Last week, we introduced our little cage match feature by pitting iGoogle against Netvibes. This week, we’re setting up the battle of the free email.
Thanks to the new web, webmail has grown up from the slow, clunky interfaces of the 90s. It was what we used to quickly check email on the road or when our desktop client was acting up. We wouldn’t dream of ditching a stand-alone application for our email needs (some of us still won’t). Now, it’s entirely possible to not only have all our email communications be accessed through a browser, but we can be more productive working that way than if we were tied to a single client on a single machine.
Google’s Gmail broke the mold with its unconventional interface and then unheard of 2GB of mail storage. Microsoft and Yahoo! have tried to swing back against Google with their answers to web-based free email.
How do they stack up? Read some opinion and then weigh in with your own rounds in the comments.

Hey! You in the back…put down that tomato! Even though it’s from Microsoft it may not be entirely evil. Let’s give it a fair shake before we throw it out of the ring.
Hotmail has been around forever. It’s the web interface that’s “new.” Windows Live Hotmail offers 2 GB of storage space and has just launched its fancy-schmancy web client. Soon Microsoft will unveil a desktop client version that’s meant to replace Outlook Express as the stand-alone freebie. Like Yahoo!, Microsoft assumes that a desktop client is what people really want and has gone to great lengths to try and reproduce that look & feel. Which is okay if you like your email surrounded by colorful, animated ads. Lots of them. In fact, ads take up nearly as much space as email.
Microsoft doesn’t offer POP or IMAP access to email. Instead, they’ll soon have a plug-in that allows you to check Hotmail from Outlook. Not quite the same thing. Like Gmail, you can set an alternate “reply-to” email address. And like Gmail, you can’t hide the fact that you’re using a free email account to send the email, as the message will appear in the recipient’s box as “From: email@domain.com on behalf of myfreeaccount@hotmail.com.”
Out of the box, the spam filter isn’t terrible. It catches most obvious junk and holds it in a folder where it’s purged after 5 days. For mobile access, Microsoft offers the ability to get SMS text messages alerts for important messages and a Windows mail mobile client (Windows Mobile OS only, natch).
Had Microsoft/Hotmail seriously put on the webmail gloves a few years ago, maybe this would be a contender. Drag & drop and pages that update without refreshing aren’t features in and of themselves. They’re what we expect nowadays. If you’re someone who has years of history with a @hotmail.com address, then the new Windows Live Hotmail is going to be a nice change. The rest of us can move on to the next challenger.

Yahoo!’s mail beta has been around for a while now, offering 1-2 GB of storage space now offering unlimited email storage. Like Microsoft, Yahoo! suffers (and suffers and suffers) from ad overload. Especially on the “Home” page which has news in a tiny box surrounded by ads. Also like Microsoft, Yahoo! mimics a desktop client interface with panels and sortable columns.
Some of Yahoo!’s best features require a paid upgrade to Mail Plus. This gives you the full 2 GB of storage space, more flexible POP features and gets rid of the ads. Getting rid of the ads may be worth the $19.99 per year fee alone. Even in the free service, Yahoo! attempts to smoothly integrate its other services into its webmail client. Calendar and photos are easily accessed when appropriate. Yahoo! IM is built right in (new stand-alone web-based messenger was recently launched). There is an easy vacation auto-response setting (as is in Gmail) and RSS feeds built-in to the interface. Gmail and Hotmail send you off to separate pages in their network to read feeds.
What Yahoo! mail needs is better spam filtering in the free version. Of the three webmail clients, Yahoo!’s Spam Guard is near useless leaving almost as much junk in the inbox as it moves to the spam folder.
Yahoo! was early out of the gate with some nice features, but has since lagged behind. Those who embrace their @yahoo.com email address are probably paying for it. For the rest of us, the free web client is nearly crippled with poor spam filtering and ad overload.

Gmail made it cool to have free webmail. Perpetually in beta, Gmail was the first webmail application that asked, “what’s so great about a desktop client, anyway?” No 3-panel split view. Email is organized by conversation, not date or subject. Desktop email applications push you to organize your email into folders, otherwise finding that email from Sally that she sent on the 15th asking about a meeting on the 20th would be a bit of a chore. With Gmail’s killer search features, if it’s in there, you’ll find it easily with a few keystrokes.
Google doesn’t give you a lot of control over the spam filter. But then again, they don’t have to. It works well from the first punch. Most of us don’t even bother looking for false positives anymore. Gmail also doesn’t give you much control over how your inbox is presented. Do you want your email sorted by conversation, or sorted by conversation? The crowd will roar if Google ever lets you sort messages by date, sender or subject. Not likely to happen. Gmail’s conversation view is what sets it apart.
Since its initial launch, space was increased from 2 GB to nearly 3 GB and growing. You can check your Gmail account from nearly any POP email client, on or offline. You can check other email accounts from the Gmail interface. Unlike Yahoo! or Hotmail, you can access Gmail from a simple HTML interface inside any mobile browser (plus download a stand-alone mobile application). This doesn’t even touch all the other ways you can hack Gmail to work with other applications and services. If you want your email flexible, Gmail throw a punch so powerful Microsoft and Yahoo! are still struggling to come to their feet.
Google is trying to do a better job integrating their services, but here they take an uppercut. While you can add a calendar event right from Gmail if it detects that’s an appropriate action from the content of the email, it seems silly that one has no control over where and how that functionality pops up. There is no sign of Picasa when you receive an email with an image attachment, and only recently did Google add the ability to open document attachments in Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
Thankfully, no animated, annoying ads in Gmail. Yes, there are ads and plenty of them. But all the ads are text-based and easier to tune out. Email is the predominant visual in the Gmail interface, not advertising, as it should be.
The winner comes down to a decision. If you want flexibility, and you’re not in love with a standard desktop client interface, then it’s Gmail by a mile. On the other hand, Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo do have some smooth moves in their favor not to be dismissed. In the end, since web workers tend to value the functional and customizable over the pretty and rigid, this round goes to Gmail. Now it’s your turn…
{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2007\/05\/11\/web-worker-head-to-head-to-head-gmail-hotmail-and-yahoo-mail\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_ccda4e60662d7e51de5513b46421d084","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}