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Yahoo's Geek Statue
Philipp Lenssen writes "Yahoo put up a life-size alpha geek statue in honor of the Yahoo Mail team, which they think beat the Gmail team. The statue's plaque says it's presented "in recognition of tremendous intellectual efforts put forth in order to defeat Gmail", and: "Not since the code breakers in Britain's Bletchley Park deciphered Germany's Enigma code during World War II has so much brainpower been focused on kicking an enemy's ass." Flickr has a photo." It's a nice little article on the difference between two of the net's superpowers.
gmail is simple and it works. What amazes me is that Yahoo has not asked users which they prefer. This is almost akin to Borland saying that OWL is better than visual (IMHO, OWL was better), or Dr Dos declaring its DOS better than MS-DOS. In each case, the product may have been better, but the vast majority of users said otherwise.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I've heard so much about the new Yahoo Mail interface except I haven't heard a launch date. Am I missing something?
You're misinformed, I'm afraid. Most of the Polish techniques relied on exploiting weak indicator systems used by the sender to convey the start positions of the Enigma rotors to the recipient. The indicator system was changed in May 1940, obsoleting the Polish techniques. British codebreakers responded with other methods, primarily the Turing-Welchman bombe, which required a short "crib" of known plaintext (most of the Polish techniques were ciphertext-only attacks).
I would also question whether the Polish mathematicians (Marian Rejewski, you're thinking of) actually introduced new theorems into mathematics. I believe that the theorem which is sometimes called "the theorem that won World War II" was already known. Rejewski's insight was that this branch of abstract mathematics could have an application in cryptanalysis -- something that nobody had ever thought of before.
gmail : k.i.s.s. interface, allowing for rich text
yahoo : no rich text possibilities found
Actually if you had used the Internet Explorer, you would be able to enable the rich text capability of Yahoo! Mail. Ahh I see, you must be on Linux.
w00t
...because I have a couple of ways in which you could really, really improve your service. I might even consider switching back to you.
1. insane captcha when SENDING mails. There shouldn't be any captcha for sending emails, especially when I have the account for 5 years or so and I sent like 233 mails in total. But no, what if I'm spammer ? You know, when I click "send" I expect to be able to just walk away (and one time I did !) but the mail hasn't been sent because of this crazy captcha. AND I have to admit I failed the captcha at least two times. There's no IQ test, just that you have more than one option to "read" the damn thing.
2. crazy spam filter. I'm getting mail from people who use ONLY the web interface and send like 2 emails/month and it's marked as spam. Is it that hard to flag the mail sent internally as NOT-SPAM (that is if the sender is not reaching a threshold of emails/day/hour/whatever) ?
3. crazy, moving ads (sometimes offensive or sexual). Slashdot is getting there too
4. I understand I have to click thru' as much as possible to get more money in displayed ads but the emails are in yahoo "one click too far" compared to Google
5. please don't silently change my outgoing emails: don't change "medieval" to "medireview" for my own protection, don't add ads (or at least let me see the ads before), etc
6. lack of features (free features, that is): google has pop3, forwarding, 2+G and the ability to send email from any address (as long as you can receive email on that address).
If you look at standalone mail programs, they don't delete the mail, they send it to a "Trash" folder. That way, you can undo that action easily. When you need space, you have to explicitly empty that folder. The problem is that now you lose that "undelete" operation. You might say you don't need it, but the reason that they have it is that people use it. The problem with common approaches to the trash bin, in my opinion, is that it's not clear for the user _when_ you actually lose the "undelete" option, specially if you have filters that delete messages older than _X_ days.
With a new name for the trash folder ("archived"), Google keeps the functionality (one-button move-to-trash) but fixes it a bit (naming it "archive" helps understanding the importance of apparently unimportant mail.
So if Google feels that it's valuable to keep apparently unimportant mail, why not simply cease to expunge old messages from the trash?
The alternative they've chosen, as you say, is to use the archive folder as a trash can. Which makes it a rather strange place to keep messages I know I actually want to archive, since all the chaff interferes with search. Wouldn't three folders -- archive (never delete), trash (also never delete, and exclude from search by default), and spam (delete after n days, and exclude from search by default -- have been more elegant?
Personally, I don't have a need for the archive folder at all; my messages pretty much stick in my inbox forever, and it appears to have exactly the same properties as the archive (never delete, search by default). But I also have no objection, as the feature requires no extra clicks out of me, and I understand some people like keeping their inboxes small as a kind of to-do list.
That said, I do like basically everything else about GMail. Labels and rules work very well for me.