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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.'"
The new yahoo mail looks like outlook, but it's more annoying since it's isn't as useful (no newsgroups). I much prefer gmail, the interface is fluid, intuitive and comfortable, and it's oh so pretty! I don't think copying the look of e-mail software should be the next step for webmail.
Does Yahoo mail let you use an interface like gmails? Or do they 'arrogantly' deny us that choice?
If I remember correctly Gmail came out almost 2 years ago. What would be more surprising is if Yahoo mail did not have a better engineered GUI. In 6 months or less Gmail will be better than Yahoo and the cycle will begin again.
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but no one else delivered.
* A nice user interface that is very responsive.
* Web-based.
* Auto-complete/tab-completion of email addresses.
* Ability to search my email.
* Advanced sorting and rules. I can place my mail subscriptions into different labels and archive them for later.
* Reliability. Gmail is much more reliable than previous hosts. My mail is delivered and I receive my mail.
* Group email threads together.
* Mail filters.
* vi-like keyboard shortcuts.
You can also use any of your normal programs (thunderbird, outlook (shudder), etc) to access it Gmail.
/. were more than ads for one service/program/etc over another these days . . .)
Yahoo! mail does not have this feature.
So if you've always liked your Netscape Messenger . . . you can use it, with Gmail. You don't need to get used to using a web browser to read your email.
*shrug* Frankly, I use PINE, so I couldn't care less.
(Meanwhile I'd really appreciate it if the articles on
Does Yahoo mail have or plan to implement free secure POP access like gmail has?
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
The author makes the accusation that google are 'arrogant' by throwing away common email metaphors, and one of them is the common 'folders' practise that just about every mail system except google uses.
However, I think Google's way of doing things is FAR better. Folders is great, it allows you to file your mail away in a flat or hierarchial organisation. however, it DOESNT easily let you file a mail in TWO locations, unless you make a copy of the mail, and that in itself is really awkward.
Applying labels, or some kind of keyword system, or however you want to call it, is in fact a far more natural and flexible way of doings things, and I fully intend to apply that idea to a few other projects I'm working on, where 'file away into nested folders' was the original way of doing things.
So... perhaps Google needs to play a little catchup, but Google's idea of 'labels' instead of 'folders' I think is far superior.
The author of the article, with his accusations of Google's "arrogance", is really letting his "must put google down at all costs, because it's the cool thing to do" attitude really show.
* Saving your e-mails in conversations ( an incredible concept)
*Works stable on all browsers ( I'm not sure if anyone else noticed buy yahoo doens't play well with opera)
*2 gigs of space.
*pop access
*and most of all simple.
I switched my mom (not computer savey) to google and she picked it up in seconds. People need to learn more bells and whistles doesn't always equal better.
The author comes across being very emotional and too judgmental for me to take the review seriously. Why was it even necessariy to add the arrogant bit? Oh right! That's the common sterotype Google has on Wall Street. I forgot! No doing a traditional IPO and not taking themselves too seriously apparently runs counter to Wall Street traditions so Google is automatically arrogant. I guess then all innovators are in a sense arrogant because they refuse to do things the same way it has been done.
I work in the finance industry but some of the narrow minded people who work there makes me want to puke. If trying new ideas and being innovative are arrogant, then I hope everyone is as arrogant as Google is. On one hand, Wall Street throws out terms like "think outside of the box" but on the other hand some elements hates change. Take this quote for example:
By contrast, Gmail has none of these new, fluid, desktop-like features.
Uh... hello? This is WEB mail, not desktop mail? Maybe things aren't all the same in both realms? My Gmail is fast as hell and gets the job done. I go on there and answer my mails as needed. Then I'm out of there. Total time taken is usually under one minute. That's how I want it to be.
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The Yahoo! ads, as pointed out by this blogger, really are quite bad - GMail doesn't even come close to having objectionable advertisements.
Based on his comments in the article, he just seems pissy because GMail works differently than the mail client he is used to, and he isn't given an option of working the way he wants.
One clear indication of this is: he complains about having labels rather than folders. Labels are essentially the same thing as folders, except labels allow you to put the message in several labels/folders. The only difference is how they are stored in the filesystem, which is irrelevant in a webmail environment. If they put folder icons on his labels, I bet he would love it.
He also complains about the "Conversation" view of e-mails (threaded view). I like the conversation view. But, I can see his point that it should be an option (even though I still think threaded/conversation view is a better way to use e-mail, because it allows for better context).
He complains about the ads in GMail, which cannot be turned off. Okay.. I guess that's a point. If it used large distracting banner ads, like Yahoo! Mail, I would want to turn them off too. But, the small text ads in GMail blend in and don't distract at all.
There is certainly room for improvement in GMail. But, Mr. Mossberg is a bit harsh when ranting about Google's arrogance for deciding they have a better way to do e-mail..
I wish I had mod points. The summary even calls Google arrogant. Whether or not you feel that that is the case, this is not the editorial page, this is supposed to be interesting news items.
And no, I'm not new here.
The summary was also largely a quotation summarizing the viewpoint of the original article. In that respect, I don't think it was the summary that was biased, rather it's Mr. Mossberg, the author of the aforementioned quotations. If you're going to villify anyone for being biased, it should be him.
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But more than that, I have to say advanced filters are key to webmail for me. I can route the spam that comes from free newsletters right to the trash. Out of principal, I previously would unsubscribe from the obnoxious newsletters that don't allow you to separately unsubscribe from their spam, but with gmail I never see the "special offers." There are quite a few decent letters I'm much happier to be subscribed to now.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
The point that was missed is that Google's GMail project was meant to test new ideas. Is it really a new idea to try to mimic Outlook's tired functionality within a web browser? Certainly not, Microsoft already did a superb job of that with OWA. GMail follows Google's UI philosophy to a tee and is nothing more or less than I would suspect from them. They are keeping thing simple by limiting options. That may emasculate some users, because they want to think that they're superior to everyone else and know the right way to setup an interface, but it's a good way to test some of the alternative ways of thinking that Google wanted to explore.
For instance, I had never really taken the time to think of keeping threads of email as a single object. The first place that I saw it was in GMail. After seeing that I really despise having to use Outlook at work with it's cluttered mess of folders. I had also heard of the concept of search folders and labels before, but seeing it in action I realized how much better it is to see, interact with, and think of each message as a single object with multiple attributes that link it to other objects. If I'm looking for an email that was recently sent to me with an image attached I can just click on the "Attachments" label that I created and see all of the messages with attachments.
It's time to put aside that gushing and look at why I understand his complaints. It's difficult for people who just think of email as email to objectify it to realize that GMail's interface is logical. I converted my wife, who almost immediately converted 20 or so of her friends, and she had some issues setting up filters for use with labels. Some of her friends just didn't get it and switched back to whatever they used before. Not the least, I understand the concept of not throwing away data when you have so much storage, but do I really want to have that thrown in my face every time I delete something that I don't want being there? I also wish that GMail would trim the original text of large threads, check the original document of a 100-message thread sometime.
Then again, this is Google so it is a beta project. I could also refute each of my points with someone else's opinion that they like things the other way. Nothing changes that GMail is extremely successful at changing the way it's faithful users think about their email.
Yahoo!'s interface sounds interesting, but I'm interested in knowing if it has what GMail does. Does it have good keyboard shortcut support? Does it treat email messages as one object if I try to organize it in two different ways? I know it doesn't have threaded viewing of messages (yet) but does it hide previous emails and quoted text and/or highlight quoted text in such a way that I can easily discern quoted from new (for those who like to reply to one paragraph at a time)? If not then shame on Yahoo! for not incorporating features that save me time and are well done by Google. For that matter, if they don't have keyboard shortcuts then shame on them for not incorporating an indispensable part of standard UI.
You know, I don't think Gmail really needs to offer the kind of options our author spoke about -- individual messaging, folder options, etc. Those are the very things I was trying to get away from when I switched. If I wanted a desktop e-mail program, I would use Thunderbird or Kmail. I wouldn't go looking to Yahoo!. But that's just me. About the invitations, they're really not that hard to get. Everytime I give away an invite, I get another to replace it -- and I'm not the only one. Hell, go into almost any chat room, find a gmail user, and just ask them at random for an invite. I'm sure they wouldn't mind. Google just did it to spark interest. People always want what they can't have.