Yahoo! Mail Superior to Gmail ? 574
ynotme writes "In his column, Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal writes that the new Yahoo! Mail beta provides a superior webmail experience to Gmail. Some quotes: 'The new Yahoo Mail is far superior to Gmail. Yahoo more closely matches the desktop experience most serious email users have come to expect ... Gmail has none of these new, fluid, desktop-like features ... Google's engineers have decreed that familiar email practices are no longer useful, and have substituted approaches they prefer, arrogantly denying users any choice.'"
Seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
Has everyone forgotten that before Gmail came along you got a whopping big 15M of space from Yahoo unless you wanted to pay after which I think it went up to an astronomical 100M. Gmail made a laughing stock of the other free mail services, and rightly so. It's nice to see Yahoo try and do better, but don't forget they, and Microsoft were resting comfortably on their lazy asses before Google came along.
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Informative)
1. Click Message
2. Click More options
3. Click Trash this message
alternately:
1. Check Message
2. Click More Actions... drop down
3. Select Move to Trash
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
Just create a label [mistress] or [love-notes] or [don't-look-here-honey], then you can conveniently log in periodically, check all read, and delete them!
(Just kidding honey, the label I use is junk mail. Though I seem to be getting more and more love letters from King Abdullah Frikahn III, asking if I would be willing to help him transfer his money...)
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Funny)
Sorry, no one will believe that here
Why the bias? (Score:5, Interesting)
I know 90% of people here dislike microsoft more than google. There is also an obvious bias against all-thing-not-google (which includes Yahoo!). But do we need to be biased even when we are submitting a story?
"Yahoo! Mail reported Superior to Gmail" seems more balanced.....does anyone else agree?
Re:Why the bias? (Score:5, Insightful)
And no, I'm not new here.
Re:Why the bias? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why the bias? (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact of the matter is, that nobody is forcing anyone to use Google email, or Yahoo email, or MSN email, or Hotmail, etc... The choice is always up to the user - Google's engineers have done things their way, Yahoo's did it differently, Microsoft did it yet again differently, several times. Mr Mossberg just needs to pick an interface he likes, and move on. Of course, he's free to express his opinion, just as much as you and I are free to call him an id10t...
Re:Why the bias? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't believe the parent post is marked insightful.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't like gmail's interface, though, don't use it. I personally like to compose messages in emacs and then sign them with gpg, so I use mutt. I also like more control over incoming messages, so I have my own qmail server. YMMV.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
The point was, You shouldn't get to decide what I want to do.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.arantius.com/article/arantius/gmail+de
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Archiving the message certainly sweeps it out of view, but it's the digital equivalent of throwing a rug over garbage in a corner of your room. Sure, you cant see it, but it will eventually stink up the whole joint if you don't toss it out for good.
Being that one of Gmail's most touted features is its powerful search mechanism, it should be obvious that the less useless data that exists in the search database, more relevant your search results are going to be.
Why in the hell do you want to keep messages that you KNOW you never want to see again? It makes absolutely no sense, and is one of the stupidest Gmail advocacy points I've ever heard.
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)
Annoying? Slightly I guess, but not a huge deal.
Re:Seriously? [Offtopic] (Score:4, Insightful)
You've been here long enough you should know better than to be surprised. :-) One could take a bowel movement and post the details on Slashdot and it will get modded "+5 Insightful" as long as it's one of the first posts. On the other hand, you could write the next "Principia Mathematica" as a response to said first post and it will be modded "-1 Troll" if you don't praise open source in the first few sentences.
Re:Seriously? [Offtopic] (Score:5, Funny)
If you did write the next Principia Mathematica chances are it would be offtopic.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
I often wonder if I'm the only person in the world who likes to delete things that have no value whatsoever.
Yes, if I need to migrate my mail or back it up for some reason, do I want to have to worry about whether I 've gotten all of the 1,800 emails, most of which are junk? Or do I want to rest assured knowing that yes, there's those 200 emails that are really worth saving, and sigh it's so much easier to know I've backed them up safely.
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)
You may be the only person in the world who can see into the future. Sometimes a message has become of value years down the road.
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm kind of in the middle on this. On the one hand, I think deletion of email is important. On the other hand, Google has one hell of a search feature. The labels feature mo
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Interesting)
Furthermore, although the paranoia has subsided, I am still not content not to know if e-mail that I delete is actually removed from their servers. If I don't ever want it to be retrieved by anybody in government years later, I need to know that it's really gone - permanently. We all
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Better == More Like Outlook? (Score:3, Interesting)
So even thoug
I've gotta agree. I might just leave Eudora (Score:5, Interesting)
Whenever I checked my mail remotely in the past with either Yahoo or GMail, I would always reminisce about how fluid the process was at home with Eudora. Scanning email by opening new pages for every email with old web interfaces was quite frustrating, even with GMails quicker load times. The new web interface on Yahoo is actually making me consider finally leaving Eudora.
So, I for one am glad to see Yahoo head in the direction of both panes and continuing to focus on adding useful features (and unlike some products, doing it without ads or clutter). Improving the initial load time would probably be enough to get me to make the transition.
Re:I've gotta agree. I might just leave Eudora (Score:5, Funny)
While my features may not be much to look at under normal conditions, once you take the 1st derivation of my features, I start to become quite the looker. Around the 3rd or 4th derivation, well, all I can say is "move over Brad Pitt!"
The only thing is, since I started trying to integrate myself back to my original look, I keep getting one that's real close, but something's just not fundamentally exactly right about it...
Re:I've gotta agree. I might just leave Eudora (Score:5, Funny)
Did you remember to add a constant?
Re:I've gotta agree. I might just leave Eudora (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I've gotta agree. I might just leave Eudora (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the only reason I made a gmail account. I wanted to keep using (don't throw things at me... please) Outlook Express. I used to have a NetZero account ONLY because of the free pop3 email access, screw getting online with it
I hate web interfaces. I'm on dialup. I don't want pictures and an interface to have to download every time I check my mail - I just want the mail. Thus... gmail via pop3. It's worked marvelously for me so far.
Re:I've gotta agree. I might just leave Eudora (Score:4, Insightful)
While it seems a lot of advanced users on Slashdot seem to love being derived of features by our Google overlords (more in response to Google Talk than GMail)
Eh, I don't see how GMail deprives anyone of anything. You like Eudora? Fine, use POP3. You like Outlook? Use POP3. You like Thunderbird? Use POP3. You like Yahoo Mail? Use POP3 to download your GMail to Yahoo.
What's nice is I get all that without having to pay for an upgraded account. Plus, I have the convenience of also being able to read my email using any web browser anywhere in the world, derived of features notwithstanding.Re:I've gotta agree. I might just leave Eudora (Score:3, Insightful)
IMAP is a much better protocol. Until GMail supports it, I'm sticking with FastMail.
Before you start all the Yahoo bashing.... (Score:5, Funny)
TAKE THAT GOOGLE
Re:Before you start all the Yahoo bashing.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Before you start all the Yahoo bashing.... (Score:3, Insightful)
(enough said)
Re:Before you start all the Yahoo bashing.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Before you start all the Yahoo bashing.... (Score:3, Informative)
Are you unaware that GMail also supports filters, with a filter action of "Skip inbox"? This action is the same as archiving an email from the Inbox view. The mail will show up in both All Mail and by clicking on the label. If a certain label is applied to an unread mail, the label is displayed in bold. So basically, they have all the functionalit
Re:Before you start all the Yahoo bashing.... (Score:3, Informative)
Well, you can do that - I have filters set up to label particular emails and then not bother showing them in the inbox. And my label list on the left shows labels with emails that are unread in bold, with the number of unread mails in brackets after the label names. i.e. exactly what you want.
If it helps: labels are just like normal folders, except you can put more than one label
Re:Before you start all the Yahoo bashing.... (Score:3, Informative)
You can. Messages which skip the inbox are still marked as unread, and still highlight as unread in the list of filters. There is absolutely nothing you can do with folders that you can't do with labels* (they are essentially a less powerful version of the same thing), and there is things you can do with labels that you can't (semantically) do with folders (multiple membership, for instance).
Folders are a clumsy metaphor, I find. The same forces that are moving filesystems (or, in particular, their repres
Choice? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Choice? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Choice? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Choice? (Score:3, Insightful)
You've missed the point. Google wasn't being called arrogant for not working like Yahoo, Google was being called arrogant for not working like practically every other mail client ever developed.
Google have this idea that you shouldn't delete stuff, that you shouldn't use folders, that your primary interface should be a search box, that threads are unimportant, and so on. Yeah, they are goo
Re:Choice? (Score:3, Informative)
For the record, I've not used Yahoo!'s mail service, and it may well be better than Gmail. But the reasoning p
Re:Choice? (Score:3, Informative)
a) You can access gmail's mail with POP3 (you can't get at Yahoo's pop access with a free account).
b) You can read POP3 mail with a Yahoo account
So, umm, yeah, you can use the Yahoo interface to read your gmail mail.
Next.
mmHmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
And the Leopard 2 is superiour to the T-34 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And the Leopard 2 is superiour to the T-34 (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Yahoo mail's interface is better, as measured by the number of users it pleases
2) Users switch to yahoo mail because of #1
Google will only "improve" its interface if they believe either #1 or #2 is true.
Re:And the Leopard 2 is superiour to the T-34 (Score:5, Insightful)
In six months, yahoo mail will still be great, gmail will still be fobbing its users off with slow login times and those dreadful labels.
Linkage? (Score:2)
Re:Linkage? (Score:5, Informative)
GMail gives me what I always wanted (Score:5, Insightful)
* A nice user interface that is very responsive.
* Web-based.
* Auto-complete/tab-completion of email addresses.
* Ability to search my email.
* Advanced sorting and rules. I can place my mail subscriptions into different labels and archive them for later.
* Reliability. Gmail is much more reliable than previous hosts. My mail is delivered and I receive my mail.
* Group email threads together.
* Mail filters.
* vi-like keyboard shortcuts.
don't forget (Score:5, Insightful)
*Works stable on all browsers ( I'm not sure if anyone else noticed buy yahoo doens't play well with opera)
*2 gigs of space.
*pop access
*and most of all simple.
I switched my mom (not computer savey) to google and she picked it up in seconds. People need to learn more bells and whistles doesn't always equal better.
Re:don't forget (Score:5, Informative)
I sign up to almost all online things with
example for my slashdotaccount
carl0ski+slashdot@gmail.com
a + symbol and any string can be added between you gmail account name and the at symbol.
They are vaild addresses an delivered to you.
In my case i use them for security purposes, suspect sites i use carl0ski+spam
as my address.
then filter it straight to trash
Re:GMail gives me what I always wanted (Score:3, Informative)
But I'll say that Google has done Yahoo users a great service, simply by bringing competition to the market. Yahoo has had to greatly increase storage and features in a hurry. It worked, I guess, at least well enough to keep me on as
Re:GMail gives me what I always wanted (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. GMail threads mail more reliably and more usably than any other mail client I've ever used, web-based or not (for example showing you your own replies right there in the thread, and showing the first sentence of collapsed messages in the header's empty space). This Yahoo thing looks just like Outlook, showing you only one mail at a time and forcing you to hunt for related ones. That is a giant step backwards, all in the name of looking like Outlook.
Re:GMail gives me what I always wanted (Score:4, Interesting)
But sometimes it does get things wrong, and GMail doesn't offer any way for you to add messages to a conversation manually. Very annoying.
Re:GMail gives me what I always wanted (Score:5, Interesting)
Even when I compose and send email through my standalone POP client, they show up on the web in Gmail. And when I compose and send email on the web through Gmail, they all get downloaded at the end of the day into said standalone POP client, and immediately filtered into my Sent Mail folder.
Before Gmail I used Yahoo! Mail, and my Sent Mail was always out of sync. Messages composed at home weren't available at work, and messages composed through webmail had to be moved into my Inbox periodically just to be downloaded and archived at home.
Without a feature like this, I wouldn't switch to Yahoo!, no matter what the interface looked like.
Labels and Filters (Score:5, Insightful)
But more than that, I have to say advanced filters are key to webmail for me. I can route the spam that comes from free newsletters right to the trash. Out of principal, I previously would unsubscribe from the obnoxious newsletters that don't allow you to separately unsubscribe from their spam, but with gmail I never see the "special offers." There are quite a few decent letters I'm much happier to be subscribed to now.
Re:My Mail is Delivered? (Score:3, Insightful)
Since Gmail allows you to use POP access (Score:5, Insightful)
Yahoo! mail does not have this feature.
So if you've always liked your Netscape Messenger . . . you can use it, with Gmail. You don't need to get used to using a web browser to read your email.
*shrug* Frankly, I use PINE, so I couldn't care less.
(Meanwhile I'd really appreciate it if the articles on
Exactly why Yahoo! is NOT better than Gmail... (Score:3, Informative)
One thing I wish they'd add to Gmail (Score:2)
Secure POP Access? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Secure POP Access? (Score:3, Insightful)
arrogantly denying users any choice? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, you could always.. not use Gmail? Isn't that considered a choice?? Or will the arrogant Google engineers come beat you if you use Yahoo mail?
gmail is a privlege, not a right (Score:5, Funny)
Well they have the choice to use a different bloody email service for one.
So.. (Score:5, Informative)
Disagreement (Score:4, Insightful)
I find it simple to use , it has ample storage , the interface is perfectly useable and takes little effort to learn .
The search functionality is also rather good and very useful .
"The new Yahoo Mail is far superior to Gmail. Yahoo more closely matches the desktop experience "
Though I must ask , Which desktop is he referring to , certainly not mine .
" Gmail, by contrast, is quirky and limited. Its only advantage is its massive free storage, which exceeds what most people will ever need."
Well I don't find google quirky , everything does what I would expect . That to me is not quirky
Re:Disagreement (Score:3, Insightful)
Yahoo's Mail Folders vs Google's Labels (Score:5, Insightful)
However, I think Google's way of doing things is FAR better. Folders is great, it allows you to file your mail away in a flat or hierarchial organisation. however, it DOESNT easily let you file a mail in TWO locations, unless you make a copy of the mail, and that in itself is really awkward.
Applying labels, or some kind of keyword system, or however you want to call it, is in fact a far more natural and flexible way of doings things, and I fully intend to apply that idea to a few other projects I'm working on, where 'file away into nested folders' was the original way of doing things.
So... perhaps Google needs to play a little catchup, but Google's idea of 'labels' instead of 'folders' I think is far superior.
The author of the article, with his accusations of Google's "arrogance", is really letting his "must put google down at all costs, because it's the cool thing to do" attitude really show.
Re:Yahoo's Mail Folders vs Google's Labels (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's a huge benefit. But until they implement a selection for 'no label' it's kinda tough if you've got several high-traffic mailing lists coming in to always find that single message you might otherwise miss.
But what about the spam? (Score:3, Insightful)
Until Yahoo! can implement spam blocking anywhere near Gmail, I will be sticking with my "1 optioned" email site.
Better how? (Score:3, Interesting)
You can right-click on various items to see short menus of useful tasks, like "add sender to address book."
Doesn't gmail automatically add every sender to the history? when you compose a new message you can just start typing the address and it will show you the email address. Isn't that easier than manually having to add?
And there's no preview pane, only a feature that shows a snippet of the content of an email.
Showing the snippet IS preview! How much more do you want to see ?
It forces you to view all of your email in groups of related messages called "conversations," instead of viewing them individually as they arrive.
Tell me why would i NOT want to see the messages which are part of the conversation?
But i have to say tabs in messages by yahoo looks cool!
That's a Review??? (Score:5, Insightful)
The author comes across being very emotional and too judgmental for me to take the review seriously. Why was it even necessariy to add the arrogant bit? Oh right! That's the common sterotype Google has on Wall Street. I forgot! No doing a traditional IPO and not taking themselves too seriously apparently runs counter to Wall Street traditions so Google is automatically arrogant. I guess then all innovators are in a sense arrogant because they refuse to do things the same way it has been done.
I work in the finance industry but some of the narrow minded people who work there makes me want to puke. If trying new ideas and being innovative are arrogant, then I hope everyone is as arrogant as Google is. On one hand, Wall Street throws out terms like "think outside of the box" but on the other hand some elements hates change. Take this quote for example:
By contrast, Gmail has none of these new, fluid, desktop-like features.
Uh... hello? This is WEB mail, not desktop mail? Maybe things aren't all the same in both realms? My Gmail is fast as hell and gets the job done. I go on there and answer my mails as needed. Then I'm out of there. Total time taken is usually under one minute. That's how I want it to be.
Screenshots (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Screenshots (Score:3, Informative)
Ask and ye shall receive [scripting.com]...
Yeah, but the Yahoo! ads suck (Score:5, Insightful)
Simplicity and speed (Score:3, Insightful)
-b.
What got you here won't get you there. (Score:3, Funny)
Yea, it's a shame they shook up the whole "search engine result sorting" thing too. Bummer that didn't work out for them.
Not hard to do... (Score:4, Insightful)
I have always said this. (Score:3, Insightful)
He just wants it to work like Outlook (Score:5, Insightful)
One clear indication of this is: he complains about having labels rather than folders. Labels are essentially the same thing as folders, except labels allow you to put the message in several labels/folders. The only difference is how they are stored in the filesystem, which is irrelevant in a webmail environment. If they put folder icons on his labels, I bet he would love it.
He also complains about the "Conversation" view of e-mails (threaded view). I like the conversation view. But, I can see his point that it should be an option (even though I still think threaded/conversation view is a better way to use e-mail, because it allows for better context).
He complains about the ads in GMail, which cannot be turned off. Okay.. I guess that's a point. If it used large distracting banner ads, like Yahoo! Mail, I would want to turn them off too. But, the small text ads in GMail blend in and don't distract at all.
There is certainly room for improvement in GMail. But, Mr. Mossberg is a bit harsh when ranting about Google's arrogance for deciding they have a better way to do e-mail..
I prefer Yahoo! Mail (Score:3, Informative)
http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools?tool=3 [yahoo.com]
And a Flash animation/tour/explanation at the end of that page.
The one flaw in Google's Plan (Score:3, Insightful)
Sadly, I use Google not because it's the best, but because I have a long memory -- and I remember VERY WELL YAHOO how you guys screwed us with your two megabyte/ten megabyte limit. Yahoo will not get my business again, no matter how much Gmail might frustrate me.
CUSTOMERS HAVE LONG MEMORIES YAHOO!
But Gmail has vi controls :) (Score:3, Insightful)
But I like the Bulk folder and this interface is clean and nice and all. And I can understand people who don't like the archive, conversation and label metaphors being pissed about Gmail. Like I said, to each his own.
Oh, and let's not forget what else Google did. They went to 1 GB of storage when that was unheard of. And now Yahoo Mail has that, too.
So life is good on the free, web-based e-mail front
RP
Yeah they don't care (Score:3, Insightful)
Hasn't anyone tried Goowy yet? (Score:4, Informative)
Calendar + Files + Address Book... (Score:3, Interesting)
I still love Gmail, use it every day. Love the POP access, love the SMTP access which keeps copies of your sent mails sent through any normal desktop email client. And I love the threading that keeps my replies with the responses. I'm sticking with Gmail and waiting out the missing features. They'll come. But the experience is already better for me than Yahoo! mail.
Best of Both Worlds (Score:4, Informative)
The advantages: I have a stable email address that's fairly well spam-filtered, and isn't tied to my ISP; I also get secure connections (with POP, SMTP, and HTTPS). Meanwhile, I don't have to turn on my main machine, and don't have to set up multiple mail clients, but can still get the benefits of old-school mail management while being able to access my mail from anywhere.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
arrogance (Score:4, Insightful)
The only "arrogance" that I see in this "debate" is Mossberg's. Google made available a high-quality web-based mail service based on AJAX and was the first to give users a gigabyte of space. The Gmail experience was closer to any desktop experience than any other webmail service. There were likely lots of usability experts and user testers involved in its development. And if it were for Yahoo! and Microsoft, we'd probably still limp along with 10Mbyte mailboxes and page redraws for each message view. And, yes, the Gmail experience is different from a desktop client. I fail to see how that "denies choice"--Mossberg always has the choice not to use it.
Apparently, Mossberg's 35 years at the WSJ have gone to his head and he has forgotten that he is a journalist, not a usability expert. It is supremely arrogant for someone with his background to make judgements about the usability or quality of applications. In fact, someone who actually knows about usability wouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions.
Fortunately, we all have a choice: we don't have to read the ill-informed drivel Mossberg publishes in the WSJ.
This article is wholly worthless (Score:4, Insightful)
When you look at the facts, Yahoo is playing catch-up, and they know it. Google came pretty much out of nowhere and released a wholly unprecedented level of quality with gmail. While most, and probably all, other free webmail providers were little more than ad spots first and email clients second, Google provided a service that was incredibly powerful that happened to run ads the same way the rest of their site did. All of this was done in a very elegant, simple yet powerful interface hosted on Google's servers. It's only a rare moment where you get errors from Google servers. It's also only a rare moment where you see something shoddily hacked together from Google's engineers. It doesn't just work, it works very well, and damned near all the time.
Did I mention it's free and nobody forces you to use it? To use the word 'arrogant' to describe the free service that set the current precedent for service and design is laughably irresponsible. How the hell do you get to use such a loaded word with negative connotation towards the parent company in responsible journalism? You don't. The fact that this hack can get paid to write this crap astounds me more than the fact that he clearly doesn't understand a single thing that he's writing about. I mean, I could spend all my days writing about crap I don't understand, but I don't think I'd get paid for it. While I admire his ability to get paid for workplace incompetence, I have to admit that I am baffled by how he manages to pull it off.
I bet he thought he was really clever with other loaded phrases such as "Not Gmail, where 'option' is a term too rarely employed, except in reference to employee compensation." Yeah, great job, ass. Way to make a thinly veiled snipe at the fact that Google happened to find a way to become fucking billionaires giving you great service at no cost.
And finally, since I seriously have to get to bed, my proof that the author has no goddamned clue what he's talking about: "I'm sure Gmail will get better and better, and will eventually adopt the new programming techniques that allow desktop-like ease of use."
This quote just proves that the author doesn't get the point at all. Google has never been one to compromise functionality with form. Just go to www.google.com if you're not sure. The whole google design philosophy almost wholly forbids gmail to ever get to the point where it will adopt these "new programming techniques," and I don't think we can realistically ever expect them to, or even want them to. If Google were to cheapen itself to the point where it were simply copying other peoples' interfaces in order to please woefully uninformed tech writers, I think we'd be much worse off than if they'd just done things the way they always had.
I'm not going to make any statements about which is better between Yahoo mail or gmail. I'm also going to point out that both are free, and you should expect nothing more than to get what you pay for both. In the event that you are pleasantly surprised by how much functionality you get out of a free service, you should be thankful. If you're into Yahoo's interface, use Yahoo. If you prefer Google's interface, use Google. Neither is going to be "far superior" to the other for all people as all people have different needs and preferences.
As for the people who keep hacks like this employed, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
-c
Re:invitation only? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:well actually (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I like gmail alot. It's a really fluid system and is well designed with the user in mind, about the only thing I really disagree with is the sign up method if you don't get an invite.
Re:well actually (Score:5, Insightful)
The point that was missed is that Google's GMail project was meant to test new ideas. Is it really a new idea to try to mimic Outlook's tired functionality within a web browser? Certainly not, Microsoft already did a superb job of that with OWA. GMail follows Google's UI philosophy to a tee and is nothing more or less than I would suspect from them. They are keeping thing simple by limiting options. That may emasculate some users, because they want to think that they're superior to everyone else and know the right way to setup an interface, but it's a good way to test some of the alternative ways of thinking that Google wanted to explore.
For instance, I had never really taken the time to think of keeping threads of email as a single object. The first place that I saw it was in GMail. After seeing that I really despise having to use Outlook at work with it's cluttered mess of folders. I had also heard of the concept of search folders and labels before, but seeing it in action I realized how much better it is to see, interact with, and think of each message as a single object with multiple attributes that link it to other objects. If I'm looking for an email that was recently sent to me with an image attached I can just click on the "Attachments" label that I created and see all of the messages with attachments.
It's time to put aside that gushing and look at why I understand his complaints. It's difficult for people who just think of email as email to objectify it to realize that GMail's interface is logical. I converted my wife, who almost immediately converted 20 or so of her friends, and she had some issues setting up filters for use with labels. Some of her friends just didn't get it and switched back to whatever they used before. Not the least, I understand the concept of not throwing away data when you have so much storage, but do I really want to have that thrown in my face every time I delete something that I don't want being there? I also wish that GMail would trim the original text of large threads, check the original document of a 100-message thread sometime.
Then again, this is Google so it is a beta project. I could also refute each of my points with someone else's opinion that they like things the other way. Nothing changes that GMail is extremely successful at changing the way it's faithful users think about their email.
Yahoo!'s interface sounds interesting, but I'm interested in knowing if it has what GMail does. Does it have good keyboard shortcut support? Does it treat email messages as one object if I try to organize it in two different ways? I know it doesn't have threaded viewing of messages (yet) but does it hide previous emails and quoted text and/or highlight quoted text in such a way that I can easily discern quoted from new (for those who like to reply to one paragraph at a time)? If not then shame on Yahoo! for not incorporating features that save me time and are well done by Google. For that matter, if they don't have keyboard shortcuts then shame on them for not incorporating an indispensable part of standard UI.
Re:well actually (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Gmail question (Score:3, Interesting)