Why The New .Mac Webmail Is Important

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1. CheckMyPassword
   

   September 29th, 2006 at 12:09 am

   For 99% of the population GMail’s Ajax capabilities are sufficient.

2. Michael Arrington
   

   September 29th, 2006 at 12:16 am

   Ok, I’ll give you that. But you cannot access non-gmail email accounts on gmail.com. You can do that with Yahoo and the new .mac webmail client. If you use multiple email accounts, that’s an important distinction.

3. Anshul
   

   September 29th, 2006 at 12:41 am

   I agree with the article but what I am doubtful about is that even though .Mac will allow multiple email account access, users will not switch unless its made free. A lot of my friends would love to use .Mac but the cost is a major barrier. Imagine who would have even given a dime to Yahoo’s new webmail had it not been free.

4. LKM
   

   September 29th, 2006 at 12:49 am

   >For 99% of the population GMail’s Ajax
   >capabilities are sufficient.

   I don’t understand that. What does that sentence even mean? Ajax makes the interface easier to use (if applied correctly). The more Ajax, the more people can use your product. Unless online mail applications work like good offline mail applications, they don’t work well enough.

5. Jeff K
   

   September 29th, 2006 at 1:06 am

   I prefer Gmail to Yahoo by a good stretch. I hadn’t noticed that Gmail didn’t allow you to pop other mail servers until you mentioned it, but why not just have your mail forwarded? That’s what I did when I made the switch from Yahoo (w/no regrets) Gmail does allow you the option to reply w/email address to which mail was originally sent.
   Did Google hurt you?
   Show me on the doll where they touched you.

6. Daniel Tschentscher
   

   September 29th, 2006 at 1:10 am

   I completely agree about your point that if you want to own the user you have to allow him to access different mail accounts.

   Why?

   a) An Email address is the only lasting point of contact we have in times of changing physical addresses and phone number frequently. You might give your mail address to a friend who would want to contact you 5 years - when you’ve already moved to another country and all your other contact data is useless.

   b) For this reason, I want to make sure that my mail address is not bound to any provider that could change his business policies 5 years ahead (it happened to me before). I would personally NEVER use a mail account on a domain that I don’t own (and I think that most people who are aware of the fast changes in businesses wouldn’t either).

   c) Nevertheless, I would use a webmail application (even an ad-financed one) if I would be sure that I could take my mail with me in case the provider starts to screw me for some reason.

   So bye bye GMail, Hotmail & Co. - these are addresses for junk, not for serious contacts.

7. Michael Arrington
   

   September 29th, 2006 at 1:12 am

   wait, hold on Daniel. Gmail gives you free Pop access TO your gmail account, which is an excellent feature.

   In my mind I break up the service and the front end. Gmail rocks on the back end service. The interface isn’t bad, but Yahoo is significantly better.

8. Erinc
   

   September 29th, 2006 at 1:17 am

   I forward all my pop3 emails to my gmail email. I can also send emails from those domain names inside gmail. It’s simple. Huge space. Integration with gCal etc. And it’s free. I have no interest to use .mac webmail app, eventhough I have a paid account through family pack. They are just too late.

9. Michael Arrington
   

   September 29th, 2006 at 1:27 am

   Forwarding email is great for many people, but if you need to separate accounts for personal/work etc. you really need the ability to access these accounts separately through Pop access.

10. Bob Matsuoka
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 1:27 am

    Completely disagree with your assessment of Yahoo. While yahoo’s use of Ajax in its new web interface is clever, I find using it awkward and frustrating.

    Re-creating a desktop app is the last thing I want to do with a web app — the paradigms and user interactions are completely different. Google’s apps are sucessful precisely because they don’t attempt to recreate desktop apps but rather create new usage patterns better suited for web use.

11. Bob Matsuoka
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 1:29 am

    To finish my last thought — while I haven’t used the .Mac mail service yet (and probably won’t), I can see based on your screenshot that they’re making precisely the same mistake that Yahoo did…

12. shutterspeaks
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 1:44 am

    Yup, maybe the gmail interface isn’t the best in terms of look, but it’s the best.

    I want to check, read and compose my email easily. I want to focus my email, not on the colorful advertising here and there in other web mail provider such as yahoo!. Don’t you think Yahoo new interface just look like outlook interface? Viewing email especially with attachment is a lot easier with gmail. For new yahoo beta, i don’t know why i have to download the picture attachment to view it.

    The gmail is so rock that our company also using gmail hosted service for our email, now we have gmail back end and front end for our own domain, cool.

13. Paul Watson
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 1:49 am

    Multiple accounts with GMail would be grand but one cannot categorically state that the Yahoo! mail interface is better. It took some getting used to but the GMail interface really does work. Some of my co-workers hate it and others love it. It is a personal thing. For traditional email users the Yahoo! interface works because it does pretty much what every other email client has done (though the tabs are handy.)

    On an aside it is interesting how GMail managed to be radically different to other mail interfaces and succeed but GReader tried the same trick and failed (as is seen by the move to a traditional 2pane Bloglines copy.)

14. Paul Hillsdon
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 1:56 am

    I just wanted to touch on your mention on AJAX interfaces. The point that you kind of brought up with Live Mail is that for AJAX to work, we need it to be fast. If you want to recreate the desktop, you can’t have ANY lag time. I’ve tried the Yahoo! beta and it’s rough, IMO. It’s still too slow for any public release.

    And that’s where I’m glad that Gmail only uses AJAX where necessary. It’s there to just speed up a few things. Sites like Digg and Flickr also use AJAX in this function, and that’s where I think it should stay, until speeds dramatically increase.

    There’s arguments to be made over how people use interfaces and whether it’s too awkward for drag-and-drop in a web browser, but I won’t get into that right now. AJAX is still a new technology, and if Apple can implement it where it is useful and run it quickly, then that in itself will be a leap forward for not just dotMac but mail services across the web.

15. Alan
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 2:00 am

    I think this will b an awesome improvement that really only shows its true significance when considered as only part of a sync service inc. cal, contacts, keychains, music, photos and mail. would really like to see a mobile client for all of this (he sez frm a Se K800i on a train in sydney)

16. Don M
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 2:05 am

    Scatterbrained response warning:

    AJAX does not equal MORE PEOPLE CAN USE YOUR PRODUCT like some in these comments suggest. Amen to Paul for pointing this out.

    I also agree with Bob Matsuoa that the last thing I want is a desktop app recreated in my browser. What I like about GMail is it introduced completely new functionality (with their conversation format) and it works like a charm for me after a few weeks of trying to “get it”.

    This was the problem with “open source” for years. They spent all their capital trying to “recreate Windows” instead of coming up with NEW solutions to old problems.

    As far as Gmail goes, I use it to manage 5 separate POP accounts and send and receive for all of them. I do wish there was better “signature” integration into GMail (right now it only allows one universal signature for all of my POP accounts), but I imagine this is something that will be remedied in time.

    -dm

17. Advanced Task Manager
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 2:43 am

    Hmm. Is the new Yahoo mail beta better than GMail? Only if you like the Outlook or Outlook Express-like interface. Many people don’t like that interface, and consider it badly designed. I am a fan of RIT Labs’ The Bat, and lately of Poco Systems’ Poco Mail and Barca. I consider them to be much better e-mail clients than Outlook and Outlook Express ever were. GMail appeals to developers because of it’s minimalistic yet very capable approach. Most developers and “hackers” (I’m using the word in the original sense of people extremely passionate about computers) will love the GMail approach and hate the Outlook Express / Outlook / Yahoo approach. So, in my opinion, GMail is way better than Yahoo Mail beta. Of course, GMail could be improved, too, but it’s already better than Yahoo Mail beta which is a clone of the badly designed Outlook interface.

18. Al
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 3:39 am

    “On the Yahoo is better”

    I would disagree, with GMail my email productivity has increased significantly as I have moved accounts over (I use personal and google apps).

    I can understand that user coming from Outlook would appreciate the Yahoo or even the .Mac design, it would appear more familiar and have a shallower learning curve.

    But that design paradigm does not work as effectively on the web, it is slower. It also does not take into account that web apps are different generally. What I think Google did with GMail was take that into account and redesigned for the web. That combined with the tweaking over the last few years has produced something that just works and is fast. So the learning curve is steeper but the long term benefits are greater.

    Mike you really should let go and climb that curve take a taste of nectar the other side

    But of course it all personal preferences at the end of the day.

    PS to explain multiple accounts : I have personal and business accounts with Google and hence can use multiple accounts. Also you can use forward and ‘=’ tricks to manage multiple accounts in one mbox.

    regards
    Al

19. Andrej
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 4:46 am

    I agree with many here: gmail’s interface is the most productive. I forward all email accounts i have to gmail. There’s no need for separate email accounts for business and personal, as you can configure multiple from accounts in gmail.

    The single most important feature for a mail program for me is that i need to be able to access it at all times, everywhere. Gmail is much better in this respect than outlook client (you always need outlook installed, or use it’s akward mail interface), and outlooks search functionality is also pretty bad, so i’ll take gmail over outlook any day.

    Regarding .mac mail, it’s too much like most desktop mail clients, which all work pretty. I don’t see any benefits to using gmail.

20. Andrej
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 4:48 am

    Oh yes, the only problem with gmail, is that because of it’s use of javascript for everything, i can’t open mails in a new browser tab. I lilke to be able to open all links in new tabs.

21. Brian
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 4:59 am

    All arguments well and good, especially if coming from preference only. As we all know, opinions and preferences are unique and therefore subject to changing whims/fashions/indigestion. One argument that is seemingly lost to posters is the end to end feature of .Mac email. I love the fact that I have multiple computers with the same email on every computer AND still on the server. I simply have had too many experiences where I needed access to web based email and couldn’t get to it for various reasons, not the least of which is that I don’t live in a major city with multiple ways to access the web. Finally, in regards to cost. Sure, Yahoo and gMail is free. But the writer, no doubt because it really wasn’t part of the immediate subject, didn’t mention the other features bundled with .Mac in addition to email. These include desktop linked online storage, syncing of bookmarks, calendars, contacts, keychain, mail accounts, including mail rules, signatures and smart mailboxes, photo sharing, web page hosting, email alias (IMO, better than multiple accounts) and the occasional simple freeby! Sure, pretty much all of these services can be found for free, but I would dare anyone to point out a single source that is as easy and seamless as this combination. I prefer to get work done, not figure out how to get work done.

22. Kyle
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 5:12 am

    I don’t understand the mentality of people who think that Yahoo Mail has a better interface than that of Gmail. I have legacy Yahoo Mail accounts that I still check every once in awhile, and I shudder everytime I have to open one. The interface is slow, inefficient, and generally clunky overall. It’s a perfect example of over engineering/designing a product just to play catch up, compete and be a player in the marketplace. With it’s Outlook type interface, Yahoo Mail almost feels like a Microsoft product and is cluttered in it’s interface.

    On the other hand, as an interaction designer, Gmail feels focused, crisp, responsive, intuitive, and has saved me countless hours through it’s threading features, a powerful search functionality, keyboard shortcuts, much better spam filters, and it’s overall simplicity. I have yet to find an online application that has been more useful or has improved my online experience more than Gmail.

23. Al
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 5:15 am

    @ Brian

    Have to take the bait my friend
    Google provides :

    Online storage - not yet but gdrive is comming
    Bookmark syncing - yup not just safari either and online bookmarks
    Calendar - yup GCal
    Contact - yup in Gmail/Gcal
    Mail - of course Gmail
    Sinature - Yup
    Mail rules - yup
    Smart Mail Boxes - Labels and search and filters
    Photo Sharing - Yup and picaza on the desktop
    Page hosting - yup and domain hosting
    email alias - yup and ‘=’ tricks

    Oh and lets not forget some of Google’s other goodies for free :
    Gspreadsheet
    Writely
    Reader
    Blogger
    Groups
    Sketchup
    Talk
    Translate
    Maps
    Earth
    Mobile versions
    Google Pack
    SMS
    Finance
    search
    blog search
    News

    The list goes on and on…
    In a pissing match I would bet on Google winning as far as getting things from one place goes

    Sorry I’m starting to sound like a godamm google fan boy now

    regards
    Al

24. treycranson
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 5:44 am

    I agree with the statement about the price barrier. The only reason I stay away from .Mac is the charge for what everyone else is offering for free.

    Gmail requires a bit of rethinking how you handle email so comparing it to the typically mail client especially those based on desktop applications is a bit of a stretch. Gmail doesn’t require a lot of AJAX in that fashion because you really don’t move your emails around. You label them and you hide them from view and that’s about it.

    I have no complaints about the new .Mac features because I’ve never used it, but I won’t pay for a webmail client. If I’ve spent this much on my Mac, I think a single .Mac account should be included especially if they only allow access to iChat via .Mac account.

25. Kyle (different than the one above)
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 5:51 am

    I’ve been a subscriber to .Mac since back when it was free, but this year, I just couldn’t justify paying the $100 fee to keep it going. I’ve found that all those things you mention, Bryan, can be handledbhn using something cheaper or something free.

    For about $20 a year, I have my own domain name and hosting service. Where Apple gives me iDisk on the desktop, they also give me FTP built into the Finder, so I can mount the Internet folders that are hosted on my site just as seamlessly as I did iDisk. For that same $20, I also get an e-mail address with my domain name that connects right into my Mail.app just as easily as a .Mac account. And as for the tie-ins with iPhoto, there’s a plugin that redirects to Flickr as opposed to .Mac, and now with iWeb integration, you can publish to your own domain too. Same goes for iMovie too.

    With all that being said, the syncing thing is definitely easier with .Mac, and it is the one thing I am truly going to miss. There’’s something very gratifying about when I go to my parents house (which is in a completely different state), sign on to their Mac, and then sync it, updating all my contacts, bookmarks, mail rules, etc. Though I haven’t touched the computer in what may be months, it’s just as if I sat down at my usual machine. Seamless. And to me, it’s a defining experience for Mac users. I’m sure I’ll find some other way to go about it now that I’ve canceled my subscription, but .Mac made it a no-brainer.

    To get back to the Mail.app likeness, however, I just don’t see it as anything that will increase the decision to pay $100/year. It didn’t make me regret my decision, that’s for sure. For those who have already made that decision, perhaps this helps them rationalize it, but I don’t see how it’s anything more than a rationalization.

26. Zvi Cohen
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 5:52 am

    I use Thunderbird on my laptop. WTF cares about webmails.

27. Thomas
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 5:54 am

    If Google wants to dominate the e-mail landscape, they should license the ‘Gmail’ client to hosting companies & ISPs. Not everyone wants all their e-mail to be centrally located at Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo.

28. Erik
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 6:02 am

    I like Pine.

29. Anthony Baker
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 6:23 am

    Great post, Michael. I, as others, had been a “yawn” to the new .Mac mail ux, but your post has had me reconsider and has offered hope.

    Here’s my situation: I absolutely love Apple Mail. While I’ve been a huge fan of Outlook on the PC, there are a number of features Apple Mail offers that can’t be beat — the biggest of which is the way it handles threading conversations.

    Unfortunately, I now work on a PC during the day behind a corporate firewall, and Apple Mail can’t send/receieve through that firewall. I’ve therefore recently (and reluctantly) moved to Gmail to handle my mail needs.

    While Gmail has a lot of nice features, I really dislike the overall UX and some of its interaction metaphor. No dragging/dropping, the way it handles mutliple conversations, the inability to get to zero messages in the inbox, etc. It’s great, but not Apple Mail great.

    However, if the new .Mac mail client is as cool as one might hope — and if it supports multiple mail clients and integrates well with Apple Mail — I’m going to move. As a geek, the $100 per year cost of using the service seemed overkill (given other open source options available), but this would do it for me.

    It’s ideally a visual metaphor I am familiar with, love and understand, and it’s web-based, and it talks with the machine I love.

    (Now to take a peek at how their online version of iCal stacks up against Google Calendar…)

30. Sam Davyson
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 6:25 am

    If you have a laptop that you are on 95% of the time then I think using a desktop client is the best solution.

    I love Apple’s mail. And use it all the time for my Gmail account via POP3. For the other 5% I can use the industry leading Gmail interface.

    I would still say that it is better than the Yahoo interface. The Yahoo interface is majorly ad infested.

31. Spice
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 6:26 am

    Gmail is probably not the most intutive interfaced email where as yahoo is, I personally love gmail because
    1) tired of heavily loaded interfaces. and Google offers one of the most lean ones.
    2) Gmail is very fast.
    3) searching capabilities.
    yahoo is not even close to the (2) and (3)

    I have 4 email accounts.( Work, School, techgroups and such crap and finally personal). I cannot access any email from work and my school one doesn’t allow me to forward the email and both the work and school are on exchange. so I end up checking different ones all the time and I hate it. I can get work and gmail ones into my outlook but cannot get seem to get the school one.(I hate getting on the VPN every other time!!) if there is any product out there which would help me get all these into one account, i would love that..

32. Dave
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 6:29 am

    It’s funny how everyone here is saying how Gmail is a better interface then Yahoo are all Gmail users. They all swear that Gmail is better ‘just because’. If you’re going to argue something at least give evidence and compare the two. The argument that outlook-style doesn’t translate to a browser is entirely based on preference. You can’t state that something is better simply because you’re used to it. Searching? Shortcuts? Spam filters? Yahoo has them all among many other features. The tabs in Yahoo mail are excellent for increasing productivity. The only real argument against Yahoo mail that it is noticably slower in terms of performance, which is probably why it’s still in beta.

33. matthew
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 6:35 am

    major problems with online email:
    1 spam
    2 ineffective spam filters
    3 overzealous spam filters
    4 small (10mb) attachment size limits
    5 bounce delays (surprise! the time-critical email that you sent yesterday wasn’t delivered)
    6 people don’t advertise their email addresses, to prevent spammers from getting ahold of them, and that stints the growth of “email networks”
    7 the email standard does not support chaining of email messages into conversations (sites like gmail try to hack this together, oftentimes unsuccessfully)

    email came to be in the 70’s. we need a more current online personal communications infrastructure.

34. Colin
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 6:36 am

    Yahoo Mail Beta(Oddpost) still needs a lot of work. It’s extremely sluggish compared to Gmail. I had to go back to the old version after trying it several times. Hopefully .mac mail won’t suffer from the same issues.

    .mac pricing is a big factor, it really should be free IMHO. iLife integration IMHO is not a significant enough feature for me to keep paying for it.

    Thomas -
    Google has been inching that way with “Google apps for your domain”. I would imagine it’s only a matter of time before we see a Gmail-mini appliance, to compete with “MS Exchange”.

35. Mike Sax
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 6:43 am

    .Mac email’s Fatal Flaw is that you can only send email from your .Mac address. People want to reply from the same email address that the email was sent to.

    It’s a “keeping your users in the box” mentality that Apple tends to suffer from.

36. JS in DC
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 6:45 am

    I must be missing something here. As far as I can tell, as a trial user of .mac who has three other email addresses to check, the .mac service does NOT allow synchronization of email MESSAGES, only email SETTINGS. Isn’t this correct?

    What I really WANT, and would be happy to pay a fee for, is to be able to synchronize the messages from my three email accounts. Right now, I have them all download into my desktop Apple Mail program. Great. I love it. But when I travel with my laptop, I can’t (easily) synchronize the laptop so that it contains all the messages in all the folders of my desktop.

    I would imagine that there are a lot of people out there doing the desktop + laptop thing, just like I do. I can’t believe there isn’t a program out there that will synch mail (without an imap server).

37. Mortimer
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 6:56 am

    For the recod, Michael, the Yahoo beta allows you to pol multiplePOP accounts, but does not permit you to repy from anything but your Yahoo account unless you pay for Premium services ($19.99 & up).

    I’m ok with ads for free services. But not if I’m paying.

    I’ll stick with Gmail - it allows me to preserve my identity by replying from the account that received the mail.

38. Ed
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 6:59 am

    i agree with Erinc & andrej. I also access other email accounts through forwarding and I’m able to respond using those individual email addresses with Gmail. I have no need for another account, plus Gmail is free.

39. Frank Cefalu
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 7:31 am

    Micheal. Yahoo has this already. 19.95 per month , even though the 8.00 /month is cheaper from Mac Mail I can see the reason why people would use it.

    But in all seriousness I don’t want a web based mail client. I like my desktop Thunderbird. I love look of the new outlook but it is horribly clunky if that makes sense at all to anyone.

    You might as well use an Ajax Desktop thats out there if you want to recieve all your emails in one place online.

40. Eric
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 7:44 am

    Yahoo makes you pay for an upgrade if you want to use it for a POP aggregator, IIRC. Unless that’s changed with the new beta. Which for a lot of people, means it doesn’t even rank.

    It’d be nice if Google supported POP access to other accounts directly - but they do support other accounts indirectly - you just have to forward them to your Gmail address, and Gmail lets you reply with that same address. I manage four separate accounts through Gmail just fine this way. It’s also the only webmail provider that gives *free* pop access to your account.

    Google is also the only company that’s actually innovated with email in the last ten years. Yahoo and Windows Live Mail did a good job of cloning the desktop email interface (and it looks like Apple is doing the same)… but who ever said that was the best interface for email?

    Drag-and-drop isn’t even that important, as far as I’m concerned - with Gmail I can navigate all the functions purely with the keyboard and never have to touch the mouse. (I don’t know if you can do that with Yahoo’s, I might but I haven’t tried). Search, Conversation view, and GTalk integration are all killer features for me. Plus it’s full of nice touches like the Calendar integration (I note that Yahoo’s Calendar is still Web 1.0), maps integration for addresses, view-attachments-as-HTML, and links for package tracking numbers.

    Google winds the interface contest hands down, IMHO.

41. Harshal Vaidya
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 7:46 am

    Pardon my ignorance folks. But I couldnt find the feature at yahoo which allows accessing multiple email accounts. Can somebody guide me ?

42. GreatChest
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 7:50 am

    The chick on the jpeg that mike attached for .mac explorer has great tits!

43. Alex
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 7:55 am

    quote…
    “Google has the best pure free internet service on the Internet. But they don’t have the best interface. Yahoo does.”

    disagree. yahoo’s has gotten to be cluttered and too busy on the surface. it’s hard to look at too long. google’s is farily clean.

    if i was hiring someone to develop a new idea, it’d be someone along the lines of google and not yahoo. truly original ideas come from people like google. truly warmed over, old ideas come from yahoo, ibm, and the like.

    google’s not perfect by any stretch, but they don’t complicate things.

44. michaelb1
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 8:28 am

    i will mos def use webmail with the multi-accoun functionality.

    i take my laptop almost everywhere, and I use Mail.app to check all my email accounts in 1 place.

    It will be nice to have that funtion in a web based email app for those times when I don’t have my laptop, or their is no WIFi cloud around me.

45. Frank Cefalu
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 9:04 am

    This is a feature for that 5% we hear about.

46. Sam
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 9:27 am

    Personally I don’t really see what all the hubbub about Gmail’s interface is. It’s boxy, has ads, and sucks for sorting large volumes of messages.

    I don’t want to look at all that crap in one mailbox.

    If you want to break gmail do this:
    1. Subscribe to numerous daily newsletters and active discussion groups
    2. Don’t set up any filters
    3. Come back and check your email a few months later

    So how do you clean that up in Gmail? 100 or 20 messages at a time? Thats not productive, its a waste of time.

    Yes, thats a stupid test, why would you set be in active discussions and not check your email, but still it breaks gmail in a manner that does not occur with Desktop style mail where you can actually view full folder contents.

    To top that off, no IMAP.

    Finally, it’s got that boxy UI that seems to be so popular with alt-alt OS users these days. I it’s cute in a “Classic Windows” sort of way, but I don’t want to interact with it everyday.

47. paul
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 9:36 am

    comment 5 - jeffk - in case you hadn’t noticed, this is not comedy central, hence your offensive ‘joke’ was ignored, where is the moderator, Michael?

48. Andrew Luter
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 9:53 am

    I agree with most of the comments above. A nice interface, with access to ALL of your mail is key. Own the relationship by owning the portal - not the data.

    If Apple was really smart, they would unbundle this service from .Mac and make it available for everyone, just like Gmail. Bring the PC and Linux world into the mix and you expose these folks to the superior talents of the Apple UI and usability designers. Once you do that, you start converting more and more people to the platform itself.

    Compare that with the argument that you need to buy a Mac and then you need to pay for a .Mac account in order to get superior web mail and you will see my point.

    - Andrew

49. Otis Gospodnetic
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 10:12 am

    While Yahoo and Apple may get AJAX + Webmail = Nicer, very few services out there get that AJAX + Webmail + IMAP = MUCH Nicer, where MUCH Nicer is “I will pay for this service” nice. Yes, I think some smaller players do offer IMAP via webmail, but I’m a long-time Y! customer, I pay for their damn 2GB that will never use, but I HAVE to use multiple email clients because Y! mail can’t get mail from my other IMAP accounts.

50. Litepost
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 10:48 am

    This is just a note to interested readers - the universe and the world at large - that Litepost.com (Litepost Webmail, which we are currently developing at our studios in Phoenix) will *definitely* be *significantly* better (in many, many ways) than ALLL of the existing webmail solutions, including Apple’s.

    We are consulting with numerous engineers and UI genies, and we always need more… I mention this here because I imagine some of the most interested readers on the subject are here; you’ll probably want to be the first to see it when it’s ready.

    We’re also interested in your help and advice (comments and criticism) if you are interested in contributing to this important project. Litepost is “the future of webmail”; if not an outright alternative to e-mail as we know it today. I encourage to look into what we’re doing, and, if you can, help us!!!

51. Ricardo
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 11:29 am

    Don´t joke me. I think that .MAC won´t have future. I don´t know in US, by all over the world, MAC is dead.

52. Suedelock
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 11:35 am

    comment 47 - how was that offensive? Grow a sack.

53. Jonathan Galore
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 11:37 am

    Excellent article!

    Webmail providers must realize the value of providing a great webmail service with access to other accounts in terms of the complementary services they can leverage:
    - calendar
    - storage
    - communication
    - etc

    Why should google care if I access my other accounts on the gmail interface if I end up using google for filing and storing my messages and attachments, using their calendar, etc - spending more and more time on google!

    JG

54. BiotechMD
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 12:16 pm

    Disagree: Google has the best interface on the net. Period. Yahoo, and especially MSN, have an outdated email system with poor storage capabilities and lousy overall functionality.

55. pwb
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 12:36 pm

    For anyone who prefers using a mouse for email handling, the Yahoo UI is far superior to Gmail.

56. Jericon
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 12:37 pm

    Take a look at GoDaddy’s webmail interface. You can add additional accounts on top of those hosted with them. It features full AJAX integration, built in calendars and many other neat and useful features.

57. Al Abut
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 2:31 pm

    It’s so easy to do multiple accounts with gmail, I do it right now.

    All you do is:
    1) get multiple email accounts, you can prefix them to organize( mine are alabut, alabut.info, alabut.data, etc etc).
    2) set up separate pop forwarding for each and set the outgoing address to the one being forwarded from rather than the gmail address.
    3) (optional) use netvibes to get a dashboard overview of all the accounts, drill in as needed.

    It’s worth doing simply for the spam filtering, especially on high traffic accounts like email addresses that’s publicly listed on websites.

58. greggman
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 2:35 pm

    I find gmail’s UI to be crap. I’m surprised you gmail fans don’t sometimes need to reference multiple emails or start composing one while looking at another or check your contacts etc etc.

    All of this is possible in Yahoo, none of this is possible in GMail. Pick compose in gmail and the screen is replaced. Try to reference something in your inbox or folder and your only choice is to send or discard your the email you are in the middle of composinig.

    Pick compose in yahoo and a new tab is added letting you still go back and view/reference everything you have. You can even separate them into separate windows if you want.

    Gmail is like using my old Apple ][ for email back when all they had was one screen, no windows. Yahoo is a modern flexible UI.

59. PhiloTech
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 3:58 pm

    Can you use .mac from a PC? If you can’t, then that kinda shoots the “use any address anywhere” idea in the foot.

60. signal_vs_noise
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 4:02 pm

    I don’t know what the hell terrific Apple might have done here. Have a look at roundcube.net their solution is available for a long time now, and it is GPL!

    just marketing buzz going on here. if something is crap, then it’s certainly .mac some new webmail-client does not fix the problems.

61. hongo
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 5:24 pm

    Free email is always subject to compromise when the host decides to change its rules.

    Paying a nominal fee for email service gets you a superior interface, service and a customer relationship. (fastmail.fm for example) I’m not an owner, just a satisfied customer.

62. Michael
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 7:43 pm

    Ok First of all…Where on the .Mac site does it say that it will allow you to have other email feed into .Mac mail online??? I see no reference of that, I think you are just making assumptions because it looks like the app Mail. I really don’t see any litature or anything suggesting that either.

    Second of all, looks wonderful and I can’t wait to use it regaurdless of what features it does and doesn’t have. Anybody winning about .Mac service either a.) doesn’t have it, or b.) doesn’t use it to their advantage.

    Who are you?

63. Adam Simon
    

    September 29th, 2006 at 10:37 pm

    Personally, I use Mail with IMAP so that my Treo will always mirror what’s on my desktop, something which just isn’t possible with Gmail. (I’ve got a Treo 650, so using Gmail OTA isn’t a workable option.) Using web-based email away on a mobile device remains pretty painful, if it’s possible at all.

    While I’m all for web-based email that lets me pretend that I’m on my own computer, I think this might be a move toward something else.

    I think the point that Michael made that a lot of commenters are glossing over is that Apple is ramping up Mail (and, in Leopard, iCal and Address book) to compete with Exchange. My guess is that this ties into the much-rumored phones - if Apple can sync your Mail.app folders/settings/messages to their servers, they can also sync them to your Apple cell phone and provide not only push email but also OTA calendar/address book syncing, and providing competition for Windows Mobile and Blackberry, especially if one of the 3 models winds up with a qwerty keyboard. That’s probably a stretch, especially in 2007, but they’re laying all the groundwork for such a device and such a service.

64. jumper
    

    September 30th, 2006 at 12:04 am

    #58 - greggman,

    open another Gmail tab in firefox - same thing.

65. julian
    

    September 30th, 2006 at 12:54 am

    #58, didn’t you notice the “new window” link top-right on conversation view? Middle click (firefox) and you have a new tab with your message. Also you have a “Save draft” button too.

    Anyway, I agree with you that Gmail is far from perfect. I found the search capabilities quite inadequate. They just cloned web-search style: typing in a box (yes, I know there is an advanced search)

    For me, searching mail should be more like: you click on a label (a tag), then add (drag&drop) some more tags, or delete some tag (holding Ctrl while dragging), or move a couple of sliders to reduce/increase a time scale, the add (or delete) some contact (hold Ctrl to match against “To” instead of “From” headers), then finally (if you didn’t find what you’re looking for) type some specific keyword to search in subject. When you’re done you should be able to save current search as label (tag)

    Except for a legacy gmail account I keep, I’m currently using a hosted Roundcube webmail (ajax, drag&drop, simple and powerful UI) where I have “superaccounts” where several “normal” accounts appears as folders. Depending on my needs I can log-in in the superaccount or in a normal account. As RC webmail allows to define identities, it’s perfect for managing several accounts.

    RC search sucks as much as Gmail’s: they are based on IMAP searches.

66. Jim
    

    September 30th, 2006 at 5:27 am

    Gmail? Yahoo? .Mac mail? Live Mail?
    Who cares?

67. Matthew
    

    September 30th, 2006 at 7:26 am

    Mike: I’ve been an Apple customer since 1988, using their products long before that. With that in mind, I would assert that Apple’s motivation with the new .Mac DotMac mail is simply to mirror the OS X Mail.app’s user experience. The rest of it is tech gravy for those who are actually interested.

    The user experience, intellectual and tactile both, has always been Apple’s focus.

    To this point, Al, what GMail, and the list of other freebies you mentioned, lacks horribly is integration. This is Apple’s .Mac advantage, of course.

    Kyle: you don’t have to pay $100/year. I have a How-To save 20-50% tutorial on my site at apple-project.com. See the sidebar.

68. Scott Loftesness
    

    September 30th, 2006 at 7:40 am

    I use Mail.app on the Mac - and learned recently that, if I included multiple email addresses in the Email Address field in preferences, Mail was smart enough to use the incoming mail header to match one of my addresses and pickup that same address as the from address when I did a reply.

    This technique allows me to forward email from many places to my IMAP email provider (could be .Mac although I’m using another provider) - and have replies work almost seamlessly using the right sent from address in any replies I send. This doesn’t seem to be well documented - but it’s a great feature if you’re interested in consolidating your email.

    Scott

69. Harry
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 4:50 am

    I second Michael’s point (#62) - where exactly is all this buzz about multiple email accounts coming from?

    The screenshot on the .mac site only shows one inbox, instead of the nested inboxes you get in Mail.app if you have multiple accounts, and there is *nothing* anywhere in Apple’s text that talks about multiple accounts.

    Multiple accounts would be a wonderful thing but I wouldn’t count on them being there just because this new interface looks the same as the OS X app!

70. jeff
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 6:52 am

    What this post fails to mention is that AOL provides many of these things, such as drag and dropping of mail, integrated calendar, pictures AND allowing to check multiple account without signing off…any thoughts on AOL’s webmail suite?

71. mac-finance
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 10:44 am

    I love the new features, I think it will help current .mac users justify and renew their membership, but I don’t see it attracting new members to .mac.
    .Mac needs to take on the unlimited storage capabilities of Gmail in order to gain a larger user base…

72. mutt
    

    October 1st, 2006 at 11:30 pm

    Those who enjoy using a visually attractive, fully functional desktop-like web mail experience should also consider http://www.laszlomail.com . It was built by the same folks at Laszlo Systems who brought you OpenLaszlo. I don’t know anything about their usage policies with accounts and storage, but it should be included in any web mail user experience conversation.

73. robert
    

    October 2nd, 2006 at 4:43 am

    Question: How do you know that .Mac webmail will support Multiple accounts? I can find no mention of this on the preview webpage, or in the .Mac email I just received this morning (which seems to have the same content).

    Multiple accounts via .Mac webmail would be a great feature for me, but as far as I can tell, it doesn’t actually exist, nor is it on the public feature list.

    So, how do you know this is a feature in the new .Mac webmail?

74. Jesse David Hollington
    

    October 3rd, 2006 at 7:33 am

    Firstly, while I don’t see any indication that the refreshed .Mac WebMail will support multiple accounts, there *is* some existing support in .Mac to check one other POP3 account. This is obviously a far cry from supporting multiple accounts, but generally no less than what most other webmail providers offer.

    IMHO, the problem with gmail at the end of the day is the fact that it’s realistically *only* available online. I actually *do* like gmail’s interface, but the limitations on using it from anywhere other than gmail.com was unacceptable, as I still want to keep copies of my e-mail offline as well.

    As web-mail interfaces go, there is a lot I like about gmail, and ultimately I agree that it’s personal preference as to which is better. I don’t mind Yahoo’s interface *either*, but if all other factors were equal and I had to choose between the two (ie, there was no other option), I”d probably go with gmail.

    But until gmail begins to support features like IMAP, it’s not a viable concept for anybody except those people who ONLY want to access their e-mail on the web.

    Further, I have never been overly impressed with free e-mail services. My e-mail is too mission-critical for me to trust to any kind of a free service, and especially a service that makes it complicated to keep copies of your e-mail offline (as gmail does).

    I’ve gone to some effort to ensure that my mail comes to a domain name that I control, which means I can point it just about anywhere. Therefore, I’m not held hostage by any one service in my ability to *receive* e-mail, and certainly don’t want to be in terms of my *stored* emails.

    At least with .Mac, Yahoo, and a slew of other IMAP-based services, I can accept the fact that if the service were to go away tomorrow, my mail wouldn’t go with it (yes, I know you can download all of your mail via POP3 in gmail, but you lose any concept of organization of that mail in the process, which defeats the purpose when dealing with a very large mailbox).

    So while I *do* like gmail as a *web-based* client, it lacks too many integration features to be viable as anything more than an alternative account to use for testing and other non-critical stuff.

75. lou
    

    October 21st, 2006 at 12:27 pm

    mac mail sucks……….no return receipt…………cost………..everything dotmac ……………………………….sucks

76. Nick
    

    October 27th, 2006 at 5:29 am

    So it seems there isn’t any external IMAP facility in the new dot Mac webmail!

77. Carol
    

    October 31st, 2006 at 12:59 pm

    What I cannot stand about .mac webmail (even before this “newer better” release”) is that it has no choices for font size, color or style. And this new release is just slow s l o w — SLOW. Very unhappy with it.