E-mail Services Report

E-mail has become a huge service nowadays. Everyone, or nearly everyone has an email account. What five years ago, maybe a bit more, was not so much used, is today a huge empire. And what is responsible for this? Well, basically the email services providers. With the continuos updates of the email experience, more and more people, younger and younger, are creating their email accounts in order to stay in touch with people, for work or to share photos or videos. Emails provide a large number of features and email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo or Messenger are behind this revolution. In this blog I am going to compare three email service providers: Gmail, Yahoo and Mail, which is used by Apple users.

Let's start with Gmail. Gmail has a lightweight, minimalist design for speed and most of the screen is taken up by the inbox. At one time you couldn’t view the inbox and an email at the same time, but a

new ‘labs’ feature splits the view horizontally or vertically with the inbox in one half and the current email in the other. Folders for organizing messages aren’t supported and instead you attach labels, such as work, personal and family. Clicking a label lists all the messages tagged with it. It’s merely a different way of organizing email, and arguably more effective. It takes some getting used to, but if you know the right commands to enter into the search box, you can do some clever filtering that isn’t possible with rival services. There are many different ways to view email and the default shows messages in date order. Priority inbox puts at the top messages Gmail thinks are important, and this works well. Gmail can automatically sort messages by content into primary, social, promotions, updates and forums and these are accessible on tabs. It’s nice to have lots of different ways of viewing email. There are more interface themes these days, and an option to use any image you like for the background. There are more configuration options than most services and overall, it’s excellent. Moreover, it has a large capacity of storage space to store emails and it rarely has a problem, thus being highly reliable. In addition, you can send email with up to 25 MB of content, something other competitors do not have. 

Let's move on to Yahoo!. Yahoo! has a modern look and feel, and themes are available with plain or

photographic backgrounds. The attractive design is ruined by an advert, but you can go ad-free for £30 a year. There’s a panel with the inbox, sent, spam, trash and other system folders, and a list of email on the right from whatever folder is selected. A preview pane can be added to enable you to browse folders, such as the inbox, and read messages at the same time. Tabs are optional and when turned on they enable multiple messages to be opened on different tabs, and new messages to be created on a tab. It makes it easy to switch from reading to writing to browsing the inbox without losing the current view. Menus under the tabs provide access to all the functions for replying, moving, deleting, flagging messages and so on. Clicking Folders on the left enables you to create extra folders to organize messages. They can be dragged and dropped into folders and there are facilities for creating filters that automatically sort incoming mail into the right folders. Messages can be starred and filters created from them to deal with similar ones. Other email accounts elsewhere can be added so you can see all your messages in one place, holiday responses are available, extra email addresses can be linked to the account and disposable addresses can be created. Contacts with Facebook, Google and other import options, and a calendar is available. 

Last on is Mail. If you have an Apple device, such as an iPhone or an iPad, you will have an iCloud account and email is a component of that service. The web-based version is a bit disappointing and less

functional than the mobile versions. On the iPhone and iPad, Mail can be set up to access other email accounts, such as Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo!, but at the website you only have access to iCloud email. In typical Apple fashion, the service is designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind. It has the commonly used three-pane view with email and folders on the left, the inbox listing all the messages is in the middle and the currently selected email on the right. It’s straightforward, easy to understand and looks very nice, but there are no options to customise it. The reading pane can’t be hidden or displayed below the inbox list as it can with Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo!. Folders can be created and emails dragged and dropped in them. Rules can also be created to automatically sort messages into folders too. Making a sender a VIP adds their messages to the VIP mailbox, which is useful for ensuring you don’t miss important emails, but it doesn’t have the custom views that Gmail and Outlook have. iCloud is a simple email service and non-technical people will love the attractive and easy-to-use interface. 


Overall, I believe Gmail is the best email service. Although I personally use more Yahoo! since before it had more options than other services and I have gotten used to it, I think Gmail offers the best features and is the most reliable. Rarely one gets an error with Gmail. Plus, its lack of ads, and it huge storage space is highly appealing, and its user-interface is just getting better and better making it very attractive. Therefore, I highly recommend Gmail, although Yahoo is another good option as well.