GMail address auto-complete vs. Yahoo! Mail address auto-complete

GMail introduced many novel concepts into the web emailing scene when it was first introduced to the online world. One of which was the excellent auto address completion feature on the TO, CC and BCC fields on the mail compost window. Most mail services provide address books where you can select the address from a text box to add them to any of these fields, but GMail acts exactly like Email Clients by giving access to the complete address book from the address fields itself. You start typing a user’s name and GMail shows a dropdown with all the related entries in a drop down.

Now, most browsers do support history remembrance on the text boxes. But they only work for the first email address. You add a comma and you cannot recall any other address from the history. GMail’s feature tackled it too!

Yahoo! responded to this feature by providing its own auto-complete utility. But alas, it’s an additional code of software that user has to manually install and it only works for Internet Explorer. And I doubt it will work if the user has his security settings set to a bit more complex levels. I tested it out and well, came out a bit disappointed.

• GMail as I already mentioned supports auto-complete for all the browsers it supports. I have tested it on Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefox. I expect it to work in Safari too but I cannot confirm that. Yahoo! Mail supports this only on Internet Explorer and that too only when the user installs it manually.
• Manual installation means, it’s not available on all computers out of the box. Most users will simply miss out on this option. With GMail, well you pick it up as soon as you start composing an email id!
• Yahoo! does have an advantage coz it automatically adds the entries from the messenger list, nicknames. It even adds an entry for Everyone, which kinda scares me for misuse!
• A small touch to the service from GMail is that it considers three aspects to catch email ids from what the user types in the address bar. User name, user email id and more importantly Last Name! Yahoo! misses the last name option. Small things, but really stands out at moments.

So, overall GMail beats Yahoo! Mail comprehensively on this small feature of its mailing service. But well, Yahoo! Mail’s utility is better than nothing!

P.S. This article does not take into consideration the address book selection features of Yahoo! and Hotmail. It just considers manual filling of the address boxes!