Running on Webmail

In a previous entry, I wrote about how I've decided to forgo installing a POP/IMAP client after my last hard disk crash. Instead, I'm going 100% Webmail. I have several Webmail accounts, the oldest one being my account at mail.com, which gave me the techie.com address. Since then, I've opened, and actively use, accounts with Yahoo!, fastmail.fm, and gmail. I might add that it's only mail.com where I paid for a premium service.

The table below summarizes what I like and dislike about each service:

Yahoo!'s 100MB (and now, 250MB) storage allocation was the first for a major Webmail provider, and others followed suit. That allowance, incidentally, excludes the Trash and Bulk folders.

In regard to its spam detection, Yahoo!'s seems to be smarter than others', catching close to 100% of spam and moving them into the Bulk folder. You can examine the messages there if you want, or simply empty the folder outright. I wouldn't recommend the latter because Yahoo! still marks some legitimate mail as spam. On the other hand, my other Webmail providers let too much obvious spam through while blocking legitimate mail. I know because friends have tried to send mail to my other accounts but the servers returned a spam rejection notice to them.

On the downside, Yahoo! gives me “Document contains no data” errors, which the other providers don't. It doesn't happen often, but often enough to be annoying.

mail.com, to tell you frankly, has a thin free service feature set. The 10MB storage allowance hasn't changed since I first opened an account there about 10 years ago. Spam detection and handling are poor: I still get too much spam in my inbox, while legitimate mail gets blocked – the latter without my knowledge because mail.com simply deletes all suspected spam. Still, I got a neat techie.com address from them, and there are several others, some free. My own suggestion for you in regard to mail.com is that, if you're getting a premium mail address, might as well enroll in another premium service, such as mail forwarding which will automatically forward your mail to another mailbox of your choice.

fastmail.fm has without a doubt the best interface I've seen in a Webmail service. You can open up a message, then from the same window delete it or move it to another folder, and move to the previous or the next message, or go back to the mailbox. In contrast, with the other providers, deleting a message or moving it to a folder automatically moves you to the next one. A tooltip over the next and previous message arrows gives you the subject of the next and previous message, respectively. Thus, if you're fairly sure that the next message is spam, you can go back to the mailbox and skip reading the suspected spam. A slight omission is the absence of the move-to-folder buttons at the bottom of the message – if you want to move the message to a folder, you'll have to scroll back to the top of the message window. Speaking of folders, fastmail.fm is the only provider I know of that provides for nested folders. Lastly, true to its name, fastmail.fm is fast in terms of mail retrieval.

gmail raised the bar for storage space with its 1GByte storage allocation. Oddly enough, you can't create folders for your messages. Instead, you “label” them. For example, I have all my mail from the domain i.ph labeled “i.ph”. Then, with one click I can filter my messages so I see only those with the i.ph label. It works for me, but it might be disconcerting for those used to organizing their mail into folders.

gmail is fast, not necessarily in terms of mail retrieval but of its interface. It apparently employs JavaScript to store the index of messages in your mailbox, so that if you return to the index from reading a message, gmail doesn't have to go back to the mail server.

As with all free Webmail providers, gmail sells ad space. And here's where the privacy concerns come in. gmail scans incoming mail and decides what ads to show you based on the content of the message. Privacy advocates claim that those who send mail to gmail accounts have not given their consent to have their mail scanned. My own take on this is that, there's no real privacy on the Internet; get over it. Of course, that's a oversimplification but an extended discussion would be beyond the scope of this blog.

So, what would my idea of a perfect Webmail service be? It would have gmail's 1GByte storage allocation and user interface speed, Yahoo!'s spam filtering and handling, fastmail.fm's user interface and speed of retrieval, and mail.com's cool domain names. Who are your Webmail providers, and what do you like and dislike about them?