All content copyright © 2004-2010 by steve hardyFree email
Have been testing free email accounts lately. Tried yahoo!, gmail and hotmail/live.
I've pretty much dismissed yahoo! mail. In their ongoing efforts to commit suicide, yahoo! makes free mail accessible only from their web interface, and that web interface pummels me with a continuing barrage of ads. To be fair though, yahoo! does seem to provide the best feature set at the moment for their webmail client. And perhaps my usage patterns when using yahoo! webmail have indicated I'm a user who is best served by that barrage of ads.
The MS webmail client seems to serve up much of the same trashy ad content (get rich quick, miracle drugs, cheap diplomas, hot dates, improved body parts) but ads don't update at the same frenetic pace as for yahoo!, and so by comparison, the experience seems somehow less objectionable. (Go figure.)
Finding ads in the gmail web client, in keeping with google strategy, is like playing where's waldo.
Both gmail and hotmail/live are usable from my local outlook client -- my preferred mode of access. Hotmail seems significantly slower than live. But I haven't bothered to measure differences. If it really is slower, I have no clue whether that's due to something on my end, or server side.
So in general gmail is winning, but live is still a contender.
Kinda interesting to ponder the business model that has these giants battling to provide my free email service. My local email client will very soon be a thing of the past and I will be happily using a descendant of today's webmail/social networking clients. My consuming eyeballs will then be inextricably bound to the provider of that service. But I digress.
posted at: 11:52 | path: | permanent link to this entry
just fishing
At a previous workplace, the company had sold itself for a tidy sum, and then a few years later, the company founder bought it back at
a fraction of the selling price. A corporate form of "catch and release"...
posted at: 08:07 | path: | permanent link to this entry
All content copyright © 2004-2010 by steve hardy