T
rying to find the best web-based email provider is like trying to
pound a nail into a board... using your forehead. It’s not that the
Internet landscape is lacking in contenders; rather, there’s such a seem-
ingly endless batch of them to slog through that it’s a maddening chore to
choose the best one.
So what’s an Internet newbie to do? In short, read this article. We’ve
rounded up the four most popular services on the net and pitted themagainst each other in an epic email deathmatch. Can Yahoo Mail frag
Gmail? Will MSN Hotmail just turtle in the corner and pick off the strays?
Does AOL Mail stand a chance or will it resort to button-mashing?
And this isn’t just a one-note melee. We’re letting the email
applications slug it out across four categories. After all, space isn’t
everything; it’s all about the experience. Now if only we could find the
people who have already taken all the MaximumPC user IDs....AOL Mail vs. Gmail vs. Hotmail vs.
Yahoo Mail
AOL MAIL
http://www.aol.comhead 22 headTWO TECHNOLOGIES ENTER, ONE TECHNOLOGY LEAVES
AESTHETICS Checking your email
shouldn’t cause eyestrain. And you
shouldn’t have to pull out a manual or wade through a
cumbersome help file just to figure out where to click half
the time. With that said, none of our contenders achieved
the holy grail of online email—an advertising-free setup
that’s painless to use. But some did achieve meritorious
marks for usability, while others made us bang our heads
against the keyboard in frustration.
When it comes to the cleanest interface, Gmail wins
by leaps and bounds due to the simple fact that when you
want your email, that’s what you get. The other three ser-
vices spam you with a “home page” full of advertisements,
prompts, and queries—it’s just information overload. With
Gmail, you get your email. That’s it. Can you say winner by
default? WINNER: GMAILBY DAVID MURPHY16 MAXIMUMPC JUNE 2007
CAPACITYCAPACITYCAPACITY Gone are the days when Gone are the days when
email accounts were limited to megabyte
capacities. Now, 1GB seems to be the de facto baseline
for anyone launching into the webmail business.
AOL Mail claims it offers unlimited storage, but a user
is limited to 1,000 pieces of new mail in the ol’ inbox at any
given time, with a 16MB limit per message. After one hits
the big wall, all new messages are returned to sender. On
the surface, that seems better than Hotmail’s paltry 1GB
of storage, Gmail’s 2.83GB (and counting) of storage, and
Yahoo’s soon-to-be-but-not-as-of-this-article’s-creation
increase to unlimited capacity.
But we’ll take Gmail’s unlimited message capacity over
unlimited megabytes. A typical email account can easily
push past 1,000 messages (Spam and archives!) while still
staying under 3GB or so. WINNER: GMAILround^1
round^2
GMAIL
http://www.gmail.com