google's Gmail. The review mentions how one service, ShireMail, offers far less features than SpyMac yet cost 10 times as much. The article also mentions how well Gmail is able to filter spam messages." Among the webmail options not mentioned in this review (the authors compare a total of five offerings) is another gig-of-mail offering from the Indian rediffmail.
So how far will you be down-modded for talking bad about it?
Because of GMail, my yahoo account went FROM 6 MB storage to 100MB storage.
(mostly) -- for my usage, that is.
-- I use webmail, but not for high-volume long-term storage.
I download-and-delete my webmail to perm storage, so I don't need massive space,
and I'm happy to let my local filter do my spam filtering.
-- I use webmail just for two purposes:
(1) to keep a long-term copy a few things I might want when away (e.g., editor, telnet client, etc.);
(2) to check my mail when I temporarily can't access my perm mail storage --
and at those times, I'm willing to tolerate the spam if the server doesn't catch it.
Actually, the web interface is so much better than any email client I've ever used (elm, mutt, Evolution, Thunderbird) that I would never want to use a real email client again. My web browser is always open, and now mail is a click away.
:)
Gmail has really changed how I use email. The conversation feature is just wonderful. So is the search. I really love it
My other car is first.
...not being shy I'll ask it anyway. Isn't it possible, given that you can buy cheap generic hosting now, to just run your own web based email, instead of using a third party service where you don't have as much control over it? All I can see as an advantage with gmail and whatnot is that it is free, but after that, it is still a hassle and you get ads, etc. I would think that getting your own independent email service might be better in the long run, it adds an element of security-no evile stuff gets downloaded to your machine, and you have control over what gets saved and doesn't and who looks at it,and the obvious portability and access from anyplace that is the same with other web based emails, etc. Well, somewhat anyway.
Anyone have an experience in this, any recommendations?
I think that you've missed the point with the labels, they're not supposed to nest hierarchically because they can overlap. Think query rather than sorting. So in your example you'd use 3 labels; 'Geocaches', 'Watched', and 'Owned'. Then tag your messages with either 'Geocaches' and 'Watched' or 'Geocaches' and 'Owned'. Then search for messages with both labels.
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I've heard a lot about the lack of folders but once you get used to the lables you wonder why nobody else had implemented it first.
Evolution has had such a feature (called VFolders) for years.
The problem I have with gmail is that I get a lot of reports and such mailed to me nightly from servers I manage. With evolution, I can search through them quickly and easily and manage messages by the hundreds. Gmail limits you to working with 50 messages at a time. The last time I logged into my Gmail account, I had ~2000 messages in the inbox and wanted to sort through them. In evolution, I could just type some search terms into the search box and filter out certain messages, deleting or archiving them as I choose. Gmail wanted me to wade through 40 pages of message listings to do the same thing. No thanks.
Beyond that, everyone is going crazy over this "Innovative conversation view", which has been in just about every decent mail client for longer than I can remember. Except Google managed to screw it up by not giving you a proper message tree to see how messages relate to one another, they just show you every related message in one big list. Not usable at all.
Maybe I'm just weird in that I'm subscribed to a lot of high volume discussion lists and a handle a lot of mail over the course of the day, but I find gmail to be completely unacceptable as a replacement for a real mail client. To give you some perspective, I forwarded some of my mail, post spam processing, to gmail for 3 weeks to try it out. I'm already at 500 MB of mail (that I need to keep.) 1GB is not nearly enough.