Yahoo vs Hotmail vs GMail vs Mail.app vs M2 vs... FIGHT!
Monday, 11. August 2008, 19:25:13
All-new Yahoo Mail Beta
Maybe this isn’t fair because I have only had a Yahoo account for less than a day now, but GMail’s interface has spoiled me. The first thing I noticed on Yahoo’s all-new beta mail, is that it looked too much like the fancy javascripty version of Hotmail. Then I couldn’t find anything. On closer inspection the icons aren’t that bad, but I just don’t like any of the colour themes. I want a cleaner interface. Ads are part of the deal for free email but at least the banner ad is down the side and you can remove it after a few seconds. The worst thing about Yahoo mail is the Home page. I want to go straight to my emails, I don’t need news and stuff that I can see in another browser tab when I want to look at my email. Yahoo already has a page that shows me news (though it looks too much like MSN). The tabbed interface is interesting, but I want to get rid of the ‘Home’ tab and I am disconcerted that it is possible to close the inbox tab. One user interface quirk is that it takes over some of your browser’s keyboard commands. While this is supposed to look like a traditional email client, it is still webmail, so to me it would be better to stick with the web browser’s UI conventions. For example, in GMail and Hotmail classic, when I am reading a message I can hit the backspace button to go back, but in Yahoo this sends the message to the trash. I know using the backspace button to go back is a trowback to IE, but I like using it even though I am a Mac Opera fan. And I especially don’t like how all-new Yahoo mail takes over CMD+W (in Safari, but not Opera). I want to close the browser window/tab, not the virtual tab in Yahoo mail!
Yahoo Mail Classic
When I switched from all-new Yahoo Mail to the Classic version (yes, I gave lots of feedback
) I was first presented with the Sand theme, which is not the colour of sand. Instead it made me think of faecal matter. Ugh. Yahoo Mail Classic isn’t that bad, when you set the theme to standard blue it does look cleaner, but on the other hand it looks archaic. Neither do I like the way it doesn’t go straight to your inbox.
Hotmail
Even in classic format Hotmail is too cluttered, but that’s partly because I don’t like the themes. I really, really don’t like Windows XP’s Luna themes, and Hotmail’s imitation looks even worse. Unfortunately I can’t use the new, more javascripty Homtail because Microsoft won’t let Opera or Safari near it, but maybe that’s not too bad. Last time I used the ‘full’ Hotmail I set it straight back to ‘classic’, partly because the banner ad takes up far too much room at the top of the page. On the plus side, I very rarely get spam via Hotmail. Though I do get loads of spam chats somehow.
GMail
First the bad bits: I can never figure out where the buttons are, and am not sure why some are links and some are buttons. There is a labs feature to read plaintext mails in a monospaced font, but in Safari it uses an horrible, tiny font. In Opera this font is larger and smoothed, but it is still not my browser’s default. This is bad. Plus, sometimes the UI takes a while to catch up to what you just did. For me though, the good far outweighs the bad. First, I don’t have to click another link to get to my inbox, it’s there as soon as I go to the GMail page. Second, the conversation view is very nice. Third, POP access via other clients is sweet. Fourth, the gadget on my Google home page is super handy. Fifth, the ads aren’t intrusive and often they aren’t ads! For the future, GMail needs some major UI overhauling to sort out the buttons, links and listbox, but I can get by while my main access is via Mail.app.
Mail.app
Mail.app 3.3 in Leopard (OS X 10.5) is the best email client I have used so far. My paradox is that I don’t like the preview pane in webmail clients or Outlook (I prefer Conversations with autopreview, which in 2003 is danged hard to set up), but I do like the preview pane in Mail.app and M2. I think it’s something to do with the sizes of the windows, but I may just be deranged. Mail.app is also pretty, in the strange way that all Leopard apps are strangely good-looking even though in purely objective terms they should be ‘plain Janes’. I also like reading and composing mail in plain text in a monospaced font like Bitstream Vera Mono or Deja Vu Mono. Mail.app lets me do this. And the search is better than Outlook.
M2
M2 is very weird compared to any other client since it doesn’t use folders and in the default ‘Unread’ view, messages disappear once you select another one. Apparently Opera (and many other mail client UI designers) think that simply glancing at a mail means you have read it and dealt with all its contents. It takes a little setup to get it to act the way you want, but it’s filter concept is great, especially the way filters can learn as you add or remove messages from them. The best thing is that since it is part of Opera you can turn off GIF animation. The reason I don’t use it is because Mail.app is just a tad better and to me it is nice to have a separate email application so that I can change window sizes independently and have them in different Spaces. Plus, Mail.app is just nicer looking.
Outlook 2003
Outlook 2003 is what I use at work and I find it usable. Searching for mails is not nice, the 2GB limit on .pst files makes me slightly paranoid and it’s a Windows app, so even in the Windows 2000-style theme it’s not going to be pretty and I’ve never liked Office 2003’s button icons (though there are extremely few icons I like). However, for some reason I do like Conversations with autopreview and the preview/reading pane turned off. This means I can leave an email as unread, but still see the first few lines to get the gist of it and then open it later when I want to actually do something about it. Then when I open a mail in a new window I like using the up and down arrows to go through the conversation. There are one or two times when I don’t want to use the Conversation view and I like the way Outlook lets me have a different view for each folder.
Tiscali Webmail
It has all the features you need to make it usable (and has many features I don’t use, like auto-responders), but I don't really like it. It’s not really ugly, in fact it’s quite clean, but it doesn’t look like the rest of Tiscali. Not that that’s a bad thing in itself, it’s just that the difference in the look and feel between the Tiscali branding at the top of the page and the webmail portion is jarring. If I need to send an email when I’m away from my MacBook I can use it, but otherwise I just use Mail.app.
Outlook Express
For some reason, Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to have Outlook Express look a bit like Outlook, yet be developed by a completely different team in a different part of the organisation. That’s no excuse for how bad it was, though. Sure settting up accounts wasn’t any worse than other clients and for reading the odd email it was usable, but it was also buggy and had an arcane mail storage system (I don’t know what Mail.app uses, but then again I intend to use Time Machine for backup - someday). Outlook Express did have one great feature, though (until Outlook 2002 took it): use different Hotmail accounts at one time.
In conclusion, I declare Mail.app the undisputed winner mainly for these reasons: handiness, prettiness and even though I hate audible alerts in general, I like them in Mail.app. However, at work, even if we had Macs I’d be tempted to stay with Outlook for the autopreview and conversation view (or Entourage if it has conversations with autopreview), which is the only thing I can think of that would make Mail.app better.
Maybe this isn’t fair because I have only had a Yahoo account for less than a day now, but GMail’s interface has spoiled me. The first thing I noticed on Yahoo’s all-new beta mail, is that it looked too much like the fancy javascripty version of Hotmail. Then I couldn’t find anything. On closer inspection the icons aren’t that bad, but I just don’t like any of the colour themes. I want a cleaner interface. Ads are part of the deal for free email but at least the banner ad is down the side and you can remove it after a few seconds. The worst thing about Yahoo mail is the Home page. I want to go straight to my emails, I don’t need news and stuff that I can see in another browser tab when I want to look at my email. Yahoo already has a page that shows me news (though it looks too much like MSN). The tabbed interface is interesting, but I want to get rid of the ‘Home’ tab and I am disconcerted that it is possible to close the inbox tab. One user interface quirk is that it takes over some of your browser’s keyboard commands. While this is supposed to look like a traditional email client, it is still webmail, so to me it would be better to stick with the web browser’s UI conventions. For example, in GMail and Hotmail classic, when I am reading a message I can hit the backspace button to go back, but in Yahoo this sends the message to the trash. I know using the backspace button to go back is a trowback to IE, but I like using it even though I am a Mac Opera fan. And I especially don’t like how all-new Yahoo mail takes over CMD+W (in Safari, but not Opera). I want to close the browser window/tab, not the virtual tab in Yahoo mail!
Yahoo Mail Classic
When I switched from all-new Yahoo Mail to the Classic version (yes, I gave lots of feedback
) I was first presented with the Sand theme, which is not the colour of sand. Instead it made me think of faecal matter. Ugh. Yahoo Mail Classic isn’t that bad, when you set the theme to standard blue it does look cleaner, but on the other hand it looks archaic. Neither do I like the way it doesn’t go straight to your inbox.Hotmail
Even in classic format Hotmail is too cluttered, but that’s partly because I don’t like the themes. I really, really don’t like Windows XP’s Luna themes, and Hotmail’s imitation looks even worse. Unfortunately I can’t use the new, more javascripty Homtail because Microsoft won’t let Opera or Safari near it, but maybe that’s not too bad. Last time I used the ‘full’ Hotmail I set it straight back to ‘classic’, partly because the banner ad takes up far too much room at the top of the page. On the plus side, I very rarely get spam via Hotmail. Though I do get loads of spam chats somehow.
GMail
First the bad bits: I can never figure out where the buttons are, and am not sure why some are links and some are buttons. There is a labs feature to read plaintext mails in a monospaced font, but in Safari it uses an horrible, tiny font. In Opera this font is larger and smoothed, but it is still not my browser’s default. This is bad. Plus, sometimes the UI takes a while to catch up to what you just did. For me though, the good far outweighs the bad. First, I don’t have to click another link to get to my inbox, it’s there as soon as I go to the GMail page. Second, the conversation view is very nice. Third, POP access via other clients is sweet. Fourth, the gadget on my Google home page is super handy. Fifth, the ads aren’t intrusive and often they aren’t ads! For the future, GMail needs some major UI overhauling to sort out the buttons, links and listbox, but I can get by while my main access is via Mail.app.
Mail.app
Mail.app 3.3 in Leopard (OS X 10.5) is the best email client I have used so far. My paradox is that I don’t like the preview pane in webmail clients or Outlook (I prefer Conversations with autopreview, which in 2003 is danged hard to set up), but I do like the preview pane in Mail.app and M2. I think it’s something to do with the sizes of the windows, but I may just be deranged. Mail.app is also pretty, in the strange way that all Leopard apps are strangely good-looking even though in purely objective terms they should be ‘plain Janes’. I also like reading and composing mail in plain text in a monospaced font like Bitstream Vera Mono or Deja Vu Mono. Mail.app lets me do this. And the search is better than Outlook.
M2
M2 is very weird compared to any other client since it doesn’t use folders and in the default ‘Unread’ view, messages disappear once you select another one. Apparently Opera (and many other mail client UI designers) think that simply glancing at a mail means you have read it and dealt with all its contents. It takes a little setup to get it to act the way you want, but it’s filter concept is great, especially the way filters can learn as you add or remove messages from them. The best thing is that since it is part of Opera you can turn off GIF animation. The reason I don’t use it is because Mail.app is just a tad better and to me it is nice to have a separate email application so that I can change window sizes independently and have them in different Spaces. Plus, Mail.app is just nicer looking.
Outlook 2003
Outlook 2003 is what I use at work and I find it usable. Searching for mails is not nice, the 2GB limit on .pst files makes me slightly paranoid and it’s a Windows app, so even in the Windows 2000-style theme it’s not going to be pretty and I’ve never liked Office 2003’s button icons (though there are extremely few icons I like). However, for some reason I do like Conversations with autopreview and the preview/reading pane turned off. This means I can leave an email as unread, but still see the first few lines to get the gist of it and then open it later when I want to actually do something about it. Then when I open a mail in a new window I like using the up and down arrows to go through the conversation. There are one or two times when I don’t want to use the Conversation view and I like the way Outlook lets me have a different view for each folder.
Tiscali Webmail
It has all the features you need to make it usable (and has many features I don’t use, like auto-responders), but I don't really like it. It’s not really ugly, in fact it’s quite clean, but it doesn’t look like the rest of Tiscali. Not that that’s a bad thing in itself, it’s just that the difference in the look and feel between the Tiscali branding at the top of the page and the webmail portion is jarring. If I need to send an email when I’m away from my MacBook I can use it, but otherwise I just use Mail.app.
Outlook Express
For some reason, Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to have Outlook Express look a bit like Outlook, yet be developed by a completely different team in a different part of the organisation. That’s no excuse for how bad it was, though. Sure settting up accounts wasn’t any worse than other clients and for reading the odd email it was usable, but it was also buggy and had an arcane mail storage system (I don’t know what Mail.app uses, but then again I intend to use Time Machine for backup - someday). Outlook Express did have one great feature, though (until Outlook 2002 took it): use different Hotmail accounts at one time.
In conclusion, I declare Mail.app the undisputed winner mainly for these reasons: handiness, prettiness and even though I hate audible alerts in general, I like them in Mail.app. However, at work, even if we had Macs I’d be tempted to stay with Outlook for the autopreview and conversation view (or Entourage if it has conversations with autopreview), which is the only thing I can think of that would make Mail.app better.
