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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.'"
i've used yahoo's beta mail for a few days, and i'm changing it back to the original.
-- lol pwned
While it seems a lot of advanced users on Slashdot seem to love being derived of features by our Google overlords (more in response to Google Talk than GMail), the plethora of features in Eudora were the most appealing reasons I still use it and I'm glad WSJ is recognizing Yahoo for its new interface and features.
Whenever I checked my mail remotely in the past with either Yahoo or GMail, I would always reminisce about how fluid the process was at home with Eudora. Scanning email by opening new pages for every email with old web interfaces was quite frustrating, even with GMails quicker load times. The new web interface on Yahoo is actually making me consider finally leaving Eudora.
So, I for one am glad to see Yahoo head in the direction of both panes and continuing to focus on adding useful features (and unlike some products, doing it without ads or clutter). Improving the initial load time would probably be enough to get me to make the transition.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well Im not sure that it is invite only still. If it is, i would assume they havent hit thier critical mass (whatever that number may be) The way I figured it was that the invite only was a zero-cost advertising program that was run entirely by the customers. If you like it, you would invite your friends. Once they reach xxx # of users then they would open it up to be without invite. Kind of a social enginering type thing. See how well we spread without a drop of $$$ in advertising. But hey who knows I am probably way way off.
We admit all this to insure disbelief
Does yahoo allow me to search through emails? Does it have text only ads for the free version?
You can right-click on various items to see short menus of useful tasks, like "add sender to address book."
Doesn't gmail automatically add every sender to the history? when you compose a new message you can just start typing the address and it will show you the email address. Isn't that easier than manually having to add?
And there's no preview pane, only a feature that shows a snippet of the content of an email.
Showing the snippet IS preview! How much more do you want to see ?
It forces you to view all of your email in groups of related messages called "conversations," instead of viewing them individually as they arrive.
Tell me why would i NOT want to see the messages which are part of the conversation?
But i have to say tabs in messages by yahoo looks cool!
I agree. The connected Yahoo Calendar, Notepad, Briefcase, etc. make Yahoo much closer to an Outlook killer than GMail does. I actually use 75% of their integrated stuff. I even use their music, shopping, etc. because it's integrated so damn well.
Does anyone have a screenshot of the yahoo interface or a link to one? I'm willing to look into it because my gmail account is getting a fair amount of spam that the filters aren't catching. I just don't want to sign up for something unless its worth my time.
I am troubled by the title of the post: Yahoo! Mail Superior to Gmail ?
I know 90% of people here dislike microsoft more than google. There is also an obvious bias against all-thing-not-google (which includes Yahoo!). But do we need to be biased even when we are submitting a story?
"Yahoo! Mail reported Superior to Gmail" seems more balanced.....does anyone else agree?
Of course users have choice: They could use Yahoo! mail. They could also use Google mail.
I like google mail.
I don't like Yahoo! mail.
That's _my_ choice.
If google mail were Yahoo! mail, I wouldn't like it.
If Yahoo! mail where google mail, I probably would like it.
That's _my_ choice.
The conversation thing is actually really annoying... threading isn't a new, whizbang feature, and the way that "conversations" are implemented makes it difficult to manage a side conversations with the same subject.
The only reason that I use GMail is for the SSL access.
As far as opera goes, I'm sure the 4 Opera users out there are annoyed by the lack of support.
Yahoo has superior features like a syncing calendar & address book and a way to really send messages from multiple accounts (GMail messages sent with a different email address still show the GMail address in the "sender" field)
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Really, the only good reasons to use gmail is the 2.5GB of space and [like any webmail] you can check it from anywhere. But there's one more excellent reason - pop3. With gmail, you don't have to stop using Eudora. You can use gmail's decent interface when you're not at your computer, and otherwise use the same email client that you love.
:). NZ doesn't support pop3 for free members anymore, so I had to find something else. I had heard about gmail a while before, but who really cares about searching through your mail? Besides, if I needed to, I could do that in OE. But when I was looking at the site, I realized they had free pop3. HOLY DAMN.
That's the only reason I made a gmail account. I wanted to keep using (don't throw things at me... please) Outlook Express. I used to have a NetZero account ONLY because of the free pop3 email access, screw getting online with it
I hate web interfaces. I'm on dialup. I don't want pictures and an interface to have to download every time I check my mail - I just want the mail. Thus... gmail via pop3. It's worked marvelously for me so far.
GMail threads mail more reliably and more usably than any other mail client I've ever used, web-based or not
But sometimes it does get things wrong, and GMail doesn't offer any way for you to add messages to a conversation manually. Very annoying.
It's funny how reduced functionality can be a bonus when 'goooogle' do it. If Microsoft had made you jump through hoops to perform simple functions they'd be slated. I for one don't like someone telling me what to do with my own e-mails as if I can't think for myself, it's patronising.
As for the FP, gmail is far from pretty, I've had mutt colour schemes that look better.
I've often wondered why Gmail admonishes me from deleting my mails - even spam. That penis enlargement e-mail may be interesting to them for statistical reasons, but I never want that coming up again under any circumstances.
Furthermore, although the paranoia has subsided, I am still not content not to know if e-mail that I delete is actually removed from their servers. If I don't ever want it to be retrieved by anybody in government years later, I need to know that it's really gone - permanently. We all know the Gmail Privacy Policy allows any form of that scenario.
Or, maybe they're just encouraging us to be packrats so that then we'll need their incredible search features to find what we really want, and they'll seem even better than the competition by handling this illogical behavior so well.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
Even when I compose and send email through my standalone POP client, they show up on the web in Gmail. And when I compose and send email on the web through Gmail, they all get downloaded at the end of the day into said standalone POP client, and immediately filtered into my Sent Mail folder.
Before Gmail I used Yahoo! Mail, and my Sent Mail was always out of sync. Messages composed at home weren't available at work, and messages composed through webmail had to be moved into my Inbox periodically just to be downloaded and archived at home.
Without a feature like this, I wouldn't switch to Yahoo!, no matter what the interface looked like.
I think that more importantly than this application itself, this development could start a chain of improvements to the web interfaces of many online sites. Online brokerage companies like ScotTrade could provide users with much better interfaces, with live quotes, ability to drag stocks between panes, or the ability to alter different data on the screen (like moving some money here, and getting out of a stock there) to see the effects in real time, with no static HTML, available from anywhere
So even though Outlook might not be your mail client of choice, this should be supported as it could be the start of a good trend.
I'm dying for Google to add calendaring and real file storage (not just uploading your files in emails) and a more complete address book with mail groups, etc.
I still love Gmail, use it every day. Love the POP access, love the SMTP access which keeps copies of your sent mails sent through any normal desktop email client. And I love the threading that keeps my replies with the responses. I'm sticking with Gmail and waiting out the missing features. They'll come. But the experience is already better for me than Yahoo! mail.
I've submitted that as a feature request, um, maybe 3 times. Nothing yet, but perhaps if we keep bothering them, it'll come to pass. It's a shame, too, 'cause gmail is pretty cool otherwise. I'll pass on the "desktop experience", if you don't mind. Unless somebody would care to introduce the "BeOS desktop experience"... Mmm... Configurable boolean queries...
My Systems
Is that I cannot set the encoding of the text I am sending so it's essentially impossible to use their web client to send email in a non-european char set and I end up using a 3rd party email client with their SMTP server to do it properly...Also some charsets dont even display correctly in gmail. I love the pics I've seen of Yahoo! mail and I hope it doesn't have the same problem(s) gmail has.