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.'"

Comments

I've gotta agree. I might just leave Eudora

[tommers]

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.

Better how?

[dotslasher_sri]

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!

Screenshots

[drakethegreat]

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.

Why the bias?

[Slashdot_Gandhi]

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?

Re:I've gotta agree. I might just leave Eudora

[xsonofagunx]

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.

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 :). 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.

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.

Re:well actually

[Shads]

Kinda strange, most everyone I know who has moved to gmail says they can't imagine how they used yahoo mail in the past after using gmail.

Personally, I like gmail alot. It's a really fluid system and is well designed with the user in mind, about the only thing I really disagree with is the sign up method if you don't get an invite.

Re:GMail gives me what I always wanted

[ioErr]

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.

Re:Seriously?

[el americano]

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.

Re:GMail gives me what I always wanted

[mattOzan]

The clincher for me was the faux-IMAP functionality I can get by using Google's SMTP servers.

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.