How Does Gmail Stack Up In The Webmail World?

Wrecks writes "Flexbeta compares several email services that promise 1 GB of storage to see how they measure up to Google's Gmail. The review mentions how one service, ShireMail, offers far less features than SpyMac yet cost 10 times as much. The article also mentions how well Gmail is able to filter spam messages." Among the webmail options not mentioned in this review (the authors compare a total of five offerings) is another gig-of-mail offering from the Indian rediffmail.

Spymac is nice, but unstable

[arkanes]

I had a spymac account and used it briefly until I had a chance to get gmail.

It's a great deal - you get your gig of email, web hosting, POP access to the email, blog, forums, etc, etc. However, the Spymac servers are almost painfully slow and it's webmail interface has nothing on Googles. POP access was barely adequate, with the POP servers being unavailable probably 50% of the time.

Also, I trust Google to stay around as a viable company and keep providing me with my email service for a lot longer than Spymac (no offense to Spymac, of course).

Directbox?

[rackrent]

There's also a German service that offers 1.5 GB e-mail with POP and SMTP for free. I've not checked it out personally, but here is the link:

http://www.directbox.com/ [directbox.com]

Re:Shiremail

[SpooForBrains]

I was about to say, the reason Shiremail probably costs so much is because of the lawyers they have to pay :)

Aforementioned Reg article [theregister.co.uk]

Re:Privacy concerns

[OneDeeTenTee]

Any spam filter that doesn't run on your own system reads every email you receive.

Does your ISP have a spam filter?

Re:I would PAY to get IMAP access to Gmail

[shird]

try fastmail.fm.. free with imap. a one time fee of $20 will give you permanent access to the 'good stuff' forever, rather than an annual fee.

How to solve:

[poohsuntzu]

When you notice spam, click the box beside it and then the button "Report as Spam".

Google will eventually be able to build up quite the comprehensive list of email/servers to block, but for now, like the software itself, that spam detector is in beta.

Note, this isn't a troll to just state the obvious feature of spam reporting, but to remind people that their database of spam to block may still be small until we continue doing our job of reporting it in.

Re:Spymac is nice, but unstable

[Saven Marek]

About thge only thing spymac hass going for it is being one of the 3GB services. man is it slow!. POP like you said is only half there with responses from questions about why it is down coming back from tech support only to be told how to set settings up again. Webpage ftp is down almost as much but not quite.

gmail is so blindingly fast in comparison!!!. Even if gmail were only 20MB I would still use it more than spymac which I have dumped allready

Re:It's google..

[OneDeeTenTee]

Then you'll love mailinator.com. Send mail to an arbitrary address (Make it up on the fly!) and they hold it there for a couple of hours. Retrieve the mail without passwords or any other pain.

It's great for registering for NYT articles, forum accounts, or anything that will quickly send you a response.

Re:Will google start unifying its services?

[br0ck]

Check out the new beta [google.com]. It definitely looks like their heading for integration. Go to any recent post and there's a reply box that automatically uses your Gmail account. There Slashdot article about this about 2 weeks ago.

Re:Directbox?

[mlk]

Babel fish? [altavista.com]

With POP/IMAP/SMTP you only need to visit every now and again, and your'll quickly learn "delete" (loschen).

I have this problem with my account (GMX [gmx.co.uk]) which use to have an english page, but they killed it.

I only log in to clear the spam folder, so its really not a problem.

Re:How to solve:

[azaris]

When you notice spam, click the box beside it and then the button "Report as Spam".

Google will eventually be able to build up quite the comprehensive list of email/servers to block, but for now, like the software itself, that spam detector is in beta.

The only server that Google will block as a result of this will be his ISPs mailserver forwarding this stuff to Gmail. In general, forwarding e-mail from one account to another breaks a lot of anti-spam stuff (IP blocklists and header parsers for example).

Re:And you cant download it

[terrab0t]

Someone already wrote an app to do that. It's called Pop Goes the Gmail. You can use use it regularily to view your Gmail in a mail app (although the web interface is better), or use it for one-time batch downloads.

You can get it here [neowin.net].

You may - in the future

[bluenawab]

From gmail help: Not at the moment, but Google believes in helping people access information whenever and however they want to do so. In the future you will be able to access Gmail messages from non-Gmail accounts for free or at a nominal fee.

Re:It's not about the gig-o-space

[Technonotice_Dom]

I've heard a lot about the lack of folders but once you get used to the labels you wonder why nobody else had implemented it first. It's great being able more then one label to a message.

Opera users with M2, the built in mail client have been doing this for ages... :)

I agree though, it's brilliant, I gave up using M2 though for other reasons.

Re:Tech support

[phlyingpenguin]

It seems that the article review (sorry, my bad. I didn't mean to rtfa) left a lot to be desired when it praised SpyMac.

I think it also left a lot of the strengths of GMail out as well. For instance, they left out the fact that GMail has Google's search engine capibilities in it to search your mail. With my GB of space, I subscribe to listerv groups for various development projects and can readily search through my own mailbox for information instead of weeding through the internet. Of course related to the search capibilities, he forgot to explain the labeling system versus traditional folders. The fact that your inbox is a single folder and several labels can be applied to a message is a pretty big difference in our traditional mail usage.

My dad still uses a hotmail account because he doesnt want to tell people about his new account (I was even nice enough to invite him), and it sucks. I can't really understand how they would ever expect to sell a hotmail account based on their free service's speed and spam issues.

All in all, I don't think this review is too great. It hardly explores the tip of the iceberg in how GMail changes the way people use email. His recomendation for GMail is good but not very well justified by his article.

Re:Is this costly ??

[Red Alastor]

They don't have the storage capability to give 1 gigabyte to every user because almost no user is near the quota. Since price of hardware are always falling they upgrade the storage when they need.

Fastmail and Spamgourmet

[Bourdain]

Hi guys,

I've been using both <A HREF="http://www.fastmail.fm/" title="fastmail.fm">Fastmail.fm</a> and <A HREF="http://www.spamgourmet.com/" title="spamgourmet.com">Spamgourmet</a> for over a year. Both services are free and very useful.

I've found the information provided at
<URL:http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/imap /isp s/>
provides balanced reviews of free and pay-mail providers. Fastmail, in my opinion, is the most reliable free provider I've ever used along with the best web interface I've ever found.

Fastmail

[*Pres*]

Gmail is nice. But I'm not going to switch as I'm extremely happy with http://fastmail.fm

Spam filtering, virus-protection, use your own domain name in your from-address, different personalities, file storage, a very powerful and fast webinterface, accessible by IMAP, POP3 etc, mail forwarding, rules, fetch mail from other accounts - even from Hotmail, an addressbook with lists, etc.

The only downside is that features and quotas vary depending on whether you are a free user, a member, full member, etc. But hey, maybe that's why they're still around.

I would never have thought that I'd be willing to pay for an e-mail account. But Fastmail is so great that I pay my yearly fee with a big smile.

Re:It's not about the gig-o-space

[Monty]

You need to prefix the labels with label: in your query, much the same as the site: keyword....

The only bad thing is there doesn't seem to be a succinct way of querying over multiple labels. The best I've been able to come up with is something like

label:School OR label:ll-1 foo

for searching "foo" in messages labeled with School and ll-1. Thankfully, this kind of query rarely happens....