MaximumPC 2004 03

THIS MONTH: Yahoo vs. Hotmail!

YAHOO! E-MAIL

Head 2 Head A showdown among natural PC competitors

E

very once in a while some smug dork announces that

the age of “free stuff on the Internet” is over, but we

know better. Sure, the ads are a little bigger these

days, but web e-mail is still one of the best deals around.

We’ve seen hundreds of offers for free e-mail come and

go, but Yahoo and Microsoft’s Hotmail service are still the

biggest names with the most staying power, which is what

you should look for unless you’re willing to change your

e-mail address at a moment’s notice. Who gets your mail

in on time, and who leaves you wishing you weren’t so

cheap? Follow along.

—JASON COMPTON

Speed: Page loads were

sometimes creaky, and

Yahoo loves to ask and

re-ask for your username

and password by default

(you can adjust this

security setting in the

preferences window),

but the mail steadily

and readily makes it

through. Yahoo’s prone

to sluggishness around

quittin’ time, though,

when everybody gives

their e-mail one last

glance before heading

home from work.

Winner: Yahoo

Capacity: No contest

here. Yahoo offers 4MB

for new accounts,

allows e-mails up to

3MB in size to go out,

and even gave us a full

megabyte of overage

before starting to reject

messages. Bonus tip:

Yahoo used to give

accounts a generous

capacity of 6MB, and

those accounts are

grandfathered in. So

if you know someone

who isn’t using his or

her old Yahoo account

and you like the e-mail

address, ask for it very

nicely. Bribes may help.

Winner: Yahoo

Interface/organization:

Both services have a

single, large ad on the right

of the screen, but Yahoo

clutters the screen with

more small ads. Folders

and functions are easy to

navigate, but the layout is a

bit clunky and garish, which

contributes to the longer

load times.

Winner: Hotmail

20 MAXIMUM PC MARCH 2004

Pay services : Yahoo has quite a few pay

services—arguably too many, so don’t make

an impulse buy before reading carefully. The

$30/year package that boosts capacity to 25MB

and vastly improves your anti-spam options is

probably the best deal, although for $10 less

you can have just the storage. A gimmicky

phone-access service is available for $5 a

month. Winner: Yahoo

Features: The stock stationery is cute, the visual HTML editor works about as well as it should, and there’s a

built-in spellchecker. All attachments are virus-scanned, and more importantly, several document types can be

viewed on the page without being downloaded, meaning you can scan a Word document on a café computer

that might not have Word installed. Plus, attachments can be saved directly to Yahoo Briefcase, a 25MB

storage bin that comes free with your e-mail account. Winner: Yahoo

Spam filtering: The

good news is that

Yahoo offers automatic

spam protection, a self-

cleaning junk folder, 100

address blocks, and 15

user-definable filters. The

bad news is that when

we bounced 14 genuine

spams to our test account

(many of which were

caught with other free

spam filters), Yahoo let all

of them through as normal

mail. Oops.

Winner: Hotmail

Search: Yahoo includes your basic case-

sensitive full-text search, but almost

shyly offers an advanced search mode

to scan individual headers using multiple

criteria, searching by date, and selecting

some but not all folders.

Clearly the choice for finding

that elusive Evite.

Winner: Yahoo

Copious space and serious features.

YEEHAH!

YAWHOOPS!

Disappointing spam filter.

http://mail.yahoo.com

MAXIMUM PC VERDICT 8