Head to Head between Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, and Hotmail

Web Worker Daily has a head to head post comparing Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and Hotmail. Pretty interesting…

I’ve never really used Yahoo! Mail, so I can’t really comment on that (although I’ve heard that it’s in their terms of service that they sell your information to other companies — if someone could confirm that would be great), but I have used Gmail and Hotmail. Here are my thoughts on those:

Hotmail has an insane amount of spam, and absolutely horrible spam filtering. Unless you set your account to only accept whitelisted email and put everything else in your junk mail folder, the spam makes it pretty much useless. The new Windows Live Hotmail interface isn’t that great, and has tons of advertising. It’s also pretty slow to use.

Gmail is my favorite of the three. It’s got a better interface than Hotmail, although it takes a bit of getting used to (the conversation view is a little different than the chronological views of most email programs). The spam is also significantly lower than most email accounts. I’m interested to try their new enterprise accounts, where you get the benefits of Gmail, but with email at your own domain…

But, I have to say that I don’t really use any of the above at the moment. I’m currently using Entourage on my Mac (the Mac version of Outlook), which is okay. I’m thinking of switching to Thunderbird, at least for my professional email correspondence…but have had some pretty negative experiences with Thunderbird for PC (but that’s a completely different post). I use webmail for each of my domains, as well as an account from the ISP that my husband works for.

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