I saw a link today to a review of Yahoo! Mail Beta vs. GMail vs. Windows Live Mail. I laughed at first because the site is called “The Inquirer”. Then I realized I was thinking of “The Enquirer” and stopped laughing.
The review is pretty spot on. They focus on Yahoo! Mail Beta as a desktop replacement. I know for a fact that the beta can easily replace desktop software, I’ve been using it in place of Mozilla Thunderbird for more than a month now to handle all of my work email. At the moment, I have 8,485 messages in my Inbox and the beta chugs along as though I had only 5 messages in it. Impressive.
With GMail they point out how GMail was the first to raise the bar in terms of the amount of free storage offered. Let’s face it, if GMail hadn’t come out swinging with 1GB we’d all still be stuck with 10MB mailboxes. They also bring up my primary concern with GMail, what are they doing with my messages. At the moment, they process the mail message into some set of parameters that can be fed into their ad system to generate context aware ads. This might not seem like a big deal to some people, but I see it as a fantastically slippery slope. What other private information will they send out and about their network?
And then there’s Windows Live Mail. I’ve been a beta tester since it was still called Kahuna. I have to say, I’ve never liked it. In my mind it’s a cheap knock off of Yahoo! Mail Beta. They made it look like Outlook, but they kept all the same paradigms like paging through your mail. The article points out the rampant spam problem on Hotmail/Windows Live Mail and I can totally relate. I moved off of my old hotmail.com account when I started at Yahoo! 19 months ago. Periodically I go back to check the inbox and it’s always a flood of crap from spammers. It’s insane, really. Complicating matters for WLM, it’s non-IE support has always been…poor.
The article gives Yahoo! Mail Beta a 9/10 (a fair assessment, we’re not perfect…yet), GMail an 8/10 (I think they rightly rate high on the scale because of some of the features they’ve implemented in webmail that you don’t see anywhere else) and Windows Live Mail an awful 2/10 (I agree, Microsoft must try harder).
In any case, whatever you prefer, it’s great to see the three powerhouses going at it. GMail woke everybody in the webmail world up with their 1GB mailboxes and Yahoo! smacked everyone silly with a desktop replacement. It’s someone’s turn to shake things up a bit again so we can keep this exciting competition for the hearts and minds (and clickthroughs) of our users.
I found the article to almost have the same sentiments of me, an average user. I wrote up a mini-comparison of the three giants in one of my blog posts.
http://ajay.chellappa.in/2006/01/20/mailosphere/
This was written a few months earlier, therefore not all the details written there are current, there have been changes all around.
Oops, your link is 404′ing for me.
9/10 is pretty high for an unusable web product. Mabe Microsoft can by Yahoo and provide the resources necessary to push a product out of a beta period.
Hi, I’m a freelance journo for the Inquirer and wrote the article you’ve spoken about. Thanks for the feedback, I’m glad you agreed, although I did have some fairly heated emails from some others who didn’t necessarily agree as much as yourselves!
I felt a bit guilty about the 2/10 for MS, but seriously what do they expect - I’m hoping it gives them a small kick up the bum that they obviously need. They really must try harder.
Dean, thanks for the article. I think a little public flogging goes a long way to making something better. Everybody was crushed by the press when Google came out with 1GB, now look…everybody is offering at least 1GB for free.
I think competition in this field is great, so feel free to keep stirring it up.