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Google Businesses The Internet Communications

How Does Gmail Stack Up In The Webmail World? 362

Posted by timothy from the pretty-darn-well-really dept.
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.
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How Does Gmail Stack Up In The Webmail World? More

How Does Gmail Stack Up In The Webmail World?

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  • It's google.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Creepy Crawler ( 680178 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:11AM (#9793954)
    So how far will you be down-modded for talking bad about it?

    Because of GMail, my yahoo account went FROM 6 MB storage to 100MB storage.

    • Re:It's google.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by selderrr ( 523988 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:25AM (#9793998) Journal
      all of these free GB mail accounts have 1 bad aura : you never know how long the conditions, the account, or even the complete system wil last. I have a DSL connection which came with 5 mailboxes 4 years ago still going strong. I used to have usa.net account that was canceled when their service stopped, a spam-blown free.net account, and a yahoo acount that all of a sudden stopped working.
      • I got my g-mail account and discovered my mail is stuck there. I cant move it to another account or dowload it to my home computer. Having 1GB of legacy e-mail that could go poof at anytime is not very attractive, so I stopped using it.

        • Re:And you cant download it (Score:5, Informative)

          by terrab0t ( 559047 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @10:25AM (#9794224)
          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].
        • 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.
    • hell

      they could insert ads in the msg's and if they are useful that would be great

      just let me access it by imap as well as web...

      regards

      john jones
      • Actually, the web interface is so much better than any email client I've ever used (elm, mutt, Evolution, Thunderbird) that I would never want to use a real email client again. My web browser is always open, and now mail is a click away.

        Gmail has really changed how I use email. The conversation feature is just wonderful. So is the search. I really love it :)
        • Well, it's not cool for us lowly souls who are stuck with dialup. It'd be great if google offered POP or at least some way of offline reading. From what I hear, they might offer POP, though it might cost some (Features in progress [google.com]).

        • Re:I would PAY to get IMAP access to Gmail (Score:5, Interesting)

          by lysander ( 31017 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @12:22PM (#9794786)
          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.
      • 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.
      • I totally agree -- I wouldn't use the IMAP client much, but it freaks me out not to have a backup of my email... (and gmail looks like it'd be hard to scrape).
        • 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,
      • Not IMAP, but you can get POP access to Gmail through PgtGM [jaybe.org]. Not sure how much Google likes it though ;^)

    • Re:It's google.. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mog007 ( 677810 )
      I think G-Mail is a great step for webmail. I stopped using webmail back in the late 90's because Yahoo was terrible, and I didn't even bother with Hotmail.

      Ignore that email address up there... it's not skewing my opinion or anything. Honest.

  • Shiremail (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CrackedButter ( 646746 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:12AM (#9793957) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Re:Shiremail (Score:4, Informative)

      by SpooForBrains ( 771537 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:19AM (#9793981)
      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]
    • See here:

      http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=shire

      Besides that, there are about 1000 'shires' in the UK. I think there may even be a few here in the US.

      In order to protect a trademark, you have to defend it from ALL encroachment, not just SOME. And if WB wants to go to the UK and start suing, well, I don't think it'll be pretty.
    • Since when does Warner Brothers own the Lord of the Rings? They may own the movies, but the original material of the books doesn't belong to them, does it? (Of course this is besides the fact that "shire" is in the dictionary)

  • Spymac is nice, but unstable (Score:5, Informative)

    by arkanes ( 521690 ) <arkanes@NoSPam.gmail.com> on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:17AM (#9793970) Homepage
    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).

    • 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

  • Directbox? (Score:5, Informative)

    by rackrent ( 160690 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:17AM (#9793972)
    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]

  • It's not about the gig-o-space (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kinema ( 630983 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:18AM (#9793976)
    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.
    • 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 folde

      • Re:It's not about the gig-o-space (Score:5, Insightful)

        by smallfries ( 601545 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:49AM (#9794092) Homepage
        I think that you've missed the point with the labels, they're not supposed to nest hierarchically because they can overlap. Think query rather than sorting. So in your example you'd use 3 labels; 'Geocaches', 'Watched', and 'Owned'. Then tag your messages with either 'Geocaches' and 'Watched' or 'Geocaches' and 'Owned'. Then search for messages with both labels.
        • There's no sorting option and I don't want to search for all items as a query when I am trying to break mail down with filters.

          There should be two seperate options.
          • Sorry dude, I think I was hitting the crackpipe when I posted earlier. I've just logged in and tried it and you can't do what I said. I'd assumed that a search for the labels would work but it doesn't seem to. And I got modded to +5 insightful, must have been those long words that I spoke crap with ;^) Yeah, the 12-letter thing is a bit of a bummer isn't it?

      • 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

      • 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 l

    • 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.
    • 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:It's not about the gig-o-space (Score:4, Insightful)

      by derF024 ( 36585 ) * on Sunday July 25, 2004 @11:40AM (#9794531) Homepage Journal
      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.

      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.
      • Evolution has had such a feature (called VFolders) for years.

        And GNUS (emacs mail/news client) has had such a feature for several times as many years as Evolution has existed. But who's counting? :)

        I agree that a tree view of "conversations" would be nice. My biggest complaint so far, though, is the extremely limited filters. You only get to have 30, (nowhere near enough for all my lists), and you can apparently only filter on to/from/subject. Still, I try to keep in mind that it's only beta, and it'
    • 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.

      "Labels" are a cute idea, but they're not a substitute for folders. And labels are useless for mailing list subscriptions.

      1) You can't search for the List-ID: header, instead you have to depend on a string in the subject line or that all e-mail comes from a specific address (some e-mail lists set the reply-to as the o

  • grammar (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    fewer features...

  • I've not noticed much spam to begin with... (Score:5, Funny)

    by morganjharvey ( 638479 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:21AM (#9793989)
    The article also mentions how well Gmail is able to filter spam messages.

    <tongue-in-cheek>

    I don't know. I haven't noticed any spam -- not even a single piece, to be exact -- going to my gmail account.
    I'm making it my new experiment. I figure if I don't give my address to anybody, including school, online stuff, etc., but only give it to friends and people I know from face-to-face world, I shouldn't be getting any spam. This is only theory, of course, becuase eventually, somehow, the spammers always get my email addresses. So my experiment is to see just how long it takes them, and then I can question my friends -- and my enemies -- and see who gave my email on something that wound me up on a mailing list.

    If you want to contact me and discuss my theory, you can reach me at m0gart3304haha@gmail.com.


    </tongue-in-cheek>
    • Don't count on it. As soon as one of your friends get infected by a virus, your address is out there. Or if you have friends that like to enter your address in boxes on web pages to invite you to "cool" competitions.
    • Go here [prattboy.net]...

      This guy has an account set up specifically test Gmail's spam detecting capabilities. Right now, Gmail isn't going so well - it's only identifying 41% of all spam. No doubt it'll get better though.

  • DIY Gmail (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nmg196 ( 184961 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:24AM (#9793995)
    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?! :)

    • Re:DIY Gmail (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Apreche ( 239272 )
      I agree that however much better the gmail interface is than the other webmail interfaces, its still webmail. I still want IMAP and Thunderbird. If you want a Gmail type search on your own e-mail you will have to write that software yourself. But, the Thunderbird guys could possibly be working on something like that for future versions. I don't see a use for it myself since I don't have more e-mail in my Inbox than I can see at one time. So searching through it is kind of useless.

      What I would like, howeve

  • Indian gigmail (Score:3, Funny)

    by s20451 ( 410424 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:27AM (#9794006) Journal
    In India, you don't need hard drives to run a gigabyte mail service. You just get a billion peasants and pay them 50 cents a month to remember a single character.

  • Will google start unifying its services? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wrinkledshirt ( 228541 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:29AM (#9794014) Homepage
    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?
    • 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.
      • Yes, but when they start carrying alt.binaries.*, then it may actually have something for people to be interested in.

        Actually, I love usenet. But I mainly see it as being replaced by message groups because of useability problems. Mainly: In order to use usenet, that's one more program I have to use.

        Same thing for IRC. IRC was my first love. Hot donkee on turtle porn in one window, Linux bootloader help in another, and downloads of the latest warez in another. But, after dalnet died, I just lost all i
    • "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."

      Well... you could always use the google API and create your own custom homepage that does all that (hypothetically)

      But yeah, a CLEAN portal that kept pulse of things I'm interested in wo
    • I agree that the archive search feature is terrific.

      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.

  • Gmail (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dalroth ( 85450 ) * on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:33AM (#9794036) Homepage Journal
    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
    • I've been wanting to try Gmail out, got any invites?
    • As someone qualified to actually talk on this subject (I have a runbox.com account I pay for), Runbox is a pretty good service and I have trouble understanding the big fuss over Gmail. Perhaps it's because I do have a good quality, reliable e-mail service with a clean web interface already that I don't quite get it. The only thing about Runbox that annoys me (and that I've been requesting over and over) is the lack of 'user subdomains'. Allow me to have anything@myusername.runbox.com so I can more effect

  • GMail spam filter? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RealBeanDip ( 26604 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:34AM (#9794041)
    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.

    • How to solve: (Score:5, Informative)

      by poohsuntzu ( 753886 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:39AM (#9794063) Homepage
      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:How to solve: (Score:5, Interesting)

        by RealBeanDip ( 26604 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:43AM (#9794076)
        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.

      • Re:How to solve: (Score:4, Informative)

        by azaris ( 699901 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @10:19AM (#9794201) Journal

        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).

    • You can create filters for spam, to delete another batch. However, given how the system works, as long as you are 'report as spam' rather than 'move to trash', your spam filters will just improve... I get less than 1 spam a day, i use to get 10-20 spam/day.

  • G's spam filter is irrelevant, (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nusratt ( 751548 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:34AM (#9794044) Journal
    (mostly) -- for my usage, that is.

    -- 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.

  • Webmail? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SirPhreak ( 122663 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:35AM (#9794052)
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by claes ( 25551 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:36AM (#9794053)
    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.
    • About three days ago, Yahoo! just deleted all of my mail older than 6/22 (years worth of mail), which coincides with about when I noticed the 2 GB changeover (yes I have Yahoo! Mail Plus). I have gotten no word from them about how or why this happened, and no idea if it will come back.

      Has anybody else had this happen to them? If not, BACK UP your email before they decide to burn you too.

  • dumb question but.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by zogger ( 617870 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @09:42AM (#9794074) Homepage Journal
    ...not being shy I'll ask it anyway. Isn't it possible, given that you can buy cheap generic hosting now, to just run your own web based email, instead of using a third party service where you don't have as much control over it? All I can see as an advantage with gmail and whatnot is that it is free, but after that, it is still a hassle and you get ads, etc. I would think that getting your own independent email service might be better in the long run, it adds an element of security-no evile stuff gets downloaded to your machine, and you have control over what gets saved and doesn't and who looks at it,and the obvious portability and access from anyplace that is the same with other web based emails, etc. Well, somewhat anyway.

    Anyone have an experience in this, any recommendations?
    • I use Linux Web Host [linuxwebhost.com]. I've been with them for 4 or 5 years now. Web mail, distribution lists, spam protection, multiple users, etc. The prices are really cheap too. (plus all the usual Web Host pluses - SQL access, Frontpage extentions (if that's your thing), passwording directories, hosting PGP keys, SSH access, etc. the list goes on and on)

      No, I don't work for them, I'm just a user and have been very happy with the service for quite a few years.
  • There are "Ads by Google" just under every page's review text. At the very least, there's a conflict of interest here.

  • Qwality Maths in this review.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dj ( 224 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @10:23AM (#9794218) Homepage
    "For £3.50/month or $6.50 US you get 1 GB of email space, virus scanning, and spam filtering. Calculating this amount into a yearly term, that's about $195 US per year; which is about 10 times what you would pay for a SpyMac Mail Pro account and six times as much as RunBox."

    Duuuh $6.50x12=$78.

    Or are they beta testing some calculators too there?

  • All gmail needs... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dilvie ( 713915 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @10:42AM (#9794301) Homepage Journal

    ...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.

  • 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/ima p /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

  • er.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by 88NoSoup4U88 ( 721233 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @11:43AM (#9794544)
    "The review mentions how one service, ShireMail, offers far less features than SpyMac yet cost 10 times as much."

    So they are... er... ten times free ?

  • Fastmail (Score:2, Informative)

    by *Pres* ( 114530 )
    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. Bu

    • I have a Gmail account, but I too have ben using Fastmail for a while, and I am very pleased with it. In a lot of cases it's better than Gmail, since it's, well, faster, and it works fine with really old browsers. Plus, you've got IMAP access... So, yeah. Fastmail rocks.

  • rediffmail? Seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by WoodstockJeff ( 568111 ) on Sunday July 25, 2004 @12:43PM (#9794919) Homepage
    not mentioned in this review ... the Indian rediffmail.

    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...

  • I have used a Gmail account for about a month and find its navigation not very convenient.
    I like having a delete button rather than searching for that drop down menu with "move to trash" towards the middle.
    1GB of storage ok, but if I cant make folders whats the point? I dont want to use Starred. I rather have my own choice of folders than Gmail deciding which folders I should have.
  • How Does Gmail Stack Up In The Webmail World?

    In the webmail world?? Gmail kicks the ass of every local e-mail client I have ever used. Its searching, while not instant like Google web search, is hundreds of times faster than Thunderbird's. The way Gmail combines e-mails from a thread into a single page is awesome. It even has better e-mail address autocomplete than Thunderbird.
  • I wasn't impressed with GMail's spam filtering. I've tried sending emails to myself from Hotmail and it looks like everything coming from hotmail is identified as spam. Heck, even I can write a spam filter that filters out everything from Hotmail. :)

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