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Yahoo! Mail Superior to Gmail ?
ynotme writes "In his column, Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal writes that the new Yahoo! Mail beta provides a superior webmail experience to Gmail. Some quotes: 'The new Yahoo Mail is far superior to Gmail. Yahoo more closely matches the desktop experience most serious email users have come to expect ... Gmail has none of these new, fluid, desktop-like features ... Google's engineers have decreed that familiar email practices are no longer useful, and have substituted approaches they prefer, arrogantly denying users any choice.'"
Log in to your Yahoo! Mail account and click What's New. From there you can sign up for the Beta, and they'll eventually upgrade your client. It's a random beta.
From TFA
Both products are officially in "beta," or test, status. Neither is easy to obtain and use. If you want a Gmail account, you have to be invited by an existing account holder, or go through an odd sign-up process using your cellphone. Yahoo's new version, just a week old, is -- for now -- available only to Yahoo Mail account holders the company selected, though the user pool will be expanded later this fall.
This sounds like some of the critisisms that Linux software devs/power users get a lot of, being elitist, arrogant and not giving users a choice etc. Besides the original article being a troll, it's overlooking the main point: If you like yahoo's interface, go with yahoo, if you like google's interface then go with them. They're both free for chrissake... Same goes for linux apps too, and while gnome are a bit arrogant about the whole spatial nautilus thing is true, you can allways choose not to use it, like I do. Nobody is telling you what to do!
Hey, GMail open it's SMTP for me and my outcoming mail... Does Yahoo! do the same ?
I'm getting quite annoyed at GMAIL saying "Ooops... pls try again"...
Of course, hotmail is horrible, but Yahoo has always at least been consistant in this area.
I've never had Yahoo mail time out or not respond.
you forgot Free POP3
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Comment removed based on user account deletion
3 steps is too many, yes, but not bad to keep the UI clean.
1. Click Message
2. Click More options
3. Click Trash this message
alternately:
1. Check Message
2. Click More Actions... drop down
3. Select Move to Trash
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
Yahoo's mail does have the first three items on your list. And arguably the "reliability," too. I don't think there's a search or a "thread view," though, but I haven't really looked for those features. I would guess that the new "beta" Yahoo Mail will probably have them.
But I'll say that Google has done Yahoo users a great service, simply by bringing competition to the market. Yahoo has had to greatly increase storage and features in a hurry. It worked, I guess, at least well enough to keep me on as a Yahoo Mail user.
I haven't yet found a webmail that's as rich, fast and feature-rich as mutt...
I like gmail mainly because it gives you 2.5 GB space, and free POP3 access. Also I can use any browser, even lynx (which I use most often than any other) or even a cell phone (which thankfully I don't have but I'm sure that day is coming) to access the site.
I agree, that's about what I got out of his article--that "better" means more like Outlook. And I don't see the damn point of a preview pane--if it shows the whole message, how is it a "preview" of any sort, anyhow?
Although I suppose it might be nice to have a split view in Gmail where you could see the email in a box below and still scroll through the emails above. Opening multiple emails at a time is nothing new, though--Gmail introduced that with 'threads' ages ago!
Frankly, using Outlook here at work is something I consider *painful* because the UI is so clunky, so I certainly won't be going over to Yahoo any time soon. And invites are hardly a problem any more--I have *100* of the damn things, and anyone who knows anyone at all with a Gmail account should be able to get an invite. As for multiple deletions, clear any labels it has & hit "archive" (or "report spam") as the case may be. Umm, who cares that Google has a collection of your spam? If it's that sensitive, you're an idiot to send it via webmail, anyhow. And even there, there's the HTTPS hack for Gmail, where a tiny protocol change allows you to go back to HTTPS after you log in, so that your whole session is encrypted (hint: after you log in, change the URL from http back to https like it was when you logged in... voila, your session is now encrypted).
That and they have that SMS signup thingy. Can't blame them for restricting the signups so that you can't just create dozens of accounts there.
Which leaves me with the only thing the other services are useful to me for any more: throw away accounts.
Pretty much everyone has 100 invites these days. I got the impression that the invite system was designed to keep the percentage of completely clueless users low in the early days when they actually wanted to hear from the users... Possibly also as a tool to keep growth of the system manageable so they don't suddenly need 1 billion 2 GB mail accounts in a week. It probably also helps limit automated signups. I could also be wrong though.
What's keeping you from creating a filter in Gmail and clicking on "Skip Inbox" to achieve the same effect as you have in Yahoo Mail? Labels are infinitely better as they allow not only folder-like functionality but also multiple labels. That way you can have messages from your mistress and wife, labeled accordingly, and also have them show under "Ass in Trouble."
Best, of course, would be some hierarchical system like in IMatch, but one step at a time, I say.
Mostly because of one important feature, which is AddressGuard. Sure, both Yahoo! and GMail spam filters do a nice work. However, that is a "new" approach and it's what makes me not to receive any spam at all. You have an explanation here:
http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools?tool=3
And a Flash animation/tour/explanation at the end of that page.
Are you unaware that GMail also supports filters, with a filter action of "Skip inbox"? This action is the same as archiving an email from the Inbox view. The mail will show up in both All Mail and by clicking on the label. If a certain label is applied to an unread mail, the label is displayed in bold. So basically, they have all the functionality of folders and filters, but the added bonus of the mail being viewable from more than one label without storing multiple copies.
Don't forget the sub-address support.
:)
I sign up to almost all online things with
example for my slashdotaccount
carl0ski+slashdot@gmail.com
a + symbol and any string can be added between you gmail account name and the at symbol.
They are vaild addresses an delivered to you.
In my case i use them for security purposes, suspect sites i use carl0ski+spam
as my address.
then filter it straight to trash
Yahoo! can add all the features they want, all the free disk space, all the spam protection, a slick web interface, etc. Until I can send and retrieve my Yahoo! mail from a POP3 or IMAP interface FOR FREE like I can on Gmail, it's not better than Gmail, at least not for me. I was using Yahoo! mail for over a year before they turned off their free POP3 access. I don't blame them, but that's why I switched to Gmail. Then Gmail activated free POP3 FTW.
Well, you can do that - I have filters set up to label particular emails and then not bother showing them in the inbox. And my label list on the left shows labels with emails that are unread in bold, with the number of unread mails in brackets after the label names. i.e. exactly what you want.
If it helps: labels are just like normal folders, except you can put more than one label on an email.
Labels seem great to me - never had any problems with them.
Tag them, smart guy.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Ask and ye shall receive...
Read my blog.
You can. Messages which skip the inbox are still marked as unread, and still highlight as unread in the list of filters. There is absolutely nothing you can do with folders that you can't do with labels* (they are essentially a less powerful version of the same thing), and there is things you can do with labels that you can't (semantically) do with folders (multiple membership, for instance).
Folders are a clumsy metaphor, I find. The same forces that are moving filesystems (or, in particular, their representation to the user) away from the "directories" approach are making this change. There's no reason to have files which can only be in one "folder" — it's an artificially limited metaphor.
* Although obviously you can't, in Google's implementation, have folders-in-folders or the like, but this isn't really a problem with the metaphor (nor a feature that 95% of people would find useful).
Thing like...
- Yahoo! lets other companies that show advertisements on some of our pages set and access their cookies on your computer.
- Yahoo! collects personal information when you register with Yahoo!, when you use Yahoo! products or services, when you visit Yahoo! pages or the pages of certain Yahoo! partners, and when you enter promotions or sweepstakes. Yahoo! may combine information about you that we have with information we obtain from business partners or other companies.
- Yahoo! collects information about your transactions with us and with some of our business partners, including information about your use of financial products and services that we offer.
Goowy mail is pretty good. You don't have to beg for an invitation, it offers both a really cool Flash version and a stripped down version for low bandwidth connections (You select which one you want at log on). It doesn't have ads (yet) and it even has news and games if you care to click on their icons. It's a credible effort.
Insert witty sig here.
As the Oddpost team blog has noted, they've been working on the new Yahoo mail interface ever since they were acquired. And yes, the new Yahoo Mail does work with Firefox.
Go somewhere random
You seem to be suggesting that you can't get e-mail on several machines from a POP3 account. I do it all the time for several e-mail accounts (including gmail via POP).
All you have to do (assuming your e-mail client supports it) is set it to "Keep Messages on Server for N days" (where N is large enough that you are sure to have downloaded e-mail from all your computers).
Works great on The Bat. It also has a "Delete Message from server when it is removed from Trash) which is handy so that you don't download spam or general useless messages on several computers.
With my [free] gmail a/c I can send/receive from my email client (Thunderbird, in my case): I never use gmail's web interface, except to change preferences. With Yahoo, I have only webmail; POP access comes only at the price of an annual subscription.
The advantages: I have a stable email address that's fairly well spam-filtered, and isn't tied to my ISP; I also get secure connections (with POP, SMTP, and HTTPS). Meanwhile, I don't have to turn on my main machine, and don't have to set up multiple mail clients, but can still get the benefits of old-school mail management while being able to access my mail from anywhere.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
a) You can access gmail's mail with POP3 (you can't get at Yahoo's pop access with a free account).
b) You can read POP3 mail with a Yahoo account
So, umm, yeah, you can use the Yahoo interface to read your gmail mail.
Next.
> But isn't drag and drop an Active-X component?
Not if its drag and drop inside of the browser. Then its just using DHTML. Dragging components on a webpage is not that complex to accomplish.
15 MB? That was a steal back before GMail. My yahoo account, which had been around for a while, was lucky enough to have 6MB, but that was because they can't reneg allotted space from an existing account. If I remember correctly, either Hotmail or Yahoo (maybe both) only offered 2 MB a year or two before GMail came out. I have to agree with some of the above posts. With my old 6 MB account, I was constantly erasing emails because I simply didn't think I would need them anymore. With GMail I pretty much keep everything except for the automatically filtered junk. I have to commend GMail on making it more difficult to delete emails, because it saved me a lot of grief for a school project. It was my high school senior project, which had a number of papers connected to it. One day I pop in my jump drive, and surprise!, my jump drive had shorted out. Luckily I had emailed all of those documents, so I was able to recover them. Anyway, that's my story for GMail.
The only way to tell the difference between a hamster and a gerbil is that the hamster has more white meat.
Erm... no. The grandparent post was, I would imagine, referring to the article summary, which states plainly "Google's engineers... [are] arrogantly denying users any choice." The point being, why is it arrogance when Google fails to emulate Yahoo!'s UI, but not arrogance when Yahoo! fails to emulate Google's UI? This isn't Google fanboyism, it's a reasonable critique of an obviously biased article.
For the record, I've not used Yahoo!'s mail service, and it may well be better than Gmail. But the reasoning presented by the article is less than convincing to me, and it seems like the author is bearing something of a grudge. IMO. YMMV.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
Have Firefox? Easy single click delete...l ete+button/
http://www.arantius.com/article/arantius/gmail+de
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
He isnt saying Google did it first, hes saying thats the first time he has seen it, i havent really seen it in any mainstream clients for the pc.