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Free Web-mail is a type of advertising-supported free email service which uses dynamic Web pages and your Web browser to create your email client on-the-fly. Your mail is stored on their server.
For links to other free Web-mail services, and information about ISP-provided remote Web-mail access to a POP-mail account, see my Free email page under the Net access section.
Web-mail has several advantages:
In late 1999 I decided to adopt a Web mail address, as part of a change of Internet providers I got forced into. I did some research and selected Yahoo Mail. Yahoo and HotMail were probably the two biggest and strongest Web mail systems at the time, and HotMail is a Microsoft property, although it didn't start out that way. Google's Gmail is probably going to be the popular favorite for new accounts for a while.
Yahoo Mail is pretty cool. You can create mail folders, store addresses by categories, and keep up to a gigabyte of mail and address records on their servers. You can define a signature,* set email preferences, do rules-based mail filtering to folders, and send file attachments. If you have a POP3-compliant mail account (ISP, employer, or school) you can even have the free version of Yahoo Mail transfer email from the POP3 server into your Yahoo mailbox.
Automatic forwarding to another email address is available only if you spring for the $19.95/year Yahoo! Mail Plus.
| Date | Yahoo Mail storage limit | Ratio to 3MB |
|---|---|---|
| Before July 2000 | 3MB | -- |
| July 2000 | 6MB | 2x |
| June 2004 | 100MB | 33x |
| November 2004 | 250MB | 83x |
| May 2005 | 1GB | 341x |
| June 2007 | Unlimited | -- |
Yahoo Mail has a free download for Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP that makes it the system default email, so when you click a mailto link on the Web you get a Yahoo Mail compose window. Unfortunately it always opens in Internet Explorer, even if MSIE isn't your system default browser, but that's an annoyance, not a show-stopper. This should also work with the email features in the MS Office clients, if you have it.
Once you sign up for your free Yahoo Mail login, you also automatically gain access to a bunch of other free services, (including lots more than I mention here) such as online auctions and instant messaging. You can also set up a simple profile page for any Yahoo login; any time you get mail from a Yahoo user, say "jane_doe@yahoo.com", you can check for Jane's profile by opening "profiles.yahoo.com/jane_doe" with your Web browser.
Yahoo Briefcase is sort of a Web-based substitute for the old floppy disk "sneakernet" trick; you get to store up to ten megabytes of anything on their servers. You can upload a file at home and retrieve it at work, or vice versa. There's even a special "photo album" folder type; if you upload picture files into a photo album folder, Yahoo automatically generates thumbnails for you. If you don't write your own Web pages, that could be an easy way to put vacation or baby pictures on the Web. You can set any Briefcase folder to be private or public. Yahoo user "jane_doe" would have Briefcase stuff, if any, at "briefcase.yahoo.com/jane_doe".
Coincidentally also in late 1999, I got interested in Palm-OS PDAs. Yahoo Mail turns out to have some very nifty features for PDA users. They have a free Windows app you can download, that lets you synchronize address-book and other files in your PDA, your desktop PDA synch software, and your Yahoo Mail account. Add a new contact in any of those three systems, run the synch program, and it'll be on all of them.
Their latest amazing free widget is Yahoo Mobile; if you have a PDA with a modem and a PDA-style Web browser (or a fancy cell phone with a browser) you can set up to access your Yahoo Mail with your PDA, anywhere there's a phone jack. This works with PDAs running the Palm OS and Windows PocketPC.
Gmail is the free advertising-supported Web-mail offering from Google, with 6+ GB storage per user. I'm highly impressed with Gmail. The innovative interface is slicker and more efficient than Yahoo! Mail, which in my opinion was the best before Gmail.
When Gmail was first launched you had to get a coded email invitation from someone with a Gmail account to sign up. Not too long after that they changed it so anyone with a cell phone could get a Gmail account. On Valentine's Day 2007 Google finally opened up Gmail to all comers. Google still says Gmail is in beta testing after three years.
Gmail has small text-based ads which are much less intrusive than the graphical ads in Yahoo mail, and vastly preferable to the annoying, jittering animated ads in things like Lycos mail.
Gmail's ads are focused by scanning your email; this bothers some folks. Even if you're using a regular ISP POP account and a local-drive email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird, if your ISP offers any sort of anti-spam protection, it has to scan your email anyway in order to work.
There's also concern in some quarters because Google apparently intends to keep all subscribers' emails in storage indefinitely, including mail deleted by users, and this data presumably would be potentially available to various levels of government.
None of this bothers me greatly. Consider your ordinary email to be just short of public. Any time you want to have really private email, encrypt it.
Gmail can import all your existing contacts (address book entries) from a CSV text file (Comma-Separated Values). Most email systems can export contacts to CSV text format ... except AOL, apparently; what a shock.* Gmail recognizes most address-book field names on its own, or if you have to, you can just open the CSV file in Excel and massage it.
You can also define a signature text block to be automatically added to the end of your emails.**
Gmail messages are presented threaded by subject, called "Conversation View," and each threaded conversation is categorized and archived as a unit that way, instead of individual messages in separate incoming and sent folders. There's a handy print link which formats the whole email conversation nicely for printing, and several other ways to view/print a whole conversation, including a "More options, Show original" mode that shows the complete email headers.
Instead of folders, Gmail relies on a more powerful idea called labels. You can define all the labels you want, and easily view/search all conversations with a given label. If a particular conversation relates to more than one topic, you can just apply more than one label.
In most free Web-mail systems, if they offer filters at all, the only filter action available is which folder to put the message in. Here are the action options for Gmail filters (any combination):
The above choices are also available manually for any conversation (outside of filters). Archived conversations are still retained as long as your 6GB+ holds out (forever?) and available via the Search Mail or All Mail features. Star is just a handy visual flag for important stuff. Items sent to Trash and Spam get deleted from your view completely when they are 30 days old.
Gmail, even in beta, offers free POP access, in which Gmail functions as a POP server. So if you want, you can use your preferred local-drive mail client with a Gmail account, such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Opera Mail, Eudora, Netscape Mail, Pegasus, or even Outlook. They state they have no plans to change that.
New-mail notifier options:
Firefox Web browser, there's a
Gmail notifier extension for Firefox and Mozilla that works on anything Firefox will run on, including all 32-bit Windows versions. I believe this extension provides new-mail alerts in the browser status bar or toolbar, but not system default email status.
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