Web-based email services

Today's digital age, emailing is becoming one form of communication which is used by many people around the world to keep in touch and to share information. I have been using some email services available free on the Internet. The very first email service I had used is from sailormoon.com when I was in Myanmar. There only a few unknown and unpopular services can be used and popular mails such as Yahoo mail, Google Mail were very difficult to accessed. So, the sailormoon mail user interface is just simple and storage limit is only about 500MB, I think. At that time, I don't have any contacts to email except to my dad in Singapore. I had to go to Internet Cafe in the downtown which is about 1hour bus ride from my home because my town is on the outskirt of the city and Internet access is rare and quite expensive.

Then, my friend invited to use Gmail and I also created one Yahoo mail account from BC library. When I used them for the first time, I needed to learn the functions and how it works. This is just some of my past experience of using emails...

Currently, I am using the following services:
1. Google Mail a.k.a. Gmail
2. Windows Live mail (formally known as Hotmail)
3. Yahoo mail

I would like to share some of the pros and cons of using these email from a user point of view. As I am not an expert in email technology, the follow views are just the reflection of my experience and opinions and may not be totally correct.

Yahoo Mail





The Home Page

Yahoo Mail is currently testing beta version which offers new user interface and access of different folders.

Pros

One feature which is very useful to me is its tab-browsing feature, which allows all the messages and folders to be opened and accessed in new tabs(something like tab-browsing in IE 7 and FireFox 2.x). This feature is very useful because I can flip and switch viewing between different messages without closing any messages. Therefore, I can open many mails and I can copy and paste from one message to another. Others mail don't have these feature.
It also allows drag-and-drop function.
And now, it offers unlimited storage. So, there is no storage limit bar and no need to delete any mails to avoid hitting the limit.
The newest feature is IM and chatting. It is kind of light-weight web-based messenger which allows IM to Yahoo contacts without the need to install Yahoo Messenger to PC and accessible using any web-browser.

Cons
Sometimes, there is lags in loading the main page and accessing the messages. And, often, some kind of error messages came out when I clicked Send button. As it is in the Beta Stage, I am hoping the tech geeks from Yahoo are fixing these errors.

Gmail



The Home Page

Pros
It's innovative Conversation view which allow all the replies to a send message to group together. Therefore, all the message are like people talking in conversation and very easy to keep track the replies to any message.
Web-based chatting is also possible to the Gmail contacts.
Its spam filter is also good and can detect most of spam mails to me.
Its search function is also very fast and I can find the message I want.
And its auto-save function saves the new message I am composing so I do not need to afraid of losing and retyping the whole message from the beginning if my browser errors or system crash(worst scenario).

The most recent thing I had discovered is that it allows files of up to 20MB to attach to email which is not possible in the other two mails.

Cons
It does not allow executable (files with .exe extensions) as attachment even they are in the zipped format because it is a virus prevention according to Google. So I can't send my Visual Studio programming files which contains .exe files to my gmail. It has a storage limit of about 2.8G (and increasing at very slow rate).

Windows Live Mail



The Home Page

Pros
Offers interface and appearance similar to Outlook. Live Spelling Checking function show spelling errors in real-time.
5GB of storage which is larger than Gmail.

Cons
Lags in choosing options and opening folders.

So, what is my choice of mail? Not all may provide perfect service yet, but for me I use Gmail as primary mail because of its useful features.