Webmail Smackdown: Which Is Best? - Comments Page 1

Give me gmail any time. It's the best!
Thank you Google.

The biggest drawback to Google Mail is that you can't alphabetize your mail box. That makes cleaning up your mail once and a while easier. I never bother now with G-mail because it is so time consuming. Eventually, I'll fill up my storage and quit using g-mail!

What I miss most about the New (awful) Yahoo and what has always been missing from Gmail is the ability to sort by columns. Searching just doesn't do the same thing.

I also miss the tabs from Yahoo.

Anyone else feel the same as this? Yahoo has been excellent lately in catching spam. In fact I find many legitimate emails showing up in gmail spam folder no matter how many times I click on the "not spam" button for the same sender.

I use both Ymail and Gmail, although I like Gmail a little better. Both work to serve my purposes.

I use several different email services, and I use them for different purposes. I do still have an AOL address, but I only use that for signing up for website memberships that could potentially cause me to receive tons of spam.

I use Outlook.com and GMail for business, career, and learning use. (such as for LinkedIn, use on my resume, certain social networks).

GMail has definitely gotten better over the years and there are plenty of improvements available with Labs and Chrome extensions. What I don't like about Gmail, especially for business use, is the lack of importance flags, such as is used in Outlook. You can add flags to your own emails, however, if you send that email to someone else, they won't see it. Once I got used to Gmail Labels, I preferred them over Outlook's and other email's folders, especially since one can apply multiple labels to one email. I also love the search feature in Gmail. It's super fast and one can search for so many different variables. I hated search in desktop Outlook - I've had times where it literally took 1/2 hour to search for particular emails and half the time wouldn't find what I was looking for. Gmail's is pretty much instantaneous and so much more productive. Another thing I like with Gmail over Outlook.com, though it may seem trivial to some, is the location of the back button. Gmail's back button is right above your list of emails whereas Outlook.com's back button is the back button of your browser, at least as far as I am aware.

Dear Bob,
I am with you. Nobody does it better than Gmail!
Thanks much for all of your informative articles.
Nezzar

My first webmail service was with Yahoo back in 1998 and still have that account. I tried Hotmail but never could take to it and when it became a pain with all the spam I just gave up on it. When Gmail first appeared, except for the lucky few that obtained accounts, you could only get them by invitation. I actually went on eBay and bought an invitation for about a buck. Best dollar I ever spent and I've never looked back.

I am one of those granny email users that doesn't want to switch my address. But I have started using Outlook.com for a group I belong to and it does have the cool feature of creating custom domain email accounts. I have heard gmail discontinued theirs.

I've used most of the big webmail players and, pretty much universally, I dislike their interfaces.

Webmail of choice: www.fastmail.fm. Brilliant service, great reliability, and enough customisation that you can use it as a front end to whatever email address you already have. Their free service is probably good enough for most people but I like it enough that I have a paid account with them.

Just my two cents... :)

Another very important topic and great coverage, Mr. Bob Rankin.
I did not know that Ymail now allows POP access. It should also be mentioned that Outloook.com now allows multiple aliasing for spam protection. Over the years, I have accumulated too many email addresses in addition to using Microsoft Office Outlook for well over 20 years.
But I must add a caveat to your comment about "Many people have ditched desktop email clients for the convenience of Web-based mail apps." >> They are not mutually exclusive territories. Especially since programs like Mozilla Thunderbird (as well as MS Office Outlook) allow for aggregating all emails and email addresses from different web-based offerings into a local account that can serve for providing a historical safe keeping that is local. Especially in this day and age of many reported privacy and snooping issues.

My favorite and most trusted email provider has got to be fastmail.fm but some good things are not always the FREE kind, including this one.

Cheers, RandiO [in only 4 paragraphs]

I have an account with all of the ones mentioned above and and few more. As a standalone server, currently, I prefer GMAIL as well. Unfortunately, my primary mail server is Yahoo (a decision I made several years ago). The new and improved Yahoo took big dive with its bloat and unnecessary features in my opinion. Fortunately, many mail accounts let you manage other accounts. My favorite is Zoho for managing my web mail accounts.

I still use the desktop : Thunderbird. It picks up my mail from multiple servers. I have gigabytes of saved mail in many folders. I have tried gmail but have a lot to learn in using its features. Also, I have a fear of losing net access with an online system

This reply is to Pam: You can use "aliasing" in a round-about way in gmail >> by simply adding a plus (+) sign followed by a bunch of characters, right after yourname and just before the at (@) sign.
For example: yourname+SPAMNAME@gmail.com [I hope no one owns a gmail account w/yourname]
If in the future, you start getting spammed by +SPAMNAME that you selected; you can simply filter that out from yourname account in gmail.

I would like to add hotmail used to be the worst webmail for spam but since the switch to outlook.com they are now as good if not better than gmail plus I now have an alias for the hotmail account I created in junior high so people that have had that email forever can still email me but I can use that email for normal business purposes too.

I have used Yahoo since around 1997. It's great. I didn't like the new Yahoo version that was released last year though. The old version was much more pleasant to use.

In the comments above, Dave S said he misses tabs in Yahoo. Me too! But it seems like the public is getting thru to Yahoo since Yahoo brought back tabs recently! (On the right hand side, click on View, then Tabs).

I've been on Yahoo mail since 1998, and it was one of the best back then, and still is. I think gmail has improved immensely, and adblock takes care the ads. I think Bob's assessment of ymail was a bit unfair, tho.

AOL has always been the worst of the bunch: easily compromised (six-letter passwords?? Are you kidding me?? Yahoo has had unlimited passwords since 1999--mine is 28 letters long!!), poor performance, spam-laden (a friend of mine went to prison thanks in part to AOL's email). In other words, the world's WORST email EVER. If someone sends me an email from AOL, I automatically block it assuming it's spam.

I have a Yahoo address so that I don't have to change my address when I change my ISP but I have everything forwarded to my Windows Live account which seems to work fine for me.

I, too, prefer Gmail but DO NOT like the inability to rollback some of the changes they've made that I find irritating. Mailstore is a free program that will backup your Gmail or other online account to your computer, if you don't trust the cloud.

Like "Tim" above, I have said 'good-bye' to the freebies. People pay for most other forms of communication (telephone, television, texting, newspaper, internet, etc.; and even with postal mail, I prefer the security of a paid-for post office box to a mailbox at the end of the driveway). But why do so many balk at the idea of paying for email? How much do those very people pay for a week or two of their Starbuck's coffee? Or for ONE home-delivered pizza? These people might say how important their email is to them, but they laugh at the idea of paying the same amount -- or less -- for a year's worth of service with a reputable provider which includes quality customer support?

Free is fine, if that's your preference. But providers like FastMail.fm, EuMX.net, PolarisMail.net, Runbox.com all have account levels below $20/yr, which, to me, is a reasonable cost for more peace of mind. :-)

I still use aol. I block all senders that are not in my address book. I have a Gmail and yahoo account but don't see the need for them. How many accounts does one person need?