Back to GMail…
April 20, 2007
After using Yahoo Mail Beta for over a year, and Windows Live Mail for a little bit before that, I’ve decided to switch back to GMail.
I had some trouble with GMail almost two years ago and I decided to try out Windows Live Mail Beta (new at that time). I then had some trouble with Windows Live Mail and got an invite to Yahoo Mail Beta, so I switched over to that.
Lately, I’ve been having trouble with Yahoo Mail Beta so I looked around again to find the best webmail solution and it does certainly seem that GMail is the front runner. Here’s how GMail won me over:
- Conversation view. Always use it in Outlook, been trying to manage without it in Yahoo! Mail for a while. Suprisingly, I can’t seem to find it on any other webmail offering (am I missing a setting somewhere?)
- POP Access and Forwarding. Note to Yahoo: I’m not going to pay you $20/year for a feature that other services offer for free.
- Ability to manage all my e-mail addresses in one place. You can set it up so that all e-mail goes to one GMail account and you can even set it so that replies look like they’re coming from whatever e-mail address you want.
- Performance. Yahoo Mail Beta is unbearably slow on my computer now. The new AIM Mail Beta doesn’t feel much better (sorry Rose!)
- Desktop notifier. No need to keep a browser window open anymore! Especially when Firefox seems to take up 200MB of memory with Yahoo Mail Beta loaded…
While some of the webmail solutions have some of these features I’ve just listed, only GMail seems to have them all.
April 20, 2007 at 11:23 am
Out of curiosity, what kinds of problems were you having with Yahoo! Mail Beta?
Ryan Kennedy
Yahoo! Mail
April 20, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Hey Ryan, mostly just performance and e-mails showing up slow. It seemed that every once in a while, a new e-mail would pop in that was 3 days old (not sure if it’s because the sender’s server was delayed or if there was maybe a communication problem between servers?).
Performance has been getting really bad though. Clicking on things exceed the 50ms “instant” feel, so it seems like I’m always waiting for the inbox tab to load or my e-mail to load
Also, when I’m using Firefox with Yahoo Mail Beta (no other tabs open), I see Firefox hang for a few seconds to up to a minute (pegging one core on my CPU at 99%) and the memory usage of Firefox jumps up to 200MB+. That might be a Firefox bug.
Maybe I’ll run into the same problems on Gmail and switch back to Y! Mail in short order. We’ll see
April 21, 2007 at 1:32 am
I’ve been widely using gmail since mid 94 I guess and never had any issues with it, I’m pretty satisfied. I even made my domain addresses redirect there and added the account so that I just manage all my email from one place, and that is savvy.
Now with gmail, they even have google apps which is interesting for people looking for gmail features while using their domain name and you have features in order to customize the UI for your users/friends/family.
The only issue that I have with gmail is that automatically feature of adding addresses of people you email to your contacts. That just screws my Contacts (and guess what, I noticed that the first time when I synched my contacts with plaxo :p ).
April 21, 2007 at 8:37 am
Hey Fays, I assume you mean mid ‘04
Yup, I hear you about GMail’s auto-adding of contacts to your GMail address book. I think you can turn that feature off in the settings now.
April 21, 2007 at 10:42 am
Yeah right, mid 04
Well, till now you cannot remove this thing. I suppose it’s done in purpose in order to enable the auto-suggestion feature. Although it should really be optional.
May 4, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Hey Mark,
Have you tried gmail mobile? It’s pretty sweet. The experience is very close to using gmail on your pc. Gmail mobile and Opera mini are the only two apps that make my data service plan worth the $$.
May 4, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Hey Phil, Heck yes! GMail mobile is awesome. I prefer the WAP access over the download java client though.