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.

[woodygg]

LOL...

I just logged into an old gmail account, and the inbox FULL of spam (as well as the spam folder).

So much for that....

[bmccorm2]

First time i have seen SO many people actually agree with the article ;) But really, IMAP is the biggest draw for me (not to mention that other services don't even offer free POP). Integration with other google services, speed, labels, and the clean look are just icing on the cake.

[NewEnglander]

I just posted a link to this in the Gmail Help Discussion group. We 'fight' about these features all the times, especially the 'conversation' thing.

Really good article. Thanks loads!

[AXG]

There is one annoyance that I found in Gmail. I was composing a message. After composing, I decided to send it to a group which I had created in Gmail contacts. I wanted to go over the group members' e-mails to make sure that it was the right group. Gmail would not allow me to display the group. Finally, I had to copy/paste the message to Notepad, get out of composing new e-mail, go into contacts, check the group membership, come back to composing the new message, type the group name into To box....This is the only e-mail program which does not allow access to contacts when composing e-mail. Now I never use the web based Gmail. I have configured Gmail account in Vista Live Mail which allows more flexibility in choosing the recipients.

[stockyjoe]

I still prefer Yahoo mail. Yahoo's contact management is better, I personally find its spam filtering works better, I have unlimited storage. Yahoo's ability to tie one account into multiple things (a big Google weakness) and the fact that Gmail seems to be perpetually in beta.

Gmail bonus for me is its free pop which is cool but but I still find the UI funky.

[LeoT_4]

A subtle analysis would have noted how gmail does its URLs ... if you do a search you can "bookmark" the page and when you hit the bookmark the search will be re-performed on the you emails. You can also bookmark individual email messages ... do Yahoo and Hotmail have these features?

[randomlinh]

You're right on the spam filters and ads. Apps, eh, neutral.

But best filters in the business? maybe for free accounts. But $20/yr... and take a look at fastmail.fm. Your filtering options dig into the nitty gritty of the headers. Why is this important? Look at one of gmail's neat features (which fastmail also has)... [e-mail].

You can only filter by that email address if it's specifically addressed to you. If you say use that to forward email from other accounts, [e-mail] for instance, and it's buried in the headers and not directly in the "to:" field.... you can't filter based on that anymore.

So gmail's filters are hardly best in the business, "period". They are good, and searching is amazing... but this is a huge gap in gmail that is making me go back to fastmail

[Maegashira]

they have a ninja theme! frickin ninja stars everywhere! the artikel should mention this!

[DemoGeek]

The simplicity that comes with Gmail is the main advantage that I stick with Gmail.

Lately they've been adding features (Labs) that are cool but at times are breaking some of the existing functionality, particularly the ability to move the labels to the right side of the page is breaking the way we view messages if they have a picture inside or sometimes even just plain text. With the ads sticking to the right make it to go underneath the Labels bar on the right. Hope they test these completely before rolling things out.

It really doesn't get any better than GMail. The feature set surpasses anything out there.
The storage space you're afforded; the navigation, color scheme and organization of the UI; and of course, the indispensable search compels me to give GMail a 5 out of 5 drunk penguins, the highest rating this bachelor can bestow with Congressional approval.

[urr_quasdim]

...and how about the TONS of memory space available to every GMail user?

You're not wrong -- I think most people realize that Gmail is superior to every other webmail or even non-webmail competitor. The reason people still use the competitors more is because they hate change -- especially if it's changing a way to get in touch with them.

Who is ever excited about having to change their phone number or physical address?? Similarly, people shy away from changing their email addresses. If I had a quarter for every time I heard someone say "I've had this email address for x years, I can't change", I'd have... like, a bunch of quarters.

The problem is that these other webmail providers don't offer the ability to forward all your email to a different account, or if they do, users don't know about them or don't care to know.

Most people are resistant to change -- even if it's a change for the better, many people must be dragged kicking and screaming to a better tomorrow.

Cheers.

[J0hnSmith]

GMail is a gift from the gods! I switched everything over to it two years ago and haven't looked back. There's no other webmail provider that provides the same experience as GMail. I concur completely with the article!

[Tergulath]

The one thing gmail needs badly is A PREVIEW PANE! It is more convenient to view messages that way.

[bornlikethis38]

um...gmail because you cant empty your inbox, or spam, you have to go page by page clicking the "check all" box and the clicking delete. in yahoo, all i have to do is click empty.

[davidneeley]

Perhaps the author uses a different Gmail than I have been using for the last several years? He says you can filter a message to go to another folder. Other than the preset "inbox", "trash" and "spam" folders, there simply aren't any--and I don't believe you can add any, either. If I am mistaken, I'd love to find out about it. The lack of custom folders is, in my opinion, the greatest weakness Gmail has.

I use both Gmail and Yahoo mail premium for my email. Some things I find are much more usable in folders. So I get some newsletters, for example, at my gmail account and then after reading if I want to save them I forward them to Yahoo mail, which has a filter to put them in the appropriate folder. Cumbersome, but it works well enough.

I am considering going to a mail client on my machine and using Gmail's pop forwarding with it, so I can get this kind of further customization.

[atomicbomb156]

I absolutely love gmail. I've had a hotmail and yahoo but gmail is just so much more fun to use. Less ads and they even added themes. Grouping together convos with the same person is quite useful as well. I use chrome btw because its faster than firefox.

[gurpreetbakshi]

And of course the ability to send secure emails. Most email providers like hotmail and yahoo just show their login page under https. The moment you are authenticated, you are switched to HTTP which basically transmits all your email contents as plain text over the wire. GMAIL (is the only one i know so far, maybe there are more out there), that provides you the ability to switch to a secure channel even after authentication (just change the http to https, after authentication while you are viewing your inbox), and all your emails are truly secure. Keep up the good work Google.

[sepreece]

The author claims that Yahoo! filters work only in "Classic view". That's wrong. They work in the latest view, too; it's just the filter editor that only has a classic view, and that view is available from either reading view.

The author might also want to read Raskin's The Humane Interface for a different take on chronological organization. I would like the option of threaded reading, but the chronological view is also very important and useful.

I prefer the folders metaphor to Google's default show-everything view, and I prefer Yahoo!;s use of an index+reading pane view, as opposed to Google's index-only top-level view (have to click an e-mail to see any of its content). But I wish Yahoo! would add tagging.

For me, at least, they both catch virtually all the spam I get.

[markpalmos]

Hello guys,

I am astonished at this article due to the fact it misses what is the most horrendous and glaring ommision in Gmail, and the sole reason why I moved to yahoo.

Message threading has caused me to miss several important emails, particulary when there is more than one person responding to the same "conversation". It becomes very difficult to see which comments are new ones and which you have read.

Conversation threading can also make it difficult, when replying to someone in the middle of the thread, then scrolling up or down to read what someone else said, to find your place again... very irritating indeed.

There are literally hundreds of people who have begged, pleaded and shouted to get this turned into an option rather than force users to have threading, but my guess is that this particular "feature" is the brainchild of someone high up and it will probably never change.

Apart from that massive omission, I much prefer the way Yahoo uses folder structure where one can drag and drop messages

Cheers
Mark
UK