How Does Gmail Stack Up In The Webmail World? 362
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.
It's google.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Because of GMail, my yahoo account went FROM 6 MB storage to 100MB storage.
I think it's a bit funny.. (Score:1, Insightful)
grammar (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's google.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's google.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ignore that email address up there... it's not skewing my opinion or anything. Honest.
G's spam filter is irrelevant, (Score:4, Insightful)
-- I use webmail, but not for high-volume long-term storage.
I download-and-delete my webmail to perm storage, so I don't need massive space,
and I'm happy to let my local filter do my spam filtering.
-- I use webmail just for two purposes:
(1) to keep a long-term copy a few things I might want when away (e.g., editor, telnet client, etc.);
(2) to check my mail when I temporarily can't access my perm mail storage --
and at those times, I'm willing to tolerate the spam if the server doesn't catch it.
Re:I would PAY to get IMAP access to Gmail (Score:5, Insightful)
Gmail has really changed how I use email. The conversation feature is just wonderful. So is the search. I really love it
dumb question but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone have an experience in this, any recommendations?
Re:It's not about the gig-o-space (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DIY Gmail (Score:3, Insightful)
What I would like, however, is for google to release gmail as a downloadable product. That way I can replace Squirrel Mail with gmail. Imagine running your own e-mail server with gmail running the web interface for it. THAT is teh hotness. I think that this is the department where google can really shine. If they do something like this and make it quality they can start to take market share away from things like Exchange.
Go Google.
And you cant download it (Score:2, Insightful)
Which ones work with plain text ? (Score:1, Insightful)
All gmail needs... (Score:3, Insightful)
...is a desktop client that will let me download my mail to my own computer (including all the neat features like search and conversations, of course!)
If it offered that, gmail would be about as good as today's obsolete e-mail system could get.
What it really needs to be even better than the current obsolete system can get, is public-key based encryption and authentication to fight spam and preserve a little privacy.
Spam filters? (Score:1, Insightful)
In the last few years I've had 3 major e-mail accounts (G-mail, hotmail and yahoo!). Neither of them have had any spam I can't trace back to pissing off a little girl who signed me up to loads on my hotmail account (all of which I unsubscribed from and never got spam from again).
Remember spam doesn't just find your e-mail address, it must be given it some how.
Re:It's not about the gig-o-space (Score:4, Insightful)
Evolution has had such a feature (called VFolders) for years.
The problem I have with gmail is that I get a lot of reports and such mailed to me nightly from servers I manage. With evolution, I can search through them quickly and easily and manage messages by the hundreds. Gmail limits you to working with 50 messages at a time. The last time I logged into my Gmail account, I had ~2000 messages in the inbox and wanted to sort through them. In evolution, I could just type some search terms into the search box and filter out certain messages, deleting or archiving them as I choose. Gmail wanted me to wade through 40 pages of message listings to do the same thing. No thanks.
Beyond that, everyone is going crazy over this "Innovative conversation view", which has been in just about every decent mail client for longer than I can remember. Except Google managed to screw it up by not giving you a proper message tree to see how messages relate to one another, they just show you every related message in one big list. Not usable at all.
Maybe I'm just weird in that I'm subscribed to a lot of high volume discussion lists and a handle a lot of mail over the course of the day, but I find gmail to be completely unacceptable as a replacement for a real mail client. To give you some perspective, I forwarded some of my mail, post spam processing, to gmail for 3 weeks to try it out. I'm already at 500 MB of mail (that I need to keep.) 1GB is not nearly enough.
It doesn't matter for most of us (Score:1, Insightful)
rediffmail? Seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably because it is blocked in many places. I know that our servers routinely block anything from this domain, because it is mostly spam.
Granted, only about 1 in 100 spam messages we've received claiming to be one of the rediffmail domains has actually come from a rediffmail server. But the messages that were really from rediffmail were directed at long-inactive email accounts, and several spam traps. We do not have a block against their servers, but the from address better be on one of our whitelists, or it will be "soft bounced" until we can find out from the recipient if it should be passed through.
This is all subject to change when/if they publish SPF records [slashdot.org] for their domain, but I certainly wouldn't use an rediffmail account for anything you want delivered...
Google's Usenet service (Score:3, Insightful)
However, Google Groups is far inferior to any decent newsreader when it comes to quickly browsing articles. GG still can't deal with a lot of character encodings outside of pure ASCII. Its beta Google Groups 2 service creates postings with screwed-up headers.