Why do I prefer GMail over hotmail or Yahoo! Mail?
General Thoughts, Webmail Service June 23rd, 2004
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I have access to around 8-9 domains. That gives me around 3.5 GB of web space to play with. I can have as many pop enabled IDs with as much space. And I have 1 nice one for personal mails (sadly, it is infested with spam mails!). Then I use a free IMAP service from FastMail for forums and Blogs.
So why do I use webmail? Well, we all have grown on webmails. They come in handy for remote access, and even when mail servers are down. And I also have my web mail IDs on all the popular services out there. Most prominently Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail. But the more I use GMail, the less I am using other webmail services!
Here are some of the reasons…
- I do not plan to use it for personal reasons. So I don’t care if Google people, USDOJ, President Bush or even the computers in Google Labs are reading these.
- It is free, fast and gives me 1000 Megs to play with. Why not use it for good purposes!
- It acts perfectly for online storage resource! For files less than 10 Megs. You just need to properly encrypt your files.
- Conversations make emailing fun. I have more than 100 mails accessible from the first screen in 35 conversations totally accessible and searchable. Yahoo! Mail would have taken more than 4 pages…
- So does Opera M2 inspired features like fast reply.
- Searching mails is way better than Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail.
- It keeps me logged in even with no activities from my side, unlike Hotmail or Yahoo which times out.
- The mail auto complete gives me access to entire address book not just the address stored in my browser history.
- The filters, blocked address are limitless unlike Yahoo! Mail and perhaps Hotmail too.
- The mails sent FROM GMail don’t have any advertisement messages (at the moment! Might change in the future) from Google, unlike signature ads from other mail providers.
- I don’t see Big (really big in fact) ads like the ones on Yahoo! Mail pages or slow, complicated interface of Hotmail. The only service giving me similar speeds is Rediff which has its own share of problems with my login ID.
- The spell checker is the best I have seen in an online webservice and works beautifully.
What I do not like about GMail:
- The Opera Browser support is under works. I think I will have to settle for a HTML based GMail which would be very sad.
- Signatures are sent all the time! Even when replying, forwarding, replying to a reply, replying to a forward, and it goes on and on and on!
- E-Mail groups are missing. I hate to select all the individual members of a group whom I have to send a mail.
- GMail definitely require an anti-virus engine to scan everything that passes through its email servers. Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail are old timers, hence pretty accustomed to viral and Trojan attacks. GMail does block certain potential risky attachments. But it was certainly not tough to compress a Trojan and successfully transfer it through the GMail servers. It let me download it normally, and it was fine until Norton got mad with me to have downloaded that file! Now, what company GMail gets in contract with for the antivirus services would be something to look forward too. Google certainly cannot build an antivirus on their own as rapidly as they have been doing with other services to fulfill their plans! But they need to do something on it soon. And not wait for the final launch and real world scenarios…
The most ridiculous thing I have heard about GMail is that it invades privacy. I cannot believe people find it acceptable that Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail add an advertisement to their personal (even intimate) mails at the bottom in the form of a signature. But they cannot accept Google showing ads on a side panel related to the content of the mail!
Yahoo! Mail kicks itself in the foot!
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About
My Collogue have gmail account. It’s really fast. You can add attachments just in a moment. All the operations are very very fast.
enjoy…
Gmail is slowing down…
I would like a gmail account.
hmm… i dont like to specially check services to test them. because i don’t have the patience to check a brand new service to be completely fair to them. :)
well the sections looks to be working fine here. can you provide me the link? :)
It worked today ! :)
Thanks for the nice review .
-A happy Gob
Ah well, I have a few points to contradict you, obviously. ;)
* Rediff also gives out 1000MB of free storage & Hotmail is also upgrading free accounts to 250MB this July.
* Ads are not there on GMail as its still in Beta & only select few have access to it so they can test it out for any bugs etc.(though I don’t know if Google pays any heed to the reported bugs, as I’ve reported a couple)
* As for invasion on privacy, well, you need to do your homework on it before you comment anything. Yahoo & Hotmail & other free eMail providers that place ads below your messages don’t invade your privacy. They are just place a random ad using an ad-rotator script, similar to one that they use on their website for displaying ads. Besides, Yahoo! & Hotmail just display their own ads(that doesn’t change often) below the messages. But what Google will do is scan the messages for specific keywords & then place the ads relevant to them. Just like its adsense where it scans the context of the page calling the script & serves relevant ads. Now here’s where the privacy matters come in. Google is actually reading your eMail. Yahoo! & Hotmail or any other don’t do it. A recent law passed in California states that messages can be read to place ads etc but they can’t be retained or shared with anyone or viewed by any living creature. You can read all about it on my Blog at http://blog.igeek.info/still-fresh/2004/06/01/gmail-or-troublemail/. You see, like many others, I too have followed this very closely.
None of these arguments are new.
a. Rediff committed a mistake when it went 1 GB. I will write about it some other day. And I don’t care if it provides 1 GB because I don’t like GMail just for 1 GB. Rediff’s user management system is shit. It does not let me recover password for the user ID Sushubh because Sushubh does not exist! And I cannot create a new user id named Sushubh because Sushubh is already takes. Think about that.
b. GMail has ads and it will have ads. But they are at this moment not as distracting as Yahoo! Mail ads (flash ads of the size of half of my browser window) nor is it as slow as Hotmail. And I doubt they will be as bad as they are on the other mail services when they go final.
c. People don’t want to see ads with their mails but they are happy if the mail service sends ads inside their personal mails!. Good for them. The post reflects my personal opinion and I stand by it. Secondly, Google people do not read your mails to manually decide what ads to show with a mail. Their computers do. Same thing is done by the spam filters at Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail. And if you have missed my first point:
I do not plan to use it for personal reasons. So I don’t care if Google people, USDOJ, President Bush or even the computers in Google Labs are reading these.
Is Google reading my email?
If you can show me anywhere on google’s site that the people working there would be reading my mails, then i might consider it worrying. But alas you wont. It’s just hype. People are scared and just being plain stupid. You are afraid of machines reading your mails? Use Snail Mail. Go to post office and pray the letter reaches the hands of the person it was destined for.
Stop getting excited. Read the BOLD prints.
[...] First the good points. It let you set the time interval of delays between the checks of GMail, which GMail Notifier does not do. So, if you get few [...]
I agree that people are blowing the “invasion of privacy” bit WAY out of proportion…and just plain missing the boat. If anyone is going to claim (incorrectly) that Gmail servers scanning for keywords is an invasion of privacy, then, RIGHT NOW, go and remove any and all virus detection, spam filters, etc. from your computers. Those applications are doing the EXACT SAME THING. Oh, and you might as well stop using email of any sort alltogether. See, once you hit “send”, you have no idea how many different “applications” are going to scan your email: it could be scanned by *your* mail service prior to being sent. It could be scanned by the recipient mail service prior to being delivered, it could be scanned by the recipients virus scanner at the desktop level (Norton, MaCafee, etc.), it could be scanned by the recipients junk mail filter…See? Yet another automated program scanning for keywords is NO DIFFERENT.
Stop being so paranoid.
As for ads, they are (and will continue to be) in the Gmail client. They are very non-intrusive Google adsense ads (text only.) No flash, no pop unders, pop ups, no animated swirling twirling distrcting banners. Just unobtrusive text. Using Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail makes my head hurt. Gmail does *not*, however, add advertisements to the footer of your email, like many of the others do. Your email is your email. Period.
As for session time-out in Yahoo! or Hotmail, don’t you think it is definitely a better feature than keeping you logged in for days? What if someone manages to access your computer and then your webmail? A useful feature - a popup saying you will be logged out in so many mins if there is no activity is useful and then it should log the user out.
You chose to stay logged into GMail when you login by clicking that checkbox…
If you do that on a system accessible to anyone else… it is your fault not a GMail issue.
You complain that email groups are missing. They are there (pretty much), just as a different concept. In the “notes” field for a contact, put in the names of the group(s) you want them to belong to. Then when you click on the Conacts link, type in one of the group names and press enter. You will get only the contacts in that group.
very hellful
hello sir
I think, the ppl who criticise GMail are die-hard fans of Yahoo or Hotmail..or they r in the world of fairy tale.
why cant they accept that GMail is far superior to any of the webmails available on the internet today???
Kudos to GMail team……….keep it up :)
Gmail is fast and is very funky and it’s storage is growing per second
There is no question that Gmail is offering a superior product to anything else available. My quick response however to the advertising issue is as follows:
Marketing to an individual you know nothing about is fair game and requires strategy and business intelligence. Marketing to an individual who’s intimate details have extracted through their personal communication, is wrong. Anyway you look at it, it is wrong.
If I know, by scanning your email for keywords, that someone close to you has passed away in the last few days, is it fair for me to advertise memorial products and flowers? NO, NEVER.
It is to easy to take advantage of people when you know personal information, it is the reason behind many problems in personal relationships. Once we accept this form of marketing without considering its consequences, we are in a fair amount of trouble because people are fairly easy targets when you have the inside scoop on their emotions.
I am a HUGE fan of Google and love and use every product they have. I don’t however support invasive marketing practices because I believe it is wrong.
Timothy: So when exactly is it appropriate to advertise memorial products? There is always going to be someone out there that is easily offended by something as simple as this. You act as though someone will personally be reviewing your emails. Get over it or use another mail service.
I don’t particularly have a problem with receiving ads for memorial services and products if I happen to be reading an email about someones death or some other traggic events. Honestly I probably wouldn’t even notice the ad if I was reading about a lost loved one or other such traggic event.
Finally…even though I don’t have a problem with this, Google i’m sure will implement a system to avoid sensitive issues like this so that the easily offended such as yourself can use their service also.
Why Can’t i make a yahoo id with a _ in it?
Why Can’t i make a yahoo id with a _ in it?
Google is jus gr8!
IT gives ya POP3 access! no other gives ya that! ITs free! USe your Thunderbird or OUTlook EXpress to get mails quickly! no ads at all!
enjoy boys!
Its account is used by only those who have a cell in US or have been invited! Thats great! NO bloggers!
ITS HEAVEN
I have tried every other thing, this is the best
Gmail is good, but I also have Hotmail: Windows Live Mail Beta. It is free and offers 2 gigs of space, and the interfact has improved. But the thing with gmail Y!Mail Beta, and Hotmail, is that they all take some time to load. Not that long, but it doesn’t get there right away.
Also, right now, you can only block people from chatting with you. And Gmail is the only email service where I actually got spam.
Don’t get me wrong, gmail is still great. I use it all the time.
I WAS SEND MY MAIL IN QUICK SECOND