GMail vs Yahoo Mail

The tech world is all atwitter that Microsoft and Yahoo have reached an accord to bolster their market share and advertising revenues. Simply put, Yahoo will use Microsoft’s Bing for its search engine and Yahoo will provide the ad sales for both companies. Of course, they are chasing Google for a bigger piece of the lucrative search engine market share.

Some pundits are calling it the death of Yahoo…which if true would be very sad. I just don’t quite believe it.  Google might get all the glory these days, but Yahoo has a huge market share.  For instance, did you know that Yahoo Sports has 5 million more viewers per month than ESPN? That shocked me. And how about email?  Google’s much ballyhooed Gmail has around 37 Million users, a large number, to be sure.  But, Yahoo Mail has over 104 million users! They are the number one most popular email provider in the world! (Hotmail, by the way, has around 48 million).

The real truth is that Yahoo has never quite figured out how to make any money with their large audience base.

But how do they stack up head-to-head in the email category? Well, let’s take a look and see.  But, understand that I am giving you my personal opinion based my own preferences and how I work. And first and foremost, you should know that I use Outlook for my email reader and my own domain for my mail address.  I pay money every year to have the corkrum.com domain name so, I am definitely going to use it the most. Outlook is also where I store all my addresses for friends and relatives.

However, I do have both a Yahoo mail account and a Gmail account and have used them both. One thing I like about Yahoo is that its Web interface looks very much like Outlook.  I like the familiarity.  But one thing I don’t like is the number of ads that show up on the interface. I realize that is the price one pays for free email, but lately their ads have become a little too sleazy for my tastes.  That usually means they need the money and will let just about anyone advertise. 

The Gmail interface has no ads and is quite clean looking.  It has some nice color schemes that please my eye. And they are beginning to add more features to make it more useful. So here, for me, Gmail is the winner, but just slightly.

As for spam filtering, both do a very fine job. I have read a couple of reviews that said Yahoo did not do a good job. I have not found that to be true at all. In fact, I find their spam filtering to be exceptional.  More spam leaks through Gmail than Yahoo in my experience. And in Gmail, I have to go to the special junk mail box, then click on each mail or click “Select All”, then erase them. With Yahoo, I just click on the word “Empty” next to the Spam box and all the crap mail just goes away.  I never even have to look at it. So for spam filter, I give the edge to Yahoo.

A very important feature for me is syncing my Outlook contacts with Yahoo and Gmail. Yahoo has a wonderful syncing program that can continually sync my contacts in Outlook with their email client. Works like a dream. Gmail does not have that capability.  I must export my Outlook contacts, then import them into Gmail. That means if someone moves, for instance, I must make the changes in two places. Yahoo wins big here.  

As for my own domain email, I can send and receive corkrum.com email inside Gmail and people never know that I was using it. Yahoo can do that, but only for a paid email account.  The winner here, for me, is Gmail.

So, because of this last feature, I personally would use Gmail more often than Yahoo. But, if Yahoo would let me do that for free, it would be my email of choice. 

As for Microsoft’s Hotmail, I would never have an account there after bad experiences many, many years ago…and would find it embarrassing to have an email account with “Hotmail” in the name. And many reviews I have read on the subject all give Hotmail less-than-stellar reviews.  They agree with me that the choice is between Yahoo and Google. 

So what is best for you? Maybe neither. But check them both out and see. After all, its free. And if you chose one, remember, you never have to change your email again. That’s important if you move or change local Internet providers.  

My next blog will compare Yahoo Calendar and Google Calendar.