grr…damn you, let me edit my comments.

@Alpesh Nakar

Don’t spread lies. Trust me, you can check Live Mail (Live Hotmail) in Outlook 2007 just fine …I check 2 accounts in Hotmail every day, and I certainly did not download or pay for the Outlook Connector.

dude, this is THE weakest comparison of standard technologies that i’ve seen in quite a while…not only do you fail to clearly compare to apples to apples at a feature level, but you fail to cite sources and completely skip over the part where you actually use all three applications before rambling…if you bothered to use all three, then you would clearly see how integrated communications factors in, how leveraging a larger services offering factors in, and so on…just be careful, it is exactly this kind of posting that damages your credibility…

I have been using all three for sometime now…, live mail most actively. One think I hope Yahoo! and Google start to offer is an outlook type client.

MS has their Live Mail Desktop Client.., its just like outlook, but consumer driven with a similar UI to the web interface. The sync action is fantastic and I have been using that about 90% over the browser interface.

Gmail apps for your domain has been around for a while, but it’s lacking the API developers want.

–98% of my users use Yahoo.

–hotmail deletes inactive accounts. so even if you’re account is for spam, they will delete it if you don’t login.

–I like the Gmail’s simplicity but it’s always down. Their spam filter also went down and everything went into my inbox. If there’s a way to organize your emails or sort them to go in specific folders automatically like Yahoo gmail would be perfect.

AOL is the worst. Not only it’s slow, but email confirmations never show up on AOL. The USPS 2 day priority mail is faster.

I have been using Hotmail since I was a kid and GMAIL did not exist. But, I dont want to risk losing contact with my old friends by switching my email address. I currently use Outlook so that I can combine all 3 of my email accounts with my app.

Michael,

interesting post and I like your general commentary although I would strongly disagree with this statement:

“The three applications, along with AOL mail, make up the vast majority of the 500 million or so webmail users around the world”

Comscore or any of these other US centric measurement sites do not really count traffic from Asia well at all. So I would consider your post a very American perspective.

Take China and Korea for example…neither of these 4 applications have any dominance in these countries yet combined they are larger than the US and some European countries put together. If you were to add all of Asian internet users using e-mail and webmail and compare that to all of Europe, it would be larger still….infact AOL does not even exist outside of the US I believe….

Re: Gmail.

Other than the lack of folders, apparently nobody mentioned that Gmail lacked the ability to SORT.

What kind of arcane mail client is this? Any decent mail client would have the ability to sort at least by sender or subject. Only google fanboyz can defend such a HUGE deficiency.

*Windows Live Mail is horrible. I consider myself pretty techy, and I could not come close to getting WLM to work properly. They invited the Windows OS–they can’t do better than this? Pass.

*Yahoo Mail- i like their attempt. But I dont have time to wait 20 seconds each time for the page to load. I timed loading Yahoo Mail (and I have a fast PC—12 seconds to load it from the time I click the icon in the toolbar. Gmail–3 seconds, trying to access the same way. Case closed.

*I have any Yahoo mails fwd’d to Gmail. About 99% of the spam I get in Gmail comes with my Yahoo add on it—I never get spam in Gmail acct addressed to that account. Ever.

PS to the above.
*INVENTED the OS. Sorry.

*once you figure out GM, it’s great. Any mail you wont need again- delete. Any you want to keep, hit ‘archive.’ That way it comes back as part of the thread when that person writes again.

But yes, that and the labeling system, are arcane. But the company’s IPO filing says, (thanks to John Batelle for the quote,) -”Google is not a conventional company…we do not intend to become one.”

So go figure.

I use Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta, it allows me to access hotmail, yahoo and Gmail in a single Desktop client. It also support RSS.
I think it is a great product if you want to integrate all of the three accounts.
It is free!! It is fast.

How come you only compare those specific features? The 3 mail apps have way more features than that. This comparison is completely biased

Gmail is good ,but without folders
live mail looks good

In my opinion, Yahoo mail has always loaded much faster then gmail..But, then, I am always ready to compromise that for the lovely features that Gmail has got..

And as the first commenter poster, not many are active gmail users..Many create one in gmail simply to use other accounts like Blogger or orkut.

I run across email addresses all the time and less than 5% are from yahoo — I can’t believe there’s 250M yahoo mail accounts.

Maybe if you could people that get accounts just to talk with the Yahoo IM or to join a Yahoo group. Not sure if those should be counted.

How about the forwarding feature in gmail..I see that not being discussed??

In October last year I moved completely to Gmail and I haven’t looked back. Not once.

Previously I was an Apple Mail user and very happy. However as time went on my mail intake vastly increased (more clients, more web service users, more blog readers, more friends etc - yay me) as did the number of actual email accounts I owned. It gradually became necessary for me to be able to check mail and have access to all my mail wherever I was, but with greater flexibility than simply using Apple Mail with IMAP.

Switching to Gmail has been the best “switch” I’ve made since switching to a mac from a PC about 4 years ago. Now all my mail just gets forwarded to my Gmail account and I have Gmail set up to respond to the mails as if they were being sent from the address they were originally sent to. Not to mention the amount of spam I see has massively decreased.

I highly recommend anyone who is battling spam and multiple email addresses to do what I did - it’s just a much more efficient way to handle my mail.

And the “conversation” style structure? Love it. Makes SO much more sense to me than wading through hundreds of mails titled “RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: ” etc.

Gmail rocks !

G M A I L ………… all the way baby!!!! lol, how lame? a lot I know.

I’m backing Gmail, hands down better experience that the other two. They have a couple of features that threw the baby out with the bathwater. Having folders AND tags would be nice. You’d think with all the brain muscle in the GYM, somebody would come up with a better way to manage contacts.

Oh yeah:
“There has to be more 228MM hotmail users. When MSFT bought Hotmail, they had 200MM users then.” I can confirm the next day it was 200MM minus one.”

How do the Y&M users stand the ads? Everyone uses Firefox with Adblock?

Have you ever been waiting for an email your are supposed to get?

Do you click on refresh or inbox every few seconds to see if you get it or not?

With Gmail, it shows up automatically without page refresh, that is a very good feature for me.

I want to point out some mistakes you did in this analysis. I do like Gmail over the rest as you mentioned. But I do not agree Gmail on “fast” point. I found it pathetic in loading if you have many discussions happening in your mails. Infact the more you interact on email threads, the less is the performance you gain from Gmail. Yahoo is much better in loading your Inbox quickly.

You forgot to analyze these services on SPAM protection. Gmail is doing very bad since long on spam protection.

Folder management is one thing which was totally ignored here. How many end users know how to manage folders kinda stuff in Gmail using Tags and Archive, skip inbox features ?. You will have create a complex rule to do so. Yahoo and Windows Live are far better and users are very much happy with that.

Yahoo india offers free incoming and outgoing to its email users.

good points savvy

Gmail also opens Excel and Word attachments in Google Docs and spreadsheets without having anything installed on your computer and without taking the risk of running VBA macro viruses.

To say that Gmail is above others is certainly an understatement.

These days I read only comments for better information. Article is just the starting point to drive comments that give better and more accurate info.

I may be a little biased, since I openly want to have sex with Google, its products and possibly its staff, BUT:

(1) It’s worth noting, I think, that Gmail offers what is easily the best mobile email product I’ve ever used.

(2) I’m shocked — shocked, I tells you — that people are calling Gmail’s spam filtering anything less than excellent. Maybe two to three times a month, something improperly slips through — and even better, Gmail very nearly never blocks legitimate email as spam (the only exception being the occasional newsletter). In my experience, Hotmail’s success rate on both sides of spam filtering remains laughable. Cryable, even.

(3) Your B+/B records for Hotmail strike me as a little generous — especially the B+ for search.

I’ve never used Yahoo, so I can’t comment there — but to me, comparing Gmail to Hotmail is like comparing apples and orange-painted rocks. Covered in poison.

Dean @ The Answer May Surprise You

Anyone who is serious about using e-mail should use (hosted) Exchange. This allows you to use Outlook, the best e-mail software and the best webmail, Outlook Web Access.

This allows an unmatched integration of e-mail, calendar and contacts.

Slap in a PDA/Windows Mobile phone with Wifi and GPRS and you will never ever think about sucky free webmail again.

I cannot believe anyone would use Gmail with POP (or with any other webmail service), this just doesn’t make any sense!

Downloading all your e-mail to your e-mail client? What’s the use of those gigs of online space then? So with your webmail you cannot reply to messages because these have all been sucked into your outlook at home??

Hold on, you say, I can do POP and leave my messages on the server! Yeah right, what about your sent items folder, how on earth are you going to synchronize these messages?

And what about the great webmail address book? Very cool, but these addresses are not available in Outlook or any other e-mail client so you will be having to update two address books!

You forgot folders, even with tags, folders are still a handy method of organisation.

Gmail’s tag support has some problems with it too, for instance there’s no way of showing justl the untagged emails.

imap support would be another thing that gets my vote.

Andy,

As far as I know, none have IMAP support.

Folders are fine, but taggins is so multi-dimensional. You can tag an email with multiple keywords instead of putting it into a single folder. Finding it later is significantly easier.

Mike, there’s one slight discrepancy in your chart. Yahoo! offers POP access for a price, OR if you sign up for promotional e-mails. My mother is a long-time Yahoo! Mail user and she accesses her e-mail through Mail.app. I just marked the first few e-mails as junk and now she doesn’t even see them.

see http://enginepuller.com

I use Yahoo! Mail, but know the features of GMail. Because I’ve got an account there for using GTalk, I got some mails there, too ;-). But much less than to my Yahoo! account.

I, whole-heartedly, despise the new slow, buggy and ad-bloated Live Hotmail. I hate it, it sickens me. Checking my emails there is a nightmare that I want to get over with as soon as possible.

On the other hand, I’m ready to jump into bed with Gmail anytime she wants!

Michael, there’s a way to achieve POP out with Yahoo without paying anything.

There’s a software called YPOPs that works like this:

- First, it installs itself like a local POP mail account, so you connect your client (let’s say thunderbird) to “localhost” (127.0.0.1).
- After you’re connected to this local POP, YPOPs connects to Yahoo Mail through the http interface and, using some sort of REGEX processing, it downloads every single mail that is on your mail account.

I have used it to perform backup of my data, just in case something very bad happens in Yahoo (like just recently happend in gmail). I think you can send email too from your local client, but haven’t tested in that way.

The software is open source (free as in speech) and can be found on http://ypopsemail.com/

Just wait to some of you Gmail freaks have one major problem with not getting your mail at all or not being able to send anything from your account, The best one is when your entire inbox is gone and they have no backups or can’t restore it!

Good luck on getting someone at Google who knows WTF they are doing, if you get anyone at all.

What about spam filter, by and far i have seen gmail has the best spam filter.

Wht do you guys say.

-Sumeet

Mike, one thing you seemed to have missed out that is critical to all 3 is SPAM and how much of it gets through…could you update your post to reflect that essential feature or lack there of it?

Now, how about a comparison between any of these web mail clients and MS Outlook 2007 + Exchange server? No comparison at all when it comes to task and calendar management. Outlook 2007 especially, which makes moving emails into your “getting things done” pile very, very easy.

I’ve been wanting to go full web based on email, task management, and calendaring for years now - and every time I try, I find them lacking in the basic features for day to day usage. This boggles my mind - with all of the capital and resources that someone like Google has, you’d think they could OWN this market with a little ingenuity and elbow grease.

Another measurement criteria that should had been used in this comparison is spam filtering efficiency. I have an account with the same user name in Yahoo, Live, and Gmail. Gmail and Live, for me at least, have a 100% accuracy for filtering Spam. I never ever get a single spam in these two services. As for Yahoo, their filtering efficiency is around 10%. My inbox is always loaded with spam on a daily basis.

Aside from Spam, Yahoo is just plain ol` slow, very slow. Live is nice, even though I am anti-Microsoft products, especially Windows. Gmail for me just rocks. Its fast, to the point, and easily accessable from my phone via small app. I just wish Gmail would allow folders (as well tagging) and eliminate the auto message grouing.

Another measurement criteria that should had been used in this comparison is spam filtering efficiency. I have an account with the same user name in Yahoo, Live, and Gmail. Gmail and Live, for me at least, have a 100% accuracy for filtering Spam. I never ever get a single spam in these two services. As for Yahoo, their filtering efficiency is around 10%. My inbox is always loaded with spam on a daily basis.

Aside from Spam, Yahoo is just plain ol` slow, very slow. Live is nice, even though I am anti-Microsoft products, especially Windows. Gmail for me just rocks. Its fast, to the point, and easily accessible from my phone via small app. I just wish Gmail would allow folders (as well tagging) and eliminate the auto message grouping.

One thing that’s clear, is Windows Live Mail is the weakest of the three, in terms of functionality and user experience. It’s slow, akward to use, and the big banner advert at the top is downright annoying.

Although they have the most accounts, that’s most likely due to them being the first webmail player. I’m sure many, many accounts are hardly used for email, and just kept for things like IM.

Overall, it’s been a big disappointment. I was expecting something much more slick from Microsoft after all the fuss, but WLM is not a worth competitor to Gmail (or Yahoo Mail either by the sounds of it, though I’m not a YM user).

On the other hand, there’s Gmail. The whole tagging thing took a little while to get used to, but once you get used to it, there’s no going back. It’s a much more intuitive user interface than WLM, and generally a lot easier to understand and use.

The spam filtering is excellent - much, much better than WLM. I’ve consistently marked messages as spam and they still show up in my inbox, whereas Gmail is a lot better at keeping the bad messages out.

Did I mention the Gmail Mobile application? It’s brilliant. The Gmail Mobile version is also damn good, for those who can’t run the application (it’s not compatible with all phones).

@savvix, I actually never realised Gmail never has sorting, but due to the powerful searching, it’s usually pretty easy to find what you want anyway.

Gmail rocks, and WLM sucks

Oh, one more thing. Learning to create filters in Gmail — and using those filters to auto-tag incoming mail (and/or skip your Inbox) — is going to change the way you think about online correspondence. (And yes, I’m writing the taglines that Google refuses to create itself.)

Michael referenced it above, but it bears repeating: The ability to tag can be used exactly the same way you use folders in Yahoo & Hotmail. Yes, it will also allow you to improve upon the usefulness of your folders; but hey, if you’re the sort of person who is frightened by change and innovation, you do have the option to do it the way you’ve always done it.

Think of it this way: Adding a tag to an email is the same thing as adding that email to a folder — except you can add multiple tags, so it appears in all pertinent “folders.” But Gmail lists your labels right there aside your Inbox; clicking a label will show you everything in that “folder.”

I know this might seem obvious to experienced Gmail users, but I have to admit, it took me a while before I actually started to play around with it. It’s simpler than it might initially appear…

Dean

Gmail is ruling coz of state of the art “fast speed and simple design”.Yahoo and Live mail still havent made it simple even though they followed gmail.

However I still look for a feature of address book, so i can make groups and send email to all at once

Who cares about RSS Integration? Just use a service like RssFwd, and you can use the same tools you use for your email as your RSS feeds (like forwarding, searching, tagging, etc.).

Live Hotmail has numerous other defects which accentuate its slowness. Seems most effort went into stupid features like different color skins. Among other things, contact list can’t be grouped and is far less accessible than old hotmail. Sending emails to select groups is harder; hitting back button doesn’t work after passing an email to which you want to return.

Just to amplify on what others have said:

Gmail does have web feed integration, both incoming and outgoing. It uses Atom.

RSS is dead, obsolete. Atom replaces it, and is an RFC. Get with the times.

To be honest,I rarely use hotmail & yahoo mail ,I love gmail most though it’s still in beta!!

to comment number 1… Daniel.
How the hell do you know gmail has “way” less than 51 mill (users). Your just one of those two cents types. Did you contact all of them and take a count. If your going to refute somebody’s facts; next time, do your own research!
Oh and congratulations! You made the first comment. Your 15 minutes of fame are now officially over.

Regarding tagging vs. folders, I wonder about the practicality and usability for accounts that receive significant amounts of messages. I like tagging for photo and videos because there is really no other way (yet) for computers to determine the content. But as for emails, I think tagging would be counterproductive for me personally. I receive nearly 100 emails a day in my Yahoo! mail and it would be nearly impossible for me to tag all of them so I can search later. Folders work best for me so I can quickly go through my email, respond accordingly and file into a folder or subfolder. The content and subject is already indexed so I haven’t had any problems locating emails without tags.

What are everyone’s thoughts on the utility of tagging emails?