What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft? 279
caluml writes "There is a humourous look at "What would happen if Microsoft had designed GMail". Gems include: "Another security measurement we'll add is that you won't be able to log-in with just username anymore but are required to enter the full username@gmail.com. Furthermore, we will change the browser URL from 'http://gmail.microsoft.com/' to the more professional looking 'http://by114w.bay114.gmail.live.com/mail/mail.aspx?rru=home'.""
Re:Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They have design a webmail site... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.news.com/2100-1023-230411.html [news.com]
Since I heard about this and followed Microsofts response I made a mental note to never get a Hotmail account.
As for scanning my emails to show me targeted adverts I don't really mind this providing the information is not sold on to other companies.
More professional looking (Score:1, Interesting)
So... whatever.
Re:You mean what if Gmail had been designed for... (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't understand the need to defend hotmail, it was cool in the nineties, but it had become a big fat turd by the time google was cutting their teeth with search. Hotmail was just another app like Internet Explorer that sat on the shelf neglected long enough, to get fucking stomped the first second someone implemented something remotely resembling modern computing. Microsoft is not an innovator, they work their applications long enough for vendor lock-in and leave the playing field with the crowd wondering what the fuck is going on. Here's a list of suck:
Anyways, if by "early adopters" you mean beta testers, then you're wrong, both systems worked the same way, and if by "mass market" you mean people that use email then again you're wrong. In fact I'd say just about everything the mass market enjoys about webmail can be credited to gmail.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail [wikipedia.org], but uh, you go ahead and fanboy it up, praise every damn turd Gates wraps in plastic, it's your software, though I can't understand why you don't care if it's better.Re:While funny ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Examples of Thunderbird's suckage:
* if you click "check mail" while it's already checking your mail, a dialogue pops up saying something like "The action cannot be performed because the folder is already being processed". What's wrong with simply ignoring the click? (Or at least displaying a less generic message)
* I get a hell of a lot of junk, and can easily have 5k - 10k messages in my junk folder. Deleting them all takes *ages*. Yet deleting all the mail in the trash is instantaneous; why is there no "Empty folder" option for the junk folder? (After all, it's pretty likely people are going to want to empty it regularly)
* Sometimes Thunderbird gets confused part-way through processing junk mails, and leaves a number (anything from half a dozen to several hundred) sat in my inbox, marked as junk. Sometimes checking for new mail clears them, sometimes telling Thunderbird to delete mail marked as junk clears them, sometimes I have to delete them manually.
* Sometimes if you hit ctrl-A to select all mails in a folder (eg to delete all the mail in the junk folder), you then discover that even though the selection is performed the message list isn't focussed, so you can't delete them - you have to click in the message list and then reselect them all
* If manually marking a number of messages as junk by clicking the little "junk" icon in the message list pane, if you click too quickly subsequent clicks are ignored. You can actually keep clicking apparently forever with nothing happening; you *must* leave a gap of a second or two between clicks
* "Get all new messages" gets messages in the currently-focussed folder - eg I use Thunderbird for mail and RSS feeds. If I have the mail list focussed, "Get all new messages" gets email; if I have one of the feeds selected then it checks for new RSS items. This is despite it being above individual options for checking each message source, thus implying that it checks *all* configured accounts
* Deleting mail doesn't seem to really delete it, you have to compact folders from time to time too
* Sometimes Thunderbird gets confused and notifies me of new mail when there is none, or doesn't when there is, or shows a folder as having a number of unread messages but the folder itself as empty or vice versa. These last two are generally fixed by using "compact folder" on the affected folder. Other times it shows phantom blank messages, with a delivery date of the Unix epoch; these seem to correspond to blank lines in the mail file itself. Again, "compact folder" sorts that out.
* Sometimes when checking for mail automatically it will display a count of how many there are to download; other times it doesn't, apparently at random.
Anyway like I said, Outlook sucks; I have to use Outlook 2000 at work and I would gladly use Thunderbird instead if I could. However personally I think Thunderbird sucks too, and from time to time look around for an alternative. So far I've not found any free mail clients that are better enough to warrant shifting all my mail and settings over, but I live in hope.
Re:Developed not Designed (Score:5, Interesting)
It brings me to my inbox, with a one line plug for their Google Reader service, and a one line text add for an IT service outsourcing company that's placed near the top of the site. I open an email, and color matched text ads span from top to bottom on the right, similar to a newspaper column. Only the content of the text ads change, not the color, shape, or location.
For Yahoo, both new and classic bring me to some sort of welcome page with a 1x4" ad for their own search service titled "Top Electronics Search", and at least it matches the colors of the rest of the site. There's a big news widget thing in the center. To the right, there's a big f'ing RED, square, Bank of America credit card ad. On the left, the top and bottom of my Outlook-like directory are straddled by little, fugly, Win95 desktop icon-ads. "Bad credit? Card in 3 days", "Netflix Only $4.99/mo.", "Best SUV for Everyday", "Gold's Gym Free 7 Day VIP Pass".
The NEW Yahoo Mail site warns that Safari is not a supported browser, click to ignore. It is cleverly disguised as Outlook, with ads. Moving right along, I click a mail in my inbox, the BoA ad disapears, and the right ad region resizes to allow a shit-you-not, blinking "Have You Checked Your Credit Score This Month?" ad that runs from top to bottom of the page.
The CLASSIC Yahoo Mail site has a 'classical' giant, horizontal, animated ebay ad across the top, and in the same places on the left are more desktop-icon-ads, "See your credit score - free", "Netflix...", "Online Degree Programs", "Gold's Gym...", oh, and with a slightly different icon as the VIP pass, "Gold's Gym 7 Day Free Trial" It looks like a high schooler designed it.
I'll take Gmail, fuck you very much.
Re:They have design a webmail site... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you mean they "sell your email address to spammers", well, I have more evidence of GOOGLE doing that than Microsoft. My Hotmail account receives no spam at all (it's quite long, but still). My Gmail account receives about a few pieces a week. Here's the interesting bit: I don't USE my Gmail account. Ever. I don't post the email address anywhere, use it to sign up to anything, or even email real people with it. So how did the spammers guess it? (Note: it is also quite long, with fullstops in it).
Re:They have design a webmail site... (Score:3, Interesting)
Every e-mail provider, to some degree, snoops atleast portions of your communications. Google are just more up front about it. If you don't like the way your free e-mail service gains funding stop using it and pay for a service. End of story. Meanwhile, stop complaining about it.
Meanwhile GMail is a more desirable service than Hotmail (kind of the point of the article) because the ads are less invasive, more pointed and therefore more useful to its users.
The whole thing really boils down to the fact that while you're using their services they have access to all the data you store within it no matter what your opinion on the matter. Moreover, e-mail is a best-effort delivery system and it's as secure as a postcard. If you don't want every person and service provider in the delivery chain snooping within your correspondence - encrypt it.
This isn't any kind of major privacy invasion. Nothing to see here, moving right along ...
Re:They have design a webmail site... (Score:4, Interesting)
First address: 10 letters, not indexed by google. It has 348 mails in the spam folder I received about 4 spam mails in the inbox over the same time period (60 days)
Second address: 8 letters, indexed by google. It has 459 mails in the spam folder and I received about 4 spam mails in the inbox over the same time period
Third address: 8 letters with spam as a suffix, indexed by google. It has 0 mails in the spam folder and I received 0 spam mails in the inbox over the same time period.
It would appear that the safest way to not get spam is to have an address with the phrase spam contained in it. The spam suffix address is also the one I've been most promiscuous with yet no spam at all is received.
Re:While funny ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Does the preview pane exist because e-mails are typically 3-5 lines? Or are corporate e-mails only 3-5 lines, because we know that nobody will ever read beyond what's in the Outlook preview pane?
If the first is true, then Microsoft did a good job of assessing hte situation, and implementing a solution.
If the second is true, we've got a rather bad situation on our hands for all the same reasons that PowerPoint is an absolutely terrible method of convening information. A single sheet of A4/Letter is a vastly superior means of communication than a PowerPoint slideshow in almost every case -- even though he comes across as a bit of a prick, Edward Tufte's got the right idea here. Likewise, a 3-sentence e-mail is potentially lacking some very vital information.
If you have a short email, keep it short, and summarize the best as you can in the subject line. Otherwise, take the liberty to explain yourself as much as necessary in the body text of the message. Reading a 3-paragraph message doesn't take long at all, and skimming it for the important details hardly takes any longer than reading the aforementioned 3-5 line message.
Re:Hotmail...? (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft has designed the monster that Hotmail is today all by them selves.
Naturally after MS bought Hotmail, I switched to real email - POP3 and the like.