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.'"

Comments

Gmail won..

[eieken]

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.

I disagree

[killmenow]

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 have a yahoo.com email account. I have had it for a long time. I had it before I got my gmail.com account. Now, I hardly use it. GMail is just fantastic. And the latest changes Yahoo! has made to try to catch up can be summed up in one word: abysmal. Here's a clue to the Yahoo! folks trying to jazz up Yahoo! e-mail: stop trying to be pretty and "full of features" and just try staying out of my way. GMail manages to be feature-rich *and* stays out of my way. I don't know how they did it, but it's wonderful.

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.

These three people...

[Ruff_ilb]

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.

Re:Google rules!

[CDPatten]

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.

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 ... they may be in respects to the media coverage, but certainly not with the numbers.

POP3

[Generic Guy]

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.

Re:Eh?

[ottothecow]

You can always use thunderbird and set it to keep track of threads. It is pretty good at organizing them, especially with multiple people (if 3 people reply to the first message and then someone replys to the second persons message, it sorts this out and puts it in the right order).

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.