{"id":46,"date":"2006-06-30T09:24:26","date_gmt":"2006-06-30T15:24:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fefnet.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2006\/06\/30\/rethinking-web-email\/"},"modified":"2006-07-12T10:48:43","modified_gmt":"2006-07-12T16:48:43","slug":"rethinking-web-email","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/2006\/06\/rethinking-web-email\/","title":{"rendered":"Rethinking web email"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After months of waiting, I was finally given a Yahoo! Mail Beta account today for my primary email address. I&#8217;ve already had it for several months on my Junk email address (which I&#8217;ve had for about ten years), but now I&#8217;m ready to use it full-time. I&#8217;ve also got an account on Windows Live Mail (the successor to hotmail) and Gmail, both of which I also use regularly. The main reason I use Yahoo! Mail primarily isn&#8217;t necessarily because I like the features best, but probably more because I&#8217;ve used it for so long and that&#8217;s where most of my email is at. I&#8217;m sure many others have already written reviews like this, but this is partly a personal exercise as I evaluate switching to another web-based email service. Each of these services, in my opinion, is better than the previous offerings by the companies, so I&#8217;m glad that they&#8217;re all out there. Which one will I use more permanently? Stay tuned. I haven&#8217;t quite decided that one yet. Read on to see pros and cons of each service.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\n<strong>Yahoo! Mail Beta, Pros and Cons<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>What&#8217;s good?:<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I <em>love<\/em> the drag-and-drop feature. Organizing Folders this way is a cinch.<\/li>\n<li>I understand that this email service is ad-supported, and positioning the ad on the right is a good start. I really don&#8217;t like it on top, like on Windows Live Mail, where it takes up too much real estate. I primarily use widescreen monitors, so this is a plus.<\/li>\n<li>Folders and filtering. I subscribe to a few email lists that I don&#8217;t always want to read right away, so folders and filtering are an easy way to keep what I don&#8217;t want to read right now out of my inbox<\/li>\n<li>Integrated RSS Reader. See also at the bottom, but I like having this integrated with my webmail.<\/li>\n<li>Composing an email is easy when you don&#8217;t remember an address &#8211; you can just type the name and it will appear.<\/li>\n<li>Keyboard shortcuts. I use them.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>What&#8217;s bad?<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I don&#8217;t like how Yahoo! puts text ads on the bottom of my emails.<\/li>\n<li>The RSS Reader is a bit clunky. I wish I could ask it to update feeds, as my wordpress feed hasn&#8217;t been updated since last November. It looks really nice, but scrolls rather awkwardly.<\/li>\n<li>You can&#8217;t easily POP your email or get it out of Yahoo! without paying for extra features. I tried to do this once, and it was an amazingly difficult project, even with tools like Yahoo! Pops.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Gmail, Pros and Cons<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>What&#8217;s good?<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>No ads in outgoing email. This is big.<\/li>\n<li>It automatically updates itself, so if it open in a separate tab from the one I&#8217;m viewing (about 95% of the time) I can tell when I receive a new message.<\/li>\n<li>Good keyboard shortcuts.<\/li>\n<li>Threaded view (by conversation). I switched over to this view in Thunderbird for my work email, and I&#8217;m enjoying it so far. In fact, I wish it worked more like Gmail in Thunderbird.<\/li>\n<li>Quick replies. Using AJAX, you can reply as soon as you finish reading the email, which helps me remember to answer messages.<\/li>\n<li>Integrated Chat. I actually use this on occasion, and it&#8217;s not too bad. I just wish it worked in Safari (although it might by now).<\/li>\n<li>Integrated Calendar. I love the Google Calendar. I wish I had a web calendar that was this good a long time ago, and the fact that it&#8217;s integrated with my email means I&#8217;ll probably continue to use it in the future. My sister and I already entered a Calendar my mom put together of all our extended family&#8217;s birthdays and anniversaries, which is really, really cool to help us keep connected.<\/li>\n<li>Ads are text-based only. That&#8217;s good.<\/li>\n<li>You can use another email client with this without any add-on programs. That&#8217;s huge.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>What&#8217;s bad?<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Big brother is watching. I&#8217;m not sure how this works in practice, but when you sign up for Gmail, it gives them the right to look at anything you write. I&#8217;m not sure if that&#8217;s right.<\/li>\n<li>No drag-and-drop.<\/li>\n<li>No folders. I like labels okay, but it&#8217;s nice to have an uncluttered inbox. I could set up labels for everything, but I&#8217;d prefer this to be a bit more automated.<\/li>\n<li>Spam filtering strategies are a bit complex for me. I don&#8217;t want to set up all kinds of rules for spam myself. I get lots more email in my Yahoo! account, and lots lets spam gets through to my inbox.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Windows Live Mail, Pros and Cons<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>What&#8217;s good?<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It&#8217;s finally worth using this over the Classic Hotmail view in Firefox. Personally, I was a little surprised that Microsoft started supporting browsers other than IE, and I&#8217;m glad they do.<\/li>\n<li>The left-to-right panes work for me in general. Like I said, I have a widescreen monitor and this helps a bit. You can change the location of this, too, but this one&#8217;s the best.<\/li>\n<li>Drag-and-drop.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>What&#8217;s bad?<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The text ads at the bottom of sent email.<\/li>\n<li>I can&#8217;t read the full message subject in the left pane. My monitor is big enough that I&#8217;d like to resize this pane. When I put this pane (the email inbox) above the other one, it&#8217;s waaaay too small to be useful.<\/li>\n<li>The naming conventions. This might seem a bit picky, but I don&#8217;t understand why they changed &#8220;Search&#8221; to &#8220;Find&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>The inbox is still divided into pages. That&#8217;s helpful for people like me who have a lot of email in their inbox, but I want to see more than just 50 emails per page. I sometimes get that much mail in just a couple of days, and if I miss a day checking it, it takes a while to switch.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After months of waiting, I was finally given a Yahoo! Mail Beta account today for my primary email address. I&#8217;ve already had it for several months on my Junk email address (which I&#8217;ve had for about ten years), but now I&#8217;m ready to use it full-time. I&#8217;ve also got an account on Windows Live Mail (the successor to hotmail) and Gmail, both of which I also use regularly. The main reason I use Yahoo! Mail primarily isn&#8217;t necessarily because I like the features best, but probably more because I&#8217;ve used it for so long and that&#8217;s where most of my email is at. I&#8217;m sure many others have already written reviews like this, but this is partly a personal exercise as I evaluate switching to another web-based email service. Each of these services, in my opinion, is better than the previous offerings by the companies, so I&#8217;m glad that they&#8217;re all out there. Which one will I use more permanently? Stay tuned. I haven&#8217;t quite decided that one yet. Read on to see pros and cons of each service.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fefnet","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}