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.

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

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

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 Yahoo, and especially MSN, have an outdated email system with poor storage capabilities and lousy overall functionality.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

#58 - greggman,

open another Gmail tab in firefox - same thing.

#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.

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

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.

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

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!

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?

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…

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.