Esumsoft Forums

In spite of the recent excitement over Gmail, Yahoo Mail remains the best free email service. It is very stable, feature rich, 1 GB storage, and international accounts have free POP3/SMTP access.

I mainly like Yahoo Mail for its stability. Website hardly ever goes down. The website has many features, including address book, calendar, aliases, spam guard, and virus protection. But Gmail has added many features and improved its stability. It is a completion to Yahoo.

For international accounts like Yahoo Canada and Yahoo UK, the POP3 and SMTP access is free. You need to sign up for email at those respective sites and then sign up for the email service. I opened up an account at Yahoo China (at that time, the only 1GB service), enabled POP3, and migrated all my Yahoo Groups to that account.

Yahoo does have its drawbacks. The website loads slow and advertisements are in abundance. And tech support is at best inconsistent. I use POP3 most of time, so I do not use the slow loading website and not see the advertisements. I had to enable Yahoo Delivers to get POP3 access, but in international accounts, I have not yet gotten one advertisement. Most of the time, Yahoo Support is slow or gives canned answers. But since the site is so stable, there is little or no reason to contact support.

Tell me what you think. What is your favorite free email service?

Edit: 16 October 2010

I would give Yahoo! Mail a 9/10.

Thanks Gmail that it started storage wars. Now I don't need to worry if an mail is bounced back (in Yahoo! Mail) because of over-storage. I don't store many files in emails though.

Yes, Yahoo is very stable. It's up %99.9 of time. (Last winter I couldn't log on to my account with Firefox for a week.) It can receive and send messages with attachment of executable files. Poor Gmail can't!

See Yahoo! Mail when it completes integrating with Oddpost. Its interface will be as fast as Gmail's.

I wish Yahoo! Mail supported POP3 for free. But I can live without it. Also, I'm able to block its huge ads by Firefox's Adblock extention.

Having a personalised email is not helpful. Why should I spend my time configuring spam filters? Yahoo does it for me.

I'm not even mentioning Hotmail and shadow over Gmail!

I am liking Gmail more and more, and have recently surpass Yahoo as my best service. I use Gmail lots more than Yahoo. Gmail has become more stable and added many features. They are listening to users more, as shown by allowing option to disable conversation view.

There are fewer POP3 and IMAP errors. Access is very dependable. Webmail access and operation are with little issues.

Besides free POP3, IMAP, and SMTP accesses, Gmail added more storage, allow fetching of external accounts, importing of major email services. Recently, Gmail added voice and video chat and Google phone.

Conversation view is a core feature of Gmail. It distinguished Gmail from other email services. Although most users like conversation view, there was a loud minority that did not. So Google added option to change the view. Besides conversation view, there are more options in Gmail new features, so that you can turn them off if you do not like them.

I don't use GMail or Yahoo a lot, but I do use GMail occasionally and haven't used Yahoo in years (for personal use; of course I test them in PP daily). I have to admit that the 2 things that annoyed me most about GMail when they first came out was conversations and tags. I probably could have grown accustomed to the conversation view if I used it regularly, but my reasons were probably selfish -- it affected how PP displayed messages (ie. it could only show the top one). And as for tags, well, let's just say that there's a good chance that PP will use the idea of tags where folders would have once been used.

Out of curiosity, does the fact that Yahoo has silently added Imap support have any sway in your opinion...?

Jeff, I did not know if Yahoo had IMAP access. Yes, Yahoo having IMAP would sway me. I do not like one aspect of Gmail implementation of IMAP, delete key archives the message instead of deleting it. I'll test it out.

Jeff wrote:And as for tags, well, let's just say that there's a good chance that PP will use the idea of tags where folders would have once been used.

Keep in mind that even before Gmail gave up on forcing conversations (which were only forced in PP's webmail mode anyway), it gave up on forcing tags. That is, it has been a while now that they support sub-folders (tag1/tag2), thus making it possible to pretend tags are just a regular folder structure (even before that, it was still possible to work with sub-folders using an external IMAP client like OE).

war1 wrote:I do not like one aspect of Gmail implementation of IMAP, delete key archives the message instead of deleting it.

Don't forget they do offer a lab utility that can make IMAP messages be deleted instead of archived. With that utility and the fact that they started to respect the external read status of IMAP messages, I don't see what makes it a unique implementation anymore.

Iwc, I know that Gmail has a lab that can kinda simulate how IMAP is normally implemented. I have one set up. But the change require several steps, not a one button implementation.

Yahoo IMAP feature is nice. I have to test how reliable it is. I just went on Yahoo webmail, as it has several nice features. But the latency was unbearable - 3-5 seconds from the time I type a letter to the time when letter show on webmail. I had forgotten how slow Yahoo webmail is.

war1 wrote:I know that Gmail has a lab that can kinda simulate how IMAP is normally implemented. I have one set up. But the change require several steps, not a one button implementation.

But it's just a one time thing. You do it once and then forget about it.

I am a new user just looking for an email notifier while still using peoplepc.com. I retrieve my mail on outlook but it does not leave a notification of mail in the tray or elsewhere. Don't need anything fancy just a notifier that will tell me I have mail. Lyle

Sounds like POP Peeper fits the bill.