Webmail Smackdown!

I love Gmail. I've been using it for years and haven't found one better suited for me yet.

It's really easy to use and has a great interface.

What is right click action. If you are indicating that you can command using mouse right click that there is a error in yahoo mail you mentioned. You can you can command reply, forward, flag, read/unread and many things after clicking right key of mouse on a mail.....

Yahoo mail has another ability too. You can write and attach at the same time. I will also recommend you to add another feature. It is address block. Yahoo and hotmail is giving the service but gmail is not giving.

I have a question In hotmail is it really possible to chat instant?? I am using it from bangladesh but I have not seen anything like it.

At last the time is to mention what is my fave webmail service. I am using all the three for several years. But I think yahoo is the Best. Gmail is very near to Yahoo. They may be the first. But Hotmail is too boaring. I hate hotmail. It is not user friendly.

I have Y and G. (I break out in hives if people mention Hotmail.) Gmail is good, and I use it for my primary email address, but my favourite for usability, accessibility, security and simplicity is fastmail.fm. That's the one /I/ pay for!

Yahoo also allows you to search through your emails for any word or phrase. It works great.

I've not been able to find a way to sort my Gmails into folders, which is how I want to organize my emails. I don't believe they offer them. It only lets me label them. Also, I don't want my emails displayed in threaded conversations, but I don't see any way to override it.

I use online email exclusively. I can access my email from any computer in the world. To prevent accidental loss, I have all my email first go to my Gmail account, then I set Gmail to automatically forward from there to my Yahoo mail account. Voila, instant redundancy and duplication, so if one system should ever lose my mail, I still have it all available on the other one.

I didn't know about the disposable Yahoo email addresses. Thanks for the info! I usually use mailinator.com for disposable email addresses; no signup or registration required, but you still have to remember to access the site. With Yahoo, it all will go to your main account for you.

The interface of GMAIL is nice, an easy. That's really important. Hotmail has ads in the botton of the mail. FAKE.

EDITOR'S NOTE: What's fake about it? (GMail has ads on the right hand side of the window.)

no one has mentioned MAIL.COM..a terrific webmail service..check it out.

Bob, not a word about G-mail's privacy concerns?! Messages kept indefinitely in G's memory even if deleted, robotically searched for ad-targeting, all records subject to subpoena forever...etc. A message to you mentions a drug bust and you may see ads for defense attorneys as you surf the net.

http://www.google-watch.org/gmail.html

EDITOR'S NOTE: I don't think the privacy concerns with Gmail are any different than any other webmail provider. In fact, not different than any ISP for that matter, because ALL your email and web page requests pass through them, and we don't even KNOW what their data retention policies are! See http://askbobrankin.com/search_privacy.html

Hi bob,

Love your articles. Another web base mail utility I like is mail2web.com

I've used Gmail for several years, though I rarely use it online. One thing that no one else has mentioned is Gmail's spam filter. Gmail forwards all my email to my Mail account on my iMac andit is rare that any spam gets through. I periodically sign in to Gmail and go through the spam folder just in case it grabbed something that I wanted, but it seldom does. Last night I emptied my husband's spam folder on Gmail of nearly 1000 spam messages--not one was there by mistake.

You wrote that gmail does not have disposible addresses:

yo can both write your address as xxx.yyy@gmail.com
and xxxyyy@ or Xxx.Yyy@ and you can add a + and whatever tickles your fancy:
xxx.yyy+amazonorders@gmail.com
xxx.YYY+imusic@gmail.com
XxxYyy+SpamfilterSUB@gmail.com
and all will get to your gmail inbox...

(where you can create a filter just to monitor these also of course.

No mention of IMAP? Gmail has it for free. I crank up Thunderbird once a week and download my email via IMAP and voila! Instant offline backup including labels and all changes. POP? A waste of bandwidth.

Not to mention using Gears (or Prism for Firefox) to make Gmail an offline app in it's own right.

You left out Mobile Me; I just started using it, and Mobile Me syncs my iPhone and Apple Macbook Pro over the ether without wires. I forward my regular email through MobileMe and have been quite pleased with it so far.

mb

I just switched to Gmail because Yahoo insisted that I have an alternate eddress. I will be keeping a Yahoo eddress as a secondary one but it will not be the one I've had for eleven years. That one is drowning in SPAM which goes not only to the SPAM box but also to the Inbox. Yahoo's once-friendly abuse department has ceased responding...things have deteriorated since the company changed its CEO. It has been increasing the size of its ads and has dropped the marvellous Briefcase feature. It also wants me to use its new version despite the fact that it recognizes that the new version will not function on my computer.

I am somewhat uncomfortable with Gmail being a beta version. I like the threading. Labels make it possible to file a message in more than one category. However, the screen of the Netbook I use as my primary computer makes labelling difficult; I have to go to a computer with a much larger screen to accomplish that task.

I will not touch Hotmail because it is a Microsoft product. I have a Microsoft operating system but avoid using other MS products, partly because it wants me to do things its way, not the ways which have worked well for me for decades. I do not share MS's passion for bells and whistles.

My fave email is www.imap.cc

good layout. great spam filters. fast page displays. different service levels - free or pay.

I've used AOL mail as my primary address since I had to pay by the hour. Now it's free. I've also got a gmail and a yahoo address. Neither is as easy to use as AOL. I love that I can search my mail so easily.
Down side with all of them is not being able to embed pictures in my emails. Everything ends up as attachments. I send email messages to my 94 year old mother who can open emails, but get's confused trying to wrestle with attachments. I'd open a new account if it allowed me to embed photos.

Hotmail now allows free POP3 access

I have both Gmail and Yahoo but I suggest you check GMX mail. It has many nice features.

Hotmail does have free POP3 and you can block the ads with FFX's ABP. That is good.

Gmail is incredible itself. But when you add the wonderful features you can pick from through Google Labs, it's a slam dunk for Gmail.

And if you need even more reasons, the calendar features of Gmail practically run our family's life... multiple calendars, color coded, SMS/e-mail notifications and calendar sharing just to name a few.

And by the way, there is a Lab add-in that allows you to have drag-and-drop in Gmail.

Yahoo has right click actions (mark as read, delete, etc - looks almost like the right click action list in outlook).