Comments on: What Gmail does better than its competitors

Does Gmail perform better than its competitors on a number of levels? Don Reisinger thinks so.

[ImRob]

Not to mention the single search box for mail and web, that defaults to searching mail when you click enter. I'm sick and tired of trying to search my mail on Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, and getting a list of web results instead.

Gmail is definitely the best around, by a mile.

[SebDavies]

ermm hotmail has a mail search and a web search seperate on the same page

[stockyjoe]

Yahoo has all of those abilities nothing new.

[loose_screw]

I *hate* how Yahoo and hotmail insert ads into each of their users' outgoing messages (via the signature line). I simply love Gmail!

[vampyr99]

You forgot the free use of IMAP and POP, something that's very useful for backing up your emails, accessing from a smartphone, etc.

[myles taylor]

Hear, hear! Gmail is the only webmail service that I know of (and the only one out of the big names for sure) that offers free pop forwarding. Of course, that may have something to do with the fact that it's still in beta, but it's been sitting in beta for going on 4 years now? Anyway, that's something I really like about it.

[sroussey]

The spam filter gets 30,000+ spam emails a month for me! And you can forward email to another account -- spam free. :)

[experiencemusic]

You forgot labels - which is a top 5 best feature in my book. I really dislike the folders system in Hotmail and Outlook.

[Photobug_fred]

I agree with labels. Of all the features, this is one I wish every product implemented. I only wish I could assign multiple labels to my work emails! It is rare that an email only falls under one heading or folder as in the case of Outlook. It makes so much more sense to "label" emails with all the categories that I want to associate it with.

[scaught78]

I agree 110%! The labels are what make it for me. I can have the same e-mail labeled with different labels. Which makes it incredibley easy to organize my ****.

[fearlessfrog]

If you like labels then try using http://www.taglocity.com with Outlook - makes things a lot easier for me.

[ChrisRomp]

Definitely! Labels and their "folders" are the major feature I miss in Hotmail. Thankfully Outlook 2007 implements categories + search folders to emulate the same functionality. Hey Hotmail team... take notes. :)

@fearlessfrog I wouldn't use Taglocity just for labels in Outlook (use categories), but it looks interesting nonetheless.

[mdljunk]

the best feature: speed speed speed!

gmail is just faster than the other guys. it loads faster, it loads messages surprisingly quickly, and it's faster and easier to work with messages (searching, switching labels, applying labels, archiving, marking as read/unread, etc ), and the keyboard shortcuts are awesome (not sure why they're not on by default...).

[angry jubu]

Actually, although I prefer Gmail, I find the new Hotmail to be significantly faster. I have to wait at least twice as long to send an email or to switch screens in Gmail.

[xhable]

I also find gmail to load a lot faster on a poor connection, although hotmail has gotton better of late.

[JuanGuapo]

I don't have anything against Google/Gmail, but I still don't like that they scan/read your e-mail. I'm not a tin foil hat type but just don't like this practice.

[thescale]

Lame. They can scan/read your mail, should they chose too - yahoo, hotmail, you name it. Get over it.

[PerryIsmangil]

The minute you press send, a machine scans your email to see where it's going. Any spam filter will. So does virus. Use the Post Office (even that is no guarantee...).

[Craig Blackburn]

One thing that's cool is... If you use the word attachment (or any variation of it) in your Subject or Body,;and you don't attach a file, It reminds you.

[DetectiveBooby]

Gmail is the best I have ever used, and Igoogle simply is the best user created interface for a homepage that I have ever tried.

I like the joined strands because it keeps your inbox from getting bloated too quickly. And to be honest, I never get spam with gmail in my inbox, its pretty flipping amazing. The spam in the spam folder is...inappropriately scary most of the time.

Gmail FTW!

[zarrik]

A few downsides of Gmail... Google scans your email to determine "relevant" advertising. That's a huge security concern. And second, the conversation view interface is hands down the worst possible way to read email. It's not smart enough to differentiate messages from the same sender with similar subjects, there's no way to break a message out of the conversation, and deleting requires use of a drop-down menu. Pain in the ass.

[thescale]

"It's not smart enough to differentiate messages from the same sender with similar subjects, there's no way to break a message out of the conversation, and deleting requires use of a drop-down menu."

Lame.
It definitely differentiates between similar subjects. Deleting does not REQUIRE the use of a drop down menu at all. Check the message, and hit X on your keyboard. Easy and quick. Not sure what you're on about, mate.

[rcrusoe]

If you are worried about security, you shouldn't use email. Google scans your email to determine "relevant" advertising. So what? Every three letter government agency scans your email, (as well as all your other electronic communications). As Scott McNealy said "Privacy is dead, get over it".

[Michael Del Camp]

I have used many e-mail software programs. Years ago, I had a Hotmail account from Microsoft that spammed me immediately and voluminously. I always wondered how much money Microsoft made by selling my e-mail account address to others instantly. Then I had America Online, AOL for short. There was a lot of spam coming my way in that in-box, believe me. The X-rated stuff was unbelievable.

After closing those two accounts, I went with Yahoo and later, Earthlink. I have them both still, and use them frequently, really daily, even now. Yahoo allows me to mark SPAM and yet the stuff just keeps on coming. Lots of it goes into my SPAM in-box, but those Spammers are resourceful and resilient in their mission to bug me by sending me unwanted junk. Normally, the SPAM notation works to stop the junk. Earthlink works well with my MS Outlook Express Desktop E-Mail Application. I like that. I get junk, and laboriously weed it out. I have learned not to search my entire INBOX for junk from the same source now, because I have a lot of stuff sitting in my INBOX and purging the junk takes a long, long time. I just delete them one at a time, and stop the sender from sending me anything else. Again, those SPAMMERS out there are both persistent and clever. Earthlink, in my opinion, makes some coin from selling my e-mail address to others, without my knowledge, much like AOL and Microsoft did in years past. However, I like using Earthlink, mostly out of habit. I do not want to switch to Verizon or Sprint or God Forbid, a cable company such as the Roberts Brothers' run Comcast Cable Corporation. So, Earthlink it is, for my DSL High Speed Internet service provision.

As for G-Mail from GooGle, I just opened an account, and I like it. I am actively looking for a new job, and the spammers have yet to stuff my in-box on Google's G-Mail. It really is galling, when you are trying to communicate with the outside world, on such an important matter as your next work opportunity, and Spammers are taking advantage of your resume postings to e-mail you unwanted junk. I have noticed that Monster.com spams me in a proverbial sense at least, with an advertising page on each occasion that I apply for a job on their Monster.com jobs website. It is truly irritating, but like other Spammers, Monster.com does not seem to know any better, than to waste my time, attention and resources with unwanted delivery of unwanted messages. Thank you Google, for G-Mail.

[rockridge2house]

So you b*tch about getting email spam but having SURPRISE HER WITH A BIGGER *****!!! as a sidebar is perfectly acceptable. SHAME ON YOU cnet!

[urr_quasdim]

It's hard to ignore spam sitting right in the middle of your emails, forcing you to carefully sift through the entire Inbox in order to filter out the spam from the "real" emails. Not only is this time-consuming but also prone to mistakes: you can remove an important email by mistake, while trying to take care of spam, which is often 95% of the Inbox contents - except with GMail; I hardly ever get any spam when using it!
Now, unlike your list of emails, it is very easy to ignore the sidebar; I seldom look at it at all. In fact, the only time I did take advantage of the sidebar was when I noticed an ad about "Pen*** ENSMALLMENT"!

[jtjj1234]

@JuanGuapo: What the hell is wrong with people here. Doesn't anyone understand that even though it looks through your emails for keywords, none of that data is necessarily 'read' by anyone at Gmail, in terms of the content of the email anyways.

Gotta say, love Gmail- tried basically everything else, never worked.

[HlLLARY CLITON]

Yahoo email is getting worse all the time. more annoying ads, slow email delivery, have to pay for POP, etc. Someone there needs to get a clue

[ravenking99]

Well, I found this article and reader comments helpful. Having reliable email service is important otherwise you waste time if you try to sell something like raw land, and clues that you didn't get your mail when family members ask how come they didn't hear from you. Arrrrg!!
Hey everybody, have a Merry Christmas.

[dracoaffectus]

I must agree with the author here, I love Gmail!

I've been using it for years, I think I remember that I had to be invited by an existing user to use the service.

I'd like to add to the list of great things about Gmail.

One major benefit, due to the fact that I opened my first Gmail account several years ago, my e-mail address wasn't exactly "professional" sounding. More recently, when I decided to make a new e-mail account with a more professional address, I discovered that two Gmail accounts can be linked completely. Linking the e-mail accounts makes it so that e-mails sent to either e-mail address go to the same inbox, and better yet, I can change the "sent" field when composing e-mails to either of the two addresses (and I can choose which address is the default). This small feature saved me the hassle of managing two separate e-mail accounts, and the hassle of notifying all my contacts about my new e-mail address.

Also, there are many useful "Labs" features available in Gmail that add to the user experience. A few I'd like to point out.... "Mark as Read button", "Google Calendar gadget", "Google Docs gadget", "Mail Goggles", "Forgotten Attachment Detector", "Tasks list", "Custom Shortcuts" and more

And one last thing that puts Gmail miles ahead of it's competitor's.... Gmail chat. No other e-mail service includes a complete chat service within it's e-mail service. So instead of sending e-mails back and forth, if that person is checking their e-mail we can just instant message right in the Gmail window. Also, you can login to your AIM account through Gmail chat, and chat with your AIM friends in the same window as your e-mails (or pop-out the chat boxes if you prefer)

That's all the praises I'll sing about Gmail for now. :)

[woodygg]

"No other e-mail service includes a complete chat service within it's e-mail service. "

yahoo does this as well...

[moonrise]

I've been using Gmail for almost 3 years now. I love it. Particularly the organization by conversation set up. It's been invaluable to me in the work I do for a charity group in which almost all of our business is conducted via email. I keep all of the information shared with me via Google Docs too and it's a boon to my busy life.

I merged my home mail with my gmail account this year and that has been a wonderment. The ability to work and keep up with family and friends in real time thru gmail has made me a very happy lady.

Plus I too work with Google Calendar, read my news feeds with Reader, surf the web with IGoogle and chat with my daughters via Google Chat. I never leave the same app to venture out into all of my online world.

Excellent mail service and I think you're right, if folks would but use it, they'd switch permanently.

[woodygg]

"Plus I too work with Google Calendar, read my news feeds with Reader, surf the web with IGoogle and chat with my daughters via Google Chat. I never leave the same app to venture out into all of my online world. "

essentially all the same things i can do with yahoo mail as well...

[DBdweeb]

Yahoo just doesn't get it and they're going out of business because of it... All those annoying blinky ads. Yahoo search can actually give ok results but I abandoned them because of the ads... Ditto for freemail... Ditto for groups... Ditto for news. What good are ads if they repel the user base? Non-annoying text ads should be sufficient. I'll tolerate that but Yahoo is history for me. I haven't logged on to them for over a year now.

[davezatz]

You should check out Yahoo Plus. $20/year gets you NO ads in the interface and no ad signatures. Also the spam protection is better and the mailbox is larger. Still no desktop IMAP... which is Google's big selling point to me.

[PerryIsmangil]

GMail never put ads in your email. Ever.

[davezatz]

No, they just scan the contents of all YOUR email to place contextual ads. Gmail and Yahoo both have their pros and cons. I'd like to take the best of both and merge them. Alas, I'm forced to choose and since I've been on Y! ten years, it's easier to stay put.

[woodygg]

yes... easier to stay put and does a great job. not enough difference between the two to justify switching a long time yahoo address, especially when yahoo works well. i rarely get spam (and i get a lot in my spam folder). another reason is that both are continually evolving, so i don't feel the need to jump back and forth as one comes out with a new feature that the other one will copy soon anyway (yes... i realize yahoo has been too slow to change )

[ArtInvent]

I have one big minus for Gmail. You can't control how often an email address gets checked. A standalone email client, you just hit 'check mail' and it fetches ALL your mail NOW. Or you have it set to check every 10 minutes or whatever you want. Gmail is very different. There's no 'check mail' button and it's not obvious at all how it figures out when to check a mailbox. Turns out, it uses how much mail a given address gets to figure out how often to check it. For addresses that don't get much mail, it may get checked only once an hour or so. So when you're on the phone with someone and he says, 'Hey, I just shot you a link, check it out' - you can't just hit the check mail button and look at the email. I realize, you can dig into the Settings | Accounts menu and force a mail check - but it's cumbersome and it will take a few minutes. Not good.

Next is the big drawback, with all of Google's apps hooked into an account, that you can only log into one Gmail account at a time. If there are two of you on a computer, you will constantly have to log out one user and log in the other. The only way I can see around this is to use one browser like Firefox for one user, and a completely different browser like IE for the other user(s). It would be nice if Google could work with Firefox so that a single browser could be 'instanced' with each window acting as a completely different browser, different cookies, logins, etc.

Other than that, yeah, Gmail rocks.

[PerryIsmangil]

For the first part: why do you need another mailbox? I used to have an IMAP mailbox from a dedicated provider so I can access it from any client. Once GMail provided IMAP, I don't need to do that anymore.

For the second part: Have you tried Google Chrome? Each tab is like a separate browser.

[jtaylorhoopla]

Try hitting inbox again. It refreshes it and looks for new messages on the server. Ta-da! and you can also Have gmail pull other accounts in through the settings. look through there. I have been using gmail for about 2-3 years and have loved it.

[BenFlavoredCandy]

I understand your problem with checking frequency, but it is not an issue with Gmail. As an example, most colleagues of mine receive their academic email account messages in Gmail. If it were checking non-stop, the servers would be overloaded. One way to fix it would be to have your non-Gmail accounts forwarded instead of having Gmail check ever hour.

[seanb724]

My gmail has a "refresh" button that gets new email... I have google notifier which sees new mail faster than the browser sometimes, and refresh always picks them up. And if google notifier has not notified me, refresh still picks up new mail.

For your 2nd comment, you can be signed on to more than one account if you are using google apps for your domain, which is what I do.

Somewhat related to that is that my google reader id is the same as one of my gafyd i'd, but they are considered separate accounts by google. I wish gafyd included reader. :-/

[Sikander]

Dude, just click on "Inbox" and it will refresh your mail, works just like a "check mail" button!

[woodygg]

"For the first part: why do you need another mailbox? "

i love this... people questioning why you need to do something... as if it was their business.

why would i use chrome? theres zero reason to. (unless you're a developer...)

[isaund]

why would you use chrome.....cause it is superior to both internet explorer and firefox.......firefox has become too big of file, and gets laggy.....and well internet explorer is quite slow. Chrome is by far the fastest of the three and i love that each tab is a separate process....no closing all of my tabs if it crashes. Why not use chrome?? oh i know why....im using a mac, and chrome is not yet out (but i have used it on the family computer and cant wait till it gets relaesed on the mac platform.)

As for Gmail, i have been a user for for at least 4 or 5 years now, and i had to be invited by the gmail team to try it out. I was fed up with the spam i kept getting in my hotmail and yahoo accounts. I dont get ANY spam in my inbox and never have.

Merry Christmas!!! and keep up the good work everyone at google!

[sueboettcher_dotmac]

@ArtInvent, if you're on a Mac check out Mailplane - it make a regular application out of Gmail by wrapping WebKit in an application. You can switch accounts with a key command, very quickly. (Plus drag and drop attachments and other goodies).

The killer part of Gmail for me is the conversation view. Nothing else like it in any other client, that I've found. If I could find one, I would consider trying it, but I'm too hooked on Gmail to use anything that doesn't do conversation view (and I don't mean "threaded view" exactly either).

[jaspen_p]

I have to agreed, I love the conversation view. I use it along with the tag function to organize my emails. I also love their built in search engine for finding that email that I archived 6 months ago.