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

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.)

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.

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)

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

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.

“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

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.

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.

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.

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.

@ 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

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.

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.

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

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.

I like Pine.

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…)

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.

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..

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.

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.

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”.

.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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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!!!