With GMail offering 1 GB (1000 MB) email space for users, popular free email service providers have felt the heat of losing customers and are ready to compete. Hotmail annouced the increment of its 2MB limit to 250MB and Yahoo!, which increased its 4MB mailbox to 100MB after GMail annoucement are also increasing it to 250MB. Did you remember, a year ago or so, there were news saying that Hotmail was going to charge fee!
Well, I think I am an interesting user of emails. I have two Hotmail ids, one Yahoo!, two GMail, one OperaMail along with office id (kantipur.com.np), my sites ids (cricket.com.np/ blog.com.np/ nepalcricket.com), one pro id (wlink.com.np) and my association id (nsjf.org.np) and more interestingly I am using them all regularly checking all the mailboxes at least once a day. So here I find myself qualified to describe the pros and cons of these emails.
GMail
Its offered by Google Inc. and that says all about it. Despite being in beta stage – the best among free mail. Why? Because of three options that any other mail service doesn’t offer: search within emails, pop/imap access and fast reply/compose/forward once after it opens. Searching email is indeed a new concept which I find quite useful while pop/imap is just introduced and it rocks. If you get a chance, don’t waste opportunity to have an id.
Hotmail
Offered by Microsoft Inc. and its says a lot: you don’t want to use the product but you can’t live without one. The best thing of Hotmail is that you got a messenger service, which is used by many. (Sorry, I don’t use AOL). The worst thing about it is its span filter – which can’r work properly. If I set the spam filter on, many of my friends message will go there – if not everyday I have to delete at least a dozen one. Remain with it until GMail introduce a messenger service.
Yahoo!
It Yahooes. Good one with good span filter and other facilities like notepad and calendar. Have a good messenger service (although I never liked its layout). I always feel sorry for it because many of may friend doesn’t use it. I rate it good than Hotmail and only problem is that many people doesn’t remember mail.yahoo.com and going to yahoo.com and clicking on mail is a bit long thing to do. But without yahoo mail, its difficult to live by if you use many features of Yahoo!
Others
Opermail is okay – I use it for internet newsletters. Np domain mails are good but most of them don’t have web access and I can only work from either office or home (would create problem when I am away.) Wlink/Kantipur mail offer web access which is good. But nothing like Hotmail/Yahoo!/GMail.
So, whats the best. Hotmail is necessary and GMail is fantastic.
