Webware

If you're contemplating switching to another e-mail provider, but have been too lazy to do a feature comparison of the competition, there's a new tool that might be of assistance. Aptly named E-mail Service Guide takes more than 100 hosted e-mail providers, and lets you comparison shop by feature.

This is handled gracefully with a search tool that lets you plug in which options you want, like whether the service has POP3 and IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) support, or customer service by phone or e-mail so you can talk to an actual human if something goes wrong.

It can also tell you how much each service will cost, by breaking down its price according to how many months you're planning to use it. This includes things from the fine print like sign-up fees or required contracts, all of which can be simply sorted by column.

Since the tool is focused on premium services, missing are consumer-grade options like the vanilla version of Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail. Instead you have providers like Zimbra, GoDaddy, and Rackspace--many of which have service license agreements, multi-user seating, and more generous attachment size limits.

See also: Wikipedia's chart of Web mail providers

Microsoft has updated its Hotmail Web e-mail service with more Bing search integration. Hotmail's quick add menu, which was introduced to a limited number of users earlier this year, lets users do a quick Web searches for things like maps, movie times, restaurants, images, and videos. Previously this used Windows Live search, but starting today it's grabbing results from Bing.

Just as it worked before, search results stream in on the right inside of the window, and can be inserted inside of outgoing messages or replies. Maps and videos can be quickly resized, and in the case of videos--previewed before being inserted.

The one limiting factor that remains with the transition is that if you want more than the few results that show up in the quick add menu, you have to retrieve them outside of Hotmail and on Bing.com. And once you're on there, the buttons to simply add the content to an outgoing message do not come along for the ride.

You also are still unable to minimize the quick add menu when it's not in use. Many users have created special browser extensions and CSS hacks to get rid of it, since despite its utility, it still takes up 200 or so pixels on the right of the screen that you cannot get back.

Quick add is not available in all localizations. Microsoft says only users in Australia, Canada, China, India, the U.S., and the U.K. will see the updated tool in their in-boxes.

GeeMail (download for Windows|Mac) is a standalone Gmail client that runs on Adobe AIR. It looks and feels exactly like Google's Gmail, or at least how it did before the introduction of labs last year. It's big feature is that it lets you view and reply to Gmail messages while offline. Messages are then sent the next time the application detects you have a connection.

Unlike Google's official offline solution that uses Gears, GeeMail is quite a bit faster. It grabbed 1,500 of my most recent messages in just a couple of minutes. This speed, while nice, comes at the expense of downloading a much smaller portion of your inbox than Gmail does. For instance, the app won't pull down Gmail's labeling structure unless you're online. This means that if offline, attempting to sort messages by label after the initial download simply won't work--even if you've downloaded a portion of messages with that same label.

The app will eventually pull in the entirety of your inbox (except for attachments and photos), but it does this in chunks. When you've left it idle for a little while it starts downloading additional segments.

Search--one of Gmail's most important features--is missing in GeeMail. It's simply not there, which if you're like me and have an unruly inbox with a lot of e-mails, can make the tool relatively useless. I assume later versions will have something that at least lets you dig through the mail it's downloaded. In the meantime you're left sorting by label or trying to remember when you received a message.

Is there any benefit to using this instead of simply linking up your Gmail account to a piece of dedicated software like Outlook Express, Apple Mail, or Thunderbird? I'm not so sure. Those solutions work offline, and grab things like attachments, as well as having their own search and workflow tools.

One thing this app really has going for it though is the feel of the old Gmail, and a faster, leaner way to pull down mail for reading offline. And, if for some reason you can't use Chrome and take advantage of its special application view--which lets you run Gmail as if it was a separate program--this is one of the easier ways to give it that same feeling.

We were lucky enough to get a chance to play with one of AOL's works-in-progress, a version of the company's popular Web mail service done entirely in Microsoft's Silverlight. It was briefly shown off at Mix '08 last week, but is not due to get into your hands for another month or two--where it will be an opt-in alpha before going out to everyone else when Silverlight 2.0 leaves beta.

In its current form it doesn't look a whole lot different from the regular version of AOL's mail. The big difference is in the new skinning technology and speed improvements. I've been playing with a private build of it, but it's noticeably snappier than the service's current in-box. Users will likely notice this the most when opening messages and moving them around, although it might also help in the built-in calendaring tool, which at the moment hasn't gone functional yet.

The other big difference is the skinning. In AOL's presentation last week, they showed off a new skin themed off of Bungie's Halo video game series for the upcoming title Halo Wars. Changing the entire skin of your e-mail in-box only takes a few seconds, and it's set up to work just like changing colors in the current iteration of AOL Mail. Roy Ben-Yoseph, the vice president of Mail for AOL told me his team is working on a way to let anyone design their own themes, complete with custom branding and color swapping that will let people custom tailor the way their mail looks. Presumably, they'll be able to swap between them as quickly as you can in the current build, as well as share them with others in a public directory.

Eye candy or not, the Silverlight version of AOL Mail is bringing to the table something I've wanted out of Gmail for a while now. While simplicity is great for day-to-day use, personalization and customization makes these Web apps feel a bit more human, which is refreshing coming from AOL.

High on my list of New Year's resolutions for 2008, no joke: e-mail friends more often. Since time is a major constraint, I want my e-mail interface easy to get around, an enabler for quick composition. Write it up, send it out. These are the greatest drawbacks to GlideFree, Glide's beta Web mail release, which has over-enthusiastically swaddled some useful and even clever functionality in unnecessary layers.

For example, GlideFree simplifies the attachment process by bringing attachable multimedia options to you in a drop-down menu, rather than making you embark on the usual hunting and pecking expedition for the files scattered all over your directory. Bravo! Then it ruins the fun by forcing the recipient to open three separate browser tabs just to view an attached video.

And why, for instance, is there no field for simply typing in a destination address? Why must you click into the address book and add even one-time recipients, and then navigate an additional drop-down menu each time you select a repeat contact? In another head-scratcher, there's a short drop-down list of symbols in the beneficial built-in word processor--math symbols. Somehow it was determined that users would favor the 'not equal' sign and Greek 'beta' to accents, tildes, and trademark symbols.

... Read more

Gmail may be getting a long overdue user interface (UI) update soon. Gmail's interface has been essentially the same since it launched more than three years ago, so it should be interesting to see how the update looks.

According to Garett Rogers over at ZDNet, Google has been asking users to translate snippets from the new UI through their Google In Your Language program. The users were asked to translate the phrase, "Newer Version," for a service called Gmail UI.

There aren't any specifics on what exactly we will be seeing in the upgrade yet, but maybe we will be seeing the rumored offline functionality with Gears.

I guess this means that we can pretty much forget the possibility of Gmail ever dropping the beta tag.

According to the Hindustan Times, Google plans to release an offline version of Gmail. I think that it's safe to assume that it would run on Google Gears, much like Google Reader's offline feature does.

Obviously, the lack of offline e-mail reading is the one huge downside to using Web mail. If Google implements this correctly, it could be a pretty big deal, but we will see if the functionality of a browser-based offline solution can compare to an actual desktop client.

It should be noted that Windows Live also currently has its Live Mail Desktop client available right now (one of my favorites, by the way). Whether Google goes browser- or client-based with its offline functionality, this is what it has to compete with.

Via TechCrunch

Azooca is a new video mail service that launched earlier this month. It joins the ranks of other video mail services like Springdoo, EyeJot, and Gabmail to let users send and receive video messages. Azooca steps it up a notch by giving its users a full-fledged e-mail in-box, along with 250MB to store attachments and incoming video messages.

Recording videos is managed entirely within the e-mail composition window, and users get three simple controls to record, play, and stop the recording. Users can also preview their video messages before sending, or save them as a draft. Video clips are limited to just one minute, although Azooca creator Brian Zheng tells me they'll be increasing that limit, along with the in-box size, in about two months.

At first glance, I felt like giving Azooca a little bit of flack for its 250MB cap on the in-box, although just a few years ago major e-mail companies were only able to offer e-mail in-boxes in the double digits of megabyte storage capacity. Still, compared to today's big guys like Gmail's 3 gigabytes and Yahoo's unlimited capacity, it's just hard for me to imagine running out of storage with Web mail.

In testing, I found a rather irritating snag. Messages sent showed up in the spam folders in Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail. While this isn't really Azooca's fault, your messages could go unseen by potential recipients. I can't fully recommend Azooca for this reason, although I think it's a noble effort. I also wouldn't use it instead of a service like Gabmail, which doesn't try to take me away from my current Web mail provider.

Yahoo on Wednesday plans to open up the APIs to Yahoo Mail, inviting outside Web developers to build mash-up applications with its mail service.

One application that Yahoo will make available creates a link between Flickr and Yahoo Mail. The service looks at the subject line of an e-mail and searches Flickr for photos related to that word, such as "party."

The company envisions a whole list of applications that can be built using mail.

For example, people can find ways to access e-mail from different mobile clients or to combine social networking features and multimedia with mail, said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail.

The company is also offering financial incentives to developers who bring in paying mail customers.

Related: Yahoo gives Yahoo Mail users unlimited storage.