The Big 3 Mail providers.

Each of the Big 3 – Gmail, Yahoo! And Hotmail have gotten most of it right. The keyword being “most”. This week I am going to compare them. This is not a strict industry level comparison. Nor is this a review of the mail providers. And it is definitely not an advertisement or a promotion of any one of them. I use all three providers and this is what I think about them. Where they excel and where they are lacking in my opinion.

Gmail – I have been using Gmail since a very long time now. I had a beta invite when they were practically being sold. After an everlasting beta it finally came to a released status. Gmail used a fantastic strategy to become popular. Invite only entry. Each user would get 100 invites that could be sent to others. This made it something to be desired. Not easily available. It became a matter of social status to have a Gmail account. Soon practically everyone had a Gmail account, but the novelty still carried on and by the time it wore out, Gmail was a household name.
The Goods – Threaded conversation view that made it easy to read conversations, even with multiple parties in the conversation. The AJAX interface is amazing with practically no load times on good connections. It supports back and forward buttons on the browser which is quite a task considering the interface. Very early POP and IMAP support. Gmail can be used with great ease on any mail client because of this and therefore becomes a very popular choice amongst all mail client users, smartphone users and basically anyone that doesn’t want to use webmail. 20MB attachment sizing is great too.
The Bads – Until very recently Gmail had practically no anti-virus. Now they claim to have some, and I have seen alerts but it is still unclear to me which one it is. Gmail claims to be the in-thing with geeks, but not being able to attach executable files, is so grandma. Geeks use .exe, .ocx, .dll, .bat and all these extensions frequently, and blocking them from being sent or received is silly. One can’t even compress any of these and send them over. The glaring flaw is that you can change the extension and bypass this gimmick. I don’t really understand what Gmail has achieved other than making life miserable for people who don’t know how to change an extension. Most people consider Gmail mail analyzing feature to be amazing, however it bothers me to know that Gmail is reading all my mail, analyzing dates, addresses, packages I am receiving, appointments I am making and so on. I would prefer to be able to block Gmail from reading stuff I don’t want it to read.

Yahoo! – One of the oldest and most reliable email providers. Yahoo! was my first email account and I have experienced it better itself over the years.
The Goods – The new Yahoo! interface is fantastic. Using AJAX to create an Outlook like preview is very helpful. A tabbed interface for reducing clutter works very well. The new shortcuts are brilliant for all the keystroke efficiency maniacs.
The Bads – Trivial issues like no browser navigation support and no way can you open new messages in new browser windows short of manually opening a new window. This can be a little bit annoying at times when you are trying to compare multiple emails. My biggest gripe however is the lack of client support for US users. Yahoo! for whatever reason gives POP access to non-US users but denies it to the US. They have some funky implementation of IMAP that can be accessed via smartphone settings or Zimbra but not otherwise. This cripples mail client users limiting them to Zimbra, which frankly is a great client except for its extremely poor Hotmail support. Wake up Yahoo! Give US IMAP.

Hotmail – One of the oldest and most populous email providers out there, Hotmail has been criticized time and again for viruses, spam and other mail problems and yet it continues to be the top provider for email. Hotmail has come a long way and is very balanced in holding its own against the competition.
The Goods – Integration into the Live system makes it easy to access many different features in the Live world with the email login. The UI has been significantly improved with themes, clear text, pleasant color schemes and intuitive navigation. You can also link up multiple Live ids and switch between them with 2 clicks.
The Bads – Nothing spectacular in Microsoft’s offerings. In the end it’s the same old hotmail. Only POP access (still better than Yahoo!). A weird bug in the “mark” section of the email – when you open a new email, the mark menu on the top only lets you mark it as read instead of unread, which is pointless since you just read the email anyways, so it makes logical sense to mark it unread.

Based on my opinions above, it is really hard to say which mail provider really comes out on top because each of them have benefits and disadvantages. If Gmail dropped its restrictions on attachment filetypes, it would outshine the others by far with its POP and IMAP support. Likewise if Yahoo! enabled IMAP for everyone, it would win. Hotmail could work on some features like IMAP along with POP and probably mail previewing. However the competition is good for the end user, and I for one am expecting things to only get better.

P.S. This week has a poll. Please vote on your favorite mail provider.