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3 Email Chiefs Come to Dinner
Carl Bialik writes "The heads of email from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all recently went over to Wall Street Journal columnist Lee Gomes's house for dinner and conversation. Gomes has an interesting writeup of the conversation that transpired. The meal started as a lovefest for Gmail and Google's Paul Buchheit, with Microsoft's Kevin Doerr (no relation to the venture capitalist) and Yahoo's Ethan Diamond 'agreeing that much of the current excitement in the email world can be traced back to last year's debut of Mr. Buchheit's Gmail.' But Gomes adds, 'Whatever early lead Gmail may have had in creating a next-generation email program, both Microsoft and Yahoo have more than caught up. I wondered out loud to Mr. Buchheit if Gmail, the pioneer, might now be falling behind. "There is a lot more we want to build," he responded.'"
The day I liked using the Gmail interface better then Thunderbird (and of course outlook) was the day I think Gmail won the war of email. If you count all the spiffy Greasemonkey extensions in firefox for Gmail, then you have a really amazing email service.
Meet new people, and kill them.
I wouldn't know anything about MSN e-mail. I wouldn't touch an MSN account with a 10' cat5 cable.
Oh, I almost forgot: YMMV.
Um, I'm sure that the Yahoo guy was the envy of the party. Have you seen the new Yahoo mail beta?
Shouldn't be mad at each other. The Yahooligan knows that Yahoo is still the #1 most visited website, the MS Man knows that his OS owns, and the google guy gloats over Gmail. Heck, Yahoo and MS have been around way longer than google. It's the upstart, even in this field.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
You are way off man. MS has demonstrated one of the best web clients for years; it comes with Exchange and is called outlook web access.
... they may be in respects to the media coverage, but certainly not with the numbers.
That said, MS and Yahoo both have public beta testing for web clients that are far superior to what google has now. Check them out if you don't believe me. What stops them from going public as quickly as google upgrades is that while google has a few million subscribers the other two have 10 of millions. It's a bit different when you deal with grown up numbers.
Google might have something in the works, but there isn't much buzz in or out of the google campus about it. And as long as their core number of users is small they won't be a real player
Gmail is still the only one of the three to still offer free POP3 support. I can use my own favorite client (currently Thunderbird) with gMail. For free.
{ - Generic Guy - }
Hmm, I am working on a firefox extension,g
Screenshot:
http://img438.imageshack.us/img438/9559/gms7rf.jp
Does anyone know if gmail is planning something like this themselves (skins)?
Unfortunately right now it has a few problems. First is that they are either all open or all closed. there is no option to expand only threads with New messages or something like that. Also (this may be version dependant) it isnt always good about bringing threads with new messages to the top of the list. Finally, instead of bolding the first message of a compressed thread that has a new message (like all of the other new messages), it underlines it which is not so obvious next to a slew of bold messages.
Bottles.
Slightly off topic warning! What do you suppose would happen if Google introduced a corporate server version of Gmail? Would it crush Exchange?
Would be to provide a robust, free, POP accessible mail account. Then I can use whatever damn interface I want.
On my account at work, most of the spam originates from Microsoft's Hotmail and MSN mail servers.
Every day, several 419 scam artist send me messages about the millions of dollars they want to transfer to my bank account.
The SpamAssassin filter catches them all. I semi-automatically forward them to the abuse department of the originating server, and of the dropbox mentioned in the body of the mail (usually at Yahoo Mail).
The Yahoo mail account is usually deleted the next day. The MSN abuse service takes 2 weeks to handle the complaint, and spends most of the return message excusing themselves that it took so long and that they are so busy.
I wonder why it would be so difficult to install a SpamAssassin-like filter (of course a Microsoft re-invention of the thing, claiming to be a novelty development) on the outgoing servers of Hotmail and MSN.
They seem to have inbound filtering (not sure, I don't have an account there but sometimes my spam complaints are bounced by the abuse account because they have been determined to be spam. DUH.)
Why not have outbound spam filtering as well??? Because it does not earn them selling points for their service, presumably? But it would save their (outsourced) abuse department a lot of work!
One feature I need in GMail is this (and I hope someone from Google is reading). I want to have several mailboxes under the same signin name. In other words, I want bar@gmail.com and quux@gmail.com both show up when I login as foo@gmail.com. If they share the same storage quota, I don't care. What I do care about is that emails are in the same mailbox, and when I reply, the reply comes from bar@gmail.com or quux@gmail.com correspondingly. I'd use one address for people who I trust, and another for people who I don't trust with a different set of filters for each group.
This one feature would allow me to abandon native email clients for good (aside from firing them up do back up my email from time to time).
This article shows that engineers of competing products usually respect each other
Absolutely. When the HTML-in-email and I18N standards were being developed, we had people from AOL, Netscape (then a separate company), Microsoft, Qualcomm, and probably others involved, and we got along great. And remember, companies that are competitors on one front are often cooperating on another; AOL was working with Microsoft techies on interoperability at the same time we were suing their bosses.
The coolest new thing i've seen in Gmail is their implementation of AJAX in the autocompletion of address book names and other goodies in the system. Makes for easier emailing.
Use the tags (you create them) for a few weeks and you'll realize that they're almost folders version 2. Imo there are two big differences to folders in most file systems: ...opps sorry I mean tags... at the same time.
/. and /.. functionality but with tags you'ld want an additional /... feature to turn off/on recursive subtag/tree availability independently for each instance of the subtag placement... This is now public domain too as far as I am concerned :)
1. You have the feature of being able to have the same file in several folders
2. You can't have tags inside each other like subfolders. It would be cool if it was possible because it would allow for using hierarchical structures if you need it anywhere (perhaps it is possible and I just haven't figured it out). What's more it would allow for having the same subfolder/subtag in different tags just like the files!
In case noone else has I claim authorship of the idea of subtags in point number two and place it in the public domain by posting this post. Anybody is free to implement it as far as I am concerned.
Oh... now I got an additional idea. With folders you've got
Google if you're interested in a cronically ill slacker without any qualifications but with the occasional interesting idea (or perhaps these were the last I'll ever have?) track me down (I know you can) and offer me a job (I'll move to the states if you want me to).
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
How about just coding to standards? Why is that so hard to get? I use a Web browser (Opera) which conforms to those same standards in what it will accept and how it renders; all you (email chiefs/chefs) need to do is send me standards-compliant data. I'll take it from there. Leave the proprietary browser-specific workaround crap back in 1999 where it belongs.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE