Slashdot Mirror
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.
Shiremail won't be offering anything if Warner Brothers manage to claim proof of ownership to the word "shire". The Register had an article where they are now taking the owner of shiremail to court because if might confuse their customers who might think that it is related to LoTR.
Jonathanjk.com
It's a great deal - you get your gig of email, web hosting, POP access to the email, blog, forums, etc, etc. However, the Spymac servers are almost painfully slow and it's webmail interface has nothing on Googles. POP access was barely adequate, with the POP servers being unavailable probably 50% of the time.
Also, I trust Google to stay around as a viable company and keep providing me with my email service for a lot longer than Spymac (no offense to Spymac, of course).
There's also a German service that offers 1.5 GB e-mail with POP and SMTP for free. I've not checked it out personally, but here is the link:
http://www.directbox.com/
--- There is a man in a smiling bag.
It's not about the gig-o-space as much as it is about the superb interface. Don't get me wrong. I really like having all that space but the UI is really slick. 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. It's great being able more then one label to a message.
Gmail isn't perfect. If it were it wouldn't still be in beta. The filters and addressbook are a bit primitave. I would also really like to have the ability to filter based upon a Google search.
Thus far I give Gmail an A+ and don't see any sign of Google slowing down with it's development and improvment.
fewer features...
The article also mentions how well Gmail is able to filter spam messages.
<tongue-in-cheek>
I don't know. I haven't noticed any spam -- not even a single piece, to be exact -- going to my gmail account.
I'm making it my new experiment. I figure if I don't give my address to anybody, including school, online stuff, etc., but only give it to friends and people I know from face-to-face world, I shouldn't be getting any spam. This is only theory, of course, becuase eventually, somehow, the spammers always get my email addresses. So my experiment is to see just how long it takes them, and then I can question my friends -- and my enemies -- and see who gave my email on something that wound me up on a mailing list.
If you want to contact me and discuss my theory, you can reach me at m0gart3304haha@gmail.com.
</tongue-in-cheek>
The problem with GMail is that you have to use a web browser to read your e-mail. What I want is the ability to use a normal client like Thunderbird to read my mail, but have the search capabilities of GMail. I can't find a way to accomplish this even though I own and run my own Linux mail server.
:)
Is there any way of indexing my Maildir mailstore, or perhaps replacing my IMAP server with something more powerful that could give me a Gmail type search? If not, why not?!
In India, you don't need hard drives to run a gigabyte mail service. You just get a billion peasants and pay them 50 cents a month to remember a single character.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
This is probably offtopic, but what the hell...
Google currently handles a good USENET service, a good news service, the internet's best web search service, a blogging service, and now an email service.
What's keeping them from taking a unifying approach to everything they have? I'd love to have a home page that I could customize the content (sort of like what my.yahoo has). Latest threads in subscribed-to newsgroups, headlines from news.google.com with my favorite filters, quick summaries of who's sent new emails, etc.
Keep in mind, I'm not saying that this sort of portal service should be mandatory and the only way to get at the individual services. I understand that google's simplicity is part of its elegance. But, at the same time, one of the things that spymac is doing right is that all of their services are available from a central location. If google is going to keep branching out into all these new areas, why not try to create a singular portal to get at all of them?
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
I've been using Gmail for a few months now. The interface is very good, very useable, and has quite a few features that the other services do not offer (such as hot keys).
The only problem with Gmail is that the address book sucks. It only stores basic information, it adds weird people to your address book without your permission (mailing lists), and worst of all it doesn't yet support distribution lists.
IF they fix the address book, the Gmail service will be awesome.
Bryan
To be totally honest:
I haven't found gmail to be that good at filtering spam. I forward two accounts to it that have been around since, oh, 1998 or so and it catches maybe 30 percent of the spam, the rest ends up in my inbox. We're talking about 500 messages a day.
Using Hotmail with those same two accounts, I'd see about 5 percent of the spam, maybe less. Yahoo is a little worse, about 10 percent in the inbox.
So I hope gmail gets better. I do like a lot of things about it; the conversations, stars, etc... very nice and easy to use.
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
(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.
Sure gmail is considered webmail, but its definitely one of the first webapps I've that seen. When i'm checking my gmail I don't feel like i'm using webpage, I feel like i'm using a very well crafted application.
------------------------------ SirPhreak - "It's Thinking..."
Since about a month, my Yahoo mail Plus account offers me ad-free email with 2 GB of space. Integrated with an address book which I can export and import in a number of formats, and a calendar. They also have a feature where I can create disposable addresses as often as I want, for example when I am web shopping. I also pay for their Personal Address feature, so that they basically host email for a domain I own. I also get POP access, forwarding, (but I don't use it) and great spam filtering.
This costs some money of course, but I think it is worth it. I haven't tried gmail (no one has invited me), many people here think it has many unique features, but yahoo mail has features that gmail does not have. Until gmail offers personal address, there is no chance I will switch.
try fastmail.fm.. free with imap. a one time fee of $20 will give you permanent access to the 'good stuff' forever, rather than an annual fee.
I.O.U One Sig.
When you notice spam, click the box beside it and then the button "Report as Spam".
Google will eventually be able to build up quite the comprehensive list of email/servers to block, but for now, like the software itself, that spam detector is in beta.
Note, this isn't a troll to just state the obvious feature of spam reporting, but to remind people that their database of spam to block may still be small until we continue doing our job of reporting it in.
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
$2/user * 100 000 000 (???) users == $200 000 000 not cheap
40 gig drives though aren't the best value really, and you have to remember the server farm that you have to put them when making the cost. So there is a lot of cost to do this.
...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?
There are "Ads by Google" just under every page's review text. At the very least, there's a conflict of interest here.
"For £3.50/month or $6.50 US you get 1 GB of email space, virus scanning, and spam filtering. Calculating this amount into a yearly term, that's about $195 US per year; which is about 10 times what you would pay for a SpyMac Mail Pro account and six times as much as RunBox."
Duuuh $6.50x12=$78.
Or are they beta testing some calculators too there?
"You know you want me baby!" - Crow T Robot
Someone already wrote an app to do that. It's called Pop Goes the Gmail. You can use use it regularily to view your Gmail in a mail app (although the web interface is better), or use it for one-time batch downloads.
You can get it here.
From gmail help: Not at the moment, but Google believes in helping people access information whenever and however they want to do so. In the future you will be able to access Gmail messages from non-Gmail accounts for free or at a nominal fee.
...is a desktop client that will let me download my mail to my own computer (including all the neat features like search and conversations, of course!)
If it offered that, gmail would be about as good as today's obsolete e-mail system could get.
What it really needs to be even better than the current obsolete system can get, is public-key based encryption and authentication to fight spam and preserve a little privacy.
MakePassword.com Mp3 Blog
It seems that the article review (sorry, my bad. I didn't mean to rtfa) left a lot to be desired when it praised SpyMac.
I think it also left a lot of the strengths of GMail out as well. For instance, they left out the fact that GMail has Google's search engine capibilities in it to search your mail. With my GB of space, I subscribe to listerv groups for various development projects and can readily search through my own mailbox for information instead of weeding through the internet. Of course related to the search capibilities, he forgot to explain the labeling system versus traditional folders. The fact that your inbox is a single folder and several labels can be applied to a message is a pretty big difference in our traditional mail usage.
My dad still uses a hotmail account because he doesnt want to tell people about his new account (I was even nice enough to invite him), and it sucks. I can't really understand how they would ever expect to sell a hotmail account based on their free service's speed and spam issues.
All in all, I don't think this review is too great. It hardly explores the tip of the iceberg in how GMail changes the way people use email. His recomendation for GMail is good but not very well justified by his article.
They don't have the storage capability to give 1 gigabyte to every user because almost no user is near the quota. Since price of hardware are always falling they upgrade the storage when they need.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
Gmail is actually amazingly easy to scrape because you don't have to scrape it - it runs kinda like a web service, with javascript sending message packets back and forth to the gmail servers (thats why it's so fast - the JS gets a message packet and updates the on-page view, rather than reloading the entire page). Check out POP Goes the GMail and GMail loader (heck, just google for GMail) for a description. Note that using these is technicaly against the GMail TOS. I'd pay (a reasonable fee) for legitimate, documented access to the GMail api, though.
Hi guys,
p /isp s/>
I've been using both <A HREF="http://www.fastmail.fm/" title="fastmail.fm">Fastmail.fm</a> and <A HREF="http://www.spamgourmet.com/" title="spamgourmet.com">Spamgourmet</a> for over a year. Both services are free and very useful.
I've found the information provided at
<URL:http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/ima
provides balanced reviews of free and pay-mail providers. Fastmail, in my opinion, is the most reliable free provider I've ever used along with the best web interface I've ever found.
So they are... er... ten times free ?
- I really want my editor when composing longer emails.
- The fact that they have shortcut keys is great, but there need to be more of them. (no file to trash? no visit trash? I realize that one is supposed to Archive rather than Trash, but there's definitely a lot of one-shot email that has lost all purpose after reading it once.)
- The limits on filters and how they are matched are annoying.
- Mutt's sort by threads is as good as conversations. Mutt with thread-editing is possibly better.
- Mutt's limit function and searching are good enough for the searching I do. The only way gmail is better is that, since there are no folders, you can search all "folders" at once. I'm pretty good about saving things to the right folder (since you can set the default save folder via a set of match operations), so this rarely comes up.
With longer gmail use, I would probably find more use for search. This all being said, if gmail offered imap I'd be extremely interested, in that I could both use the web interface when using a friend's machine, and switch over to mutt when I want to do more serious mail usage.GET YOUR WEAPONS READY! --DR.LIGHT
Spam filtering, virus-protection, use your own domain name in your from-address, different personalities, file storage, a very powerful and fast webinterface, accessible by IMAP, POP3 etc, mail forwarding, rules, fetch mail from other accounts - even from Hotmail, an addressbook with lists, etc.
The only downside is that features and quotas vary depending on whether you are a free user, a member, full member, etc. But hey, maybe that's why they're still around.
I would never have thought that I'd be willing to pay for an e-mail account. But Fastmail is so great that I pay my yearly fee with a big smile.
Probably because it is blocked in many places. I know that our servers routinely block anything from this domain, because it is mostly spam.
Granted, only about 1 in 100 spam messages we've received claiming to be one of the rediffmail domains has actually come from a rediffmail server. But the messages that were really from rediffmail were directed at long-inactive email accounts, and several spam traps. We do not have a block against their servers, but the from address better be on one of our whitelists, or it will be "soft bounced" until we can find out from the recipient if it should be passed through.
This is all subject to change when/if they publish SPF records for their domain, but I certainly wouldn't use an rediffmail account for anything you want delivered...
I agree that the archive search feature is terrific.
However, Google Groups is far inferior to any decent newsreader when it comes to quickly browsing articles. GG still can't deal with a lot of character encodings outside of pure ASCII. Its beta Google Groups 2 service creates postings with screwed-up headers.