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.

Shiremail

[CrackedButter]

Shiremail won't be offering anything if Warner Brothers manage to claim proof of ownership to the word "shire". The Register had an article where they are now taking the owner of shiremail to court because if might confuse their customers who might think that it is related to LoTR.

It's not about the gig-o-space

[kinema]

It's not about the gig-o-space as much as it is about the superb interface. Don't get me wrong. I really like having all that space but the UI is really slick. I've heard a lot about the lack of folders but once you get used to the lables you wonder why nobody else had implemented it first. It's great being able more then one label to a message.

Gmail isn't perfect. If it were it wouldn't still be in beta. The filters and addressbook are a bit primitave. I would also really like to have the ability to filter based upon a Google search.

Thus far I give Gmail an A+ and don't see any sign of Google slowing down with it's development and improvment.

Re:Shiremail

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and how many English (and American?) counties will they have to sue then?

DIY Gmail

[nmg196]

The problem with GMail is that you have to use a web browser to read your e-mail. What I want is the ability to use a normal client like Thunderbird to read my mail, but have the search capabilities of GMail. I can't find a way to accomplish this even though I own and run my own Linux mail server.

Is there any way of indexing my Maildir mailstore, or perhaps replacing my IMAP server with something more powerful that could give me a Gmail type search? If not, why not?! :)

Is this costly ??

[ihdaras]

Providing 1GB space for each user is not at all costly ! The latest price quote for a 40GB HDD is approximately $80 if not less. So for each user ie for each GB the cost comes to $2/user which is nothing for gaints like Google, Rediff, Spymac etc etc...

Re:It's google..

[Creepy Crawler]

Whatever floats your boat...

I personally dont TRUST any free email account now, nor will I. Free email accts are great for internet correspondance, reistration of other crap services, and other nuisance go-no go for not having an email.

The key here is trust. I pay nothing, so anything past nothing is essentially untrustable. What is there for me to take away? What I conside rin the webmail world, anything I cant get in 1 session, I *consider* deleted or lost. Whether its there later (it usually is), I still dont trust it.

Will google start unifying its services?

[wrinkledshirt]

This is probably offtopic, but what the hell...

Google currently handles a good USENET service, a good news service, the internet's best web search service, a blogging service, and now an email service.

What's keeping them from taking a unifying approach to everything they have? I'd love to have a home page that I could customize the content (sort of like what my.yahoo has). Latest threads in subscribed-to newsgroups, headlines from news.google.com with my favorite filters, quick summaries of who's sent new emails, etc.

Keep in mind, I'm not saying that this sort of portal service should be mandatory and the only way to get at the individual services. I understand that google's simplicity is part of its elegance. But, at the same time, one of the things that spymac is doing right is that all of their services are available from a central location. If google is going to keep branching out into all these new areas, why not try to create a singular portal to get at all of them?

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

[garcia]

really like having all that space but the UI is really slick. I've heard a lot about the lack of folders but once you get used to the lables you wonder why nobody else had implemented it first. It's great being able more then one label to a message.

I have been using GMail since mid-June. I am completely unimpressed with the labels. Labels are nice and work exactly like folders except for one thing... They aren't nested.

Ok, so they aren't nested, what's the big deal? Most people only have like 5 folders anyway. Well, I use folders for breaking down emails into specific groupings. Can't exactly do that with labels without having two things to click on. Nevermind the fact that the size of the box that they put the label names in is too small and I can't read the entire length of the line... "Geocaching.com Watched Caches" and "Geocaching.com Owned Caches" just show up as "Geocaching.co..." Not very helpful. I reported the "feature/bug" and it hasn't been fixed. Sorry but this is a major annoyance. No one creates labels longer than 12 characters?

My biggest pet peeve is the heavy reliance on JavaScript (including the requirement that you have it enabled in order to use the service). Sorry but JavaScript should not be necessary and should be eliminated completely. But that's just a personal gripe.

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

[taeric]

I have to agree. My only complaint is that I would like to have a local backup copy of my email for the times when I'm not connected to the net. But as far as the ability to store in folders goes, labels really do get rid of the need for them. And the way it threads messages is awesome when it works.

Gmail

[Dalroth]

I've been using Gmail for a few months now. The interface is very good, very useable, and has quite a few features that the other services do not offer (such as hot keys).

The only problem with Gmail is that the address book sucks. It only stores basic information, it adds weird people to your address book without your permission (mailing lists), and worst of all it doesn't yet support distribution lists.

IF they fix the address book, the Gmail service will be awesome.

Bryan

GMail spam filter?

[RealBeanDip]

To be totally honest:

I haven't found gmail to be that good at filtering spam. I forward two accounts to it that have been around since, oh, 1998 or so and it catches maybe 30 percent of the spam, the rest ends up in my inbox. We're talking about 500 messages a day.

Using Hotmail with those same two accounts, I'd see about 5 percent of the spam, maybe less. Yahoo is a little worse, about 10 percent in the inbox.

So I hope gmail gets better. I do like a lot of things about it; the conversations, stars, etc... very nice and easy to use.

Webmail?

[SirPhreak]

Sure gmail is considered webmail, but its definitely one of the first webapps I've that seen. When i'm checking my gmail I don't feel like i'm using webpage, I feel like i'm using a very well crafted application.

Yahoo email

[claes]

Since about a month, my Yahoo mail Plus account offers me ad-free email with 2 GB of space. Integrated with an address book which I can export and import in a number of formats, and a calendar. They also have a feature where I can create disposable addresses as often as I want, for example when I am web shopping. I also pay for their Personal Address feature, so that they basically host email for a domain I own. I also get POP access, forwarding, (but I don't use it) and great spam filtering.

This costs some money of course, but I think it is worth it. I haven't tried gmail (no one has invited me), many people here think it has many unique features, but yahoo mail has features that gmail does not have. Until gmail offers personal address, there is no chance I will switch.

Re:Is this costly ??

[lachlan76]

$2/user * 100 000 000 (???) users == $200 000 000 not cheap

40 gig drives though aren't the best value really, and you have to remember the server farm that you have to put them when making the cost. So there is a lot of cost to do this.

Re:How to solve:

[RealBeanDip]

Good point.

I've been reporting it, but haven't noticed gmail getting any better at identifying it.

I consider spam to be a major problem with my personal email accounts right now. With hotmail offering 2 gig of space (like you would ever need that) and its excellent spam block, I may just opt to fork over the $20 per year for the spam filter alone.

Review is questionable

[rgoldste]

There are "Ads by Google" just under every page's review text. At the very least, there's a conflict of interest here.

Re:I would PAY to get IMAP access to Gmail

[arkanes]

Gmail is actually amazingly easy to scrape because you don't have to scrape it - it runs kinda like a web service, with javascript sending message packets back and forth to the gmail servers (thats why it's so fast - the JS gets a message packet and updates the on-page view, rather than reloading the entire page). Check out POP Goes the GMail and GMail loader (heck, just google for GMail) for a description. Note that using these is technicaly against the GMail TOS. I'd pay (a reasonable fee) for legitimate, documented access to the GMail api, though.

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

[Mouse42]

Sorry but JavaScript should not be necessary and should be eliminated completely.

All client side scripting should be avoided for any sort of mass consumption.

Individual computers just have all sorts of different settings and preferences, so it's just unreliable to put valueable information that could be blocked because of the inability to execute client side scripting.

I had this problem when I first got gmail. My computer just didn't jive with the javascript preventing me from logging in. It took me quite awhile to figure out how to solve the problem. And of course, Google listed how to solve the problem... but you had to log in to see how to solve it.

This has caused me to have a tentative feeling about Gmail. I now ponder how reliable it is, because what if I need to access my mail, and I can't because of this again?

The good thing, though, is that I can set the "reply to" to any address I want. I have all my mail forwarded to my gmail account, and then I set my reply to my prefered e-mail address. At least then I know I can access my e-mail in an alternate location, have all my e-mail be downloaded onto my computer, AND be able to use the gmail UI.

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

[gmuslera]

My biggest pet peeve is the heavy reliance on JavaScript (including the requirement that you have it enabled in order to use the service). Sorry but JavaScript should not be necessary and should be eliminated completely. But that's just a personal gripe

That is what makes that you can use it with certain browers and browser versions and not with any browser. If i want to access gmail with Opera, Konqueror, links, w3m or even lynx (accessing gmail from a text console would be nice), I can't or at the very least will have limited functionality.

BUT, between the things they are working on are an optional just-HTML web interface, as far i understand no specific browser required. Probably you will lose some of the niceties that adds javascript (updating the unread messages count in labels, or not needing a submit button to apply an action or changing a label) but it will be accessible from anything.

Unbearable pause

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but a large portion of the web seems to be plagued now by the connnecting to page2.googlesyndication.com evil. There must be a timer delay in there as well because it always takes around 10 seconds to finish. And tons of sites are using this google ad service of course...

Re:I would PAY to get IMAP access to Gmail

[lysander]

Actually, the web interface is so much better than any email client I've ever used (elm, mutt, Evolution, Thunderbird)...
The conversation feature is just wonderful.

I had my incoming mail split between gmail and my normal mail, which I read with mutt. I stuck to gmail for a week, but came to these conclusions:

1. I really want my editor when composing longer emails.
2. The fact that they have shortcut keys is great, but there need to be more of them. (no file to trash? no visit trash? I realize that one is supposed to Archive rather than Trash, but there's definitely a lot of one-shot email that has lost all purpose after reading it once.)
3. The limits on filters and how they are matched are annoying.
4. Mutt's sort by threads is as good as conversations. Mutt with thread-editing is possibly better.
5. Mutt's limit function and searching are good enough for the searching I do. The only way gmail is better is that, since there are no folders, you can search all "folders" at once. I'm pretty good about saving things to the right folder (since you can set the default save folder via a set of match operations), so this rarely comes up.

With longer gmail use, I would probably find more use for search. This all being said, if gmail offered imap I'd be extremely interested, in that I could both use the web interface when using a friend's machine, and switch over to mutt when I want to do more serious mail usage.

Re:rediffmail? Seriously?

[timothy]

I opened a rediffmail account a few weeks ago, partly because I wanted to have two brand-new 1-gb webmail accounts (gmail is the other), to see what spam arrives at which, how well they handle things when I really do have a significant amount of email in there, etc. I've certainly had no trouble sending messages between those accounts (or to / from there some other, existing email accounts). To me, it's not spectacular (I prefer gmail's actual interface), but it's clean and seems to work very well.

timothy