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.

[hmdz105]

I can't believe that in 4 years of using Gmail I have got only less than 5 spams in my inbox. Gmail is half of the web by itself for me!

Yahoo give you a paid option to get rip of all the ads. The interface allows you to sort emails by time, name, subject. The tab views allows you to write a few similar email at the same windows. See if you can do that without new windows. I can also send big attachments and never reach the 7GB limit.

Try doing that with Gmail.

[PerryIsmangil]

I've found that with a powerful search interface, I never needed to sort my email!

The only reason I sort by name/or subject was to make it easy to find a collection of someone's email. Now I just search for 'from:[e-mail]' and I've found them. Or actually more likely I just type in the address or part of it or name or even any word that I vaguely remembered from the email.

GMail also has a paid option: Google Apps Enterprise Edition. More expensive surely, because you get more than email, and you need a domain name (but surely everybody needs one anyway...)

[queticomn]

Yahoo mail is the best web mail service out there, there's more to a web mail service then just blocking spam. An like they said on ZdNet .com Gmail has been in beta since its inception *hehehe*. I'm beginning to wonder how much google is paying CBS the owner of c-net to be bias in favor of google on every on just about all web applications. Offshore Zdnet is also a cbs/c-net company, so who knows...

[PerryIsmangil]

True, but for me spam is no. 1 on the list. No 2 is search. I was a long time Yahoo Mail user, before there was GMail. But spam was too much.

You didn't mention what you find 'more' on Yahoo?

[sobishop]

"You didn't mention what you find 'more' on Yahoo?"

SPAM!!! and lots of it

[benjimen]

Love Gmail, hate the Contact app -- no birthday or anniversary fields that integrate with the Calendar app.

One thing i can't STAND about Gmail is the lack to sort by subject.... something so simple is missing yet others laud Gmail for being the best thing since beer and pizza just because it's Google....

That annoying missing piece is heavily offset by the free IMAP access and the excellent spam filtering though

[cipals15]

Gmail has been working for me in terms of spam prevention or filtration.

[Pricey]

I have used Yahoo Mail for around 10 years now...never had any problems...knock wood. I switched to Yahoo Mail Plus a few years ago so I could use POP with Picasa and I absolutely love it.... No ads at all and great Spam filter "plus" the interface is great with the folders and the tabs. I also want to mention that the search in the Plus version is as good as it gets...one little keyword is all I need most of the time to find an old message. Anyway, good luck with Gmail everyone - just remember that as with all services and products they just keep leapfrogging each other...Gmail might have something better today and tomorrow Yahoo will beat them with that plus some other nice stuff.

[phatphletch]

Don, you said "Granted, ads don't have any impact on the viability of an e-mail service..." Sorry, is this you first year on the Internet? Maybe you shouldn't have slept through Econ. How do you think companies can afford to offer free email service? That's like saying ads don't have any impact on the viability of an online news site. OK, well then take down the ads cnet! You're brilliant.

[Jyakotu]

So, why is it still in beta? That's the big question.

[irondog1970]

I like the Gmail Notifier on my Mac at home. It checks my email every few minutes. And since I use Growl, I get an non intrusive popup that displays the first few lines of the incoming email. The Gmail Notifier doesn't shift focuswhich is a major plus.

[NPGMBR]

I must be the lucky one because the SPAM issue is backdwards for me. I have an account I've had with MSN for well over 10 years now and on average I get about one SPAM message in my Inbox a month if I get one at all. Also very interesting is that I don't get thousands of SPAM messages in my junk mail folder. I average less than ten messages per day in that folder.

The odd part is that I opened an gmail account about two years ago and never use it. I've gone back to look at it about once a month and there are thousands of messages in the SPAM folder. How is this possible?

[Deceth]

Search, conversation displays and labels make it far far better than anything else. Built in text and voice chat with contacts is icing on the cake.

[jcronkhite]

"Yahoo and AOL Mail are more popular than Gmail and each employs the "old" display style, suggesting that users prefer that over Gmail's style."

I do not think this suggests users prefer the "old" method over Gmail's method. My belief is that users only know how to use their mail program. They have invested in it and know how to use it. For many users this is a huge accomplishment for them as most are not necessarily tech savvy. I would guess most have no idea that Gmail provides this functionality.

I, however, do not favor the old convention. After years of having my email forwarded to a Gmail account (that was authorized to send as my real address), I recently moved the entire operation to Google Apps to host my email. What an awesome experience! Of course, having IMAP is huge, but the migration was relatively seamless.

I always like to hear what others have to say about Google products. Mainly to see if they "get it" or not. You obviously do. Thanks for the article.

[sting7k]

My only complaint about Gmail is, when will it freaking come out of BETA!!! It is already better than pretty much everything else. I do still maintain my old AOL/AIM email account for some things to keep my gmail out of less important sites. But Gmail blows it away in every possible category. Gmail has been in beta for at least 5 years now, come on Google I know you have Android on your hands but how about getting some of your other products out of beta as well.

[jaando]

Been using G Mail for three and 1/2 years. For the most part i love it.

BUT HOW DO YOU G-MAILERS DEAL WITH not having folders?

I get newsletters which i wanna read later, personal banking emails, emails from my family and other stuff. I want to be able to reduce the amount of emails in my inbox, and the best way is to move emails to subject catergorised folders; your family emails to a folder called 'family', and banking emails to 'banking' and so on and so forth.

How do gmailers handle not having folders? How do you manage having on giant listing, you always search by filters?

Why can't there be folders?

G Mailer Jason

[zot3000]

To Jaando: you do not need folders in Gmail because you can use labels. Check the help for doing it, but basically you define labels and there is a popdown menu which allows you to assign any label you want to any mail (or multiple selections). The labels appear to the left of the screen, and by clicking on them you get all the mails with that particular label assigned.

I have been using Gmail since 2002 and I could not be happier. I don't give a damm that it is still beta, or that it "reads my mails" ... who cares? it works, it never goes down, is super fast, it searches any mail in seconds, so I don't have to create complicated folder structures. I just archive the mails, and then I search them.

By the way, one killer feature no one have mentioned: you can use keywords in the search box. For example, if I want to see mails sent by Joe, I just type "from:Joe" (w/o quotes) and voilà! Other keywords are in: , has:attachment, subject: , to: and many more (check the help).

Another thing: you don't have to sort by subject, you just can look for all mails with a subject (e.g "subject:sales" will get you all the mails about sales).

In summary: gmail rocks, and I just cry for all other email users who don't know better :-)

[jaando]

I know about labels but my issue is this;

My inbox is still full of multi subject emails and labelling is tedious and unreliable.

Foe example:

Say i label everything in my inbox related to banking, cool! I can click the label and it retrieves all those emails.

But if i miss one or two banking emails and do not label them they are still hidden soewhere in 55 pages of inbox.

If i had folders i would not have 55 pages pages in my inbox, i would have one page and i would say "Hey these two banking emails have not been filed, they belong in the 'Banking' folder.

So labels you can lose something easily. Who feels like labelling there 2500 emails?

The essence of how gmail's inbox works still bothers me. I will never be convince labeling is reliable as the only way to double check if all items have been catergorised is to go though item-by-item and double check.

[brianwolters]

Windows Live Mail rarely lets spam in and it is now my choice.

[SebDavies]

I prefer hotmail. But thats me! Suppose with Windows Live Mail how it connects with Live Home. But the new gmail themes are proper good!

[zot3000]

To Jaando: there are several things you can do to solve your problem.
1) You can do a search with the subject / sender from your bank. Then you can select all the mails and label them

2) You can add a rule (super easy) so that any mail sent from your bank will be labeled automatically

Basically, you should just archive your mails! This way they are in not in your inbox anymore and you can still find them searching by subject: or anything. Remember, you simply cannot lose any mail in Gmail, search is as easy (based in the same technology) as with google. My girlfriend uses Hotmail and everytime she has to search for a mail she never finds it, it is really bad. Not in Gmail, really.

[jaando]

Hi Zot,

Ok you have shown me what others do.... excellent. I previously was using my archive for old emails (like 6 months or more) and didn't think to use it to store emails i really need and are recent. Now i will just archive each week and label everything as it arrives.....

This actually now means i really love.

[freewill42]

So far I have not seen a comment about Firefox and Ad Block Plus add-on feature; so you can have no ads on any page you visit, unless you specify allow. Also, there is an add-on to let you customize Google, & you can check no ads in many of the features.
To me, the ADBlock Plus feature is why I use Firefox over Google chrome, but I still use gmail.