YaBOOOO! Or, convince me that Gmail is all that.

November 11, 2011 3:30 PM

I have had Yahoo! email for 15 years, but their newest upgrade is driving me away. For some reason, Gmail just irritates me.

Please talk me out of my distaste for the gargantuan, be-tentacled monster that is Google or speak to me of better email providers.

The problems I'm having with the new Yahoo are that 1) it's now hecka slow to load and 2) it keeps corrupting the attachments I receive, so that if I don't save them the first time I look at them, I can't see them or the email they're attached to ever again.

I have given it a month and it's just irritating me more, so I think it's time to give up on it.

I also hate Yahoo's new chat, but that's not an important feature to me.

I have a gmail account that I use so seldom that it takes me forever to figure out my username. All the different panes of conversation are confusing to me. But mostly I don't like how it keeps trying to use my gmail login for everything. When I go to google.com, there's my login up top (look! I'm still logged in!). Ick.

I don't want to have to worry about being COMPLETELY logged out of gmail when I'm switching around and I worry for some reason about giving more info than I want to to the websites I browse. I use Internet Explorer and only delete my cookies at the end of the day, so it's not like I'm not giving out info willy nilly already, but I'd prefer to feel like I'm actually logged out when I close my email. I hate looking up in the corner and discovering that google is still displaying my username.

I use multiple email addresses (for personal and professional and throwaway, etc) and I use a relatively old PC, if it matters.

posted by small_ruminant to Technology (22 answers total)

All that junk mail and spam that you are getting on yahoo? 95% of it will be gone through Google Mail.Also, stop using webmail and get your mail via Google's free IMAP service on your PC or Mac email client. Things work much more smoothly that way.
posted by Poet_Lariat at 3:34 PM on November 11, 2011 [3 favorites]

I'd recommend using a desktop email client. Outlook if you have access to it, Thunderbird if you don't. There might be others but those are the two biggies for PCs, from what I understand. Once you move away from web-based email access, the email provider is more of a moot point, at least from the perspective you're looking through now. And you get to manage all your email accounts at once.
posted by litnerd at 3:36 PM on November 11, 2011

Response by poster: I would like to be able to access my email from multiple computers. I use at least three very regularly.
posted by small_ruminant at 3:37 PM on November 11, 2011

I was anti-gmail for years. I too have a ton of email accounts.
Then I started at a job where lots of email accounts were blocked but gmail worked.

I now forward all my email to gmail and here's what I like:

- I can reply or forward from whatever email I want. Today I bought a ticket using Orbitz where my account is personal. I forwarded it using my professional.

- Threading. Email conversations are threaded in a beautiful way.

- Syncing of contacts. All my contacts are in 1 place. And I can easily merge duplicates.

- Most of all Search - wow, the search function is out of this world.

Try it. You might just like it.
posted by k8t at 3:46 PM on November 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

You can get a portable version of Thunderbird that you can put on a flash drive and run from any computer you use. That way you wouldn't have to change your email address. I have a yahoo account too, and while I haven't experienced any of the problems you have, there are things I don't love about it. But I still find it better than Gmail, and believe me I've tried to switch. I just don't like it. Have you tried reporting your bugs/issues to Yahoo? I've reported bugs to them before and I found them surprisingly responsive most of the time.

Poet_Lariat: "All that junk mail and spam that you are getting on yahoo? 95% of it will be gone through Google Mail."

I've had Yahoo mail for 10 years and I almost never get spam. Except in my spam folder but that's what it's there for right?
posted by katyggls at 3:47 PM on November 11, 2011

IMAP lets you get to your email from however many computers as you want. That's what it was designed for. And if you're on a computer without Apple Mail or Thunderbird or whatever, you can still use the web Gmail interface in a pinch.
posted by zsazsa at 3:48 PM on November 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

If you'd rather pay for an ad-free service, Fastmail.fm have been offering a good quality service (via Web, IMAP, and POP if you insist) for years.
posted by dirm at 4:07 PM on November 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

I like Zoho Mail - I'm forwarding both my domain account and Gmail address to it.
posted by COD at 5:00 PM on November 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

For almost exactly your reasoning about Gmail, I use (and actually prefer) live.com. Yes, good old Hotmail. It will sync with the Live Mail client. You can choose to group conversations or not. You can have associated accounts and send from any one you choose. It also has a sweep function that I like, which files things easily. I don't often actively sign out, but the sign out link isn't hidden. If you don't select "remember me" when you sign in, closing the browser (not a tab) will log you out. It does try to get a little social-y, but I turn all that off and just use the mail and the sky drive.
posted by sageleaf at 5:05 PM on November 11, 2011

Gmail is great, except you can't have more than 1 account open in a browser at a time, which is so stupid I could scream. But otherwise, it's very easy to use. And it's easy to hide the toolbar that shows you logged in on Gmail.
posted by Ideefixe at 5:59 PM on November 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

I just refused to switch to the new version, despite Yahoo giving me an ominous daily countdown. When the big day arrived, I ignored it again -- and I'm still using the old version.

Maybe you can switch back somehow?
posted by pmurray63 at 6:58 PM on November 11, 2011

One advantage of Gmail is that if you have a Google account, you can have all this other useful stuff tied to it. Like Google Docs, for example. I use that all the time, and I'm not even a power user. It's just nice to have online documents either for easy sharing or for accessing via my phone. Grocery lists, to do lists, forms tied to spreadsheets, etc. I like having certain things there as backup in case I ever need them but am without my own computer. And you can have Picasa tied to it for very easy photo touch-up and sharing, youtube, groups, reader, etc. I find it convenient to have only one account for all of those things.

In regard to logging out, if you're ever switching between computers and are worried you didn't log out on the previous computer, you can go to gmail and look in the very bottom right at the tiny text that says "Last account activity: X minutes ago. Details." If you click the Details link, you get a new window with a button that says "Sign out all other sessions". That way if someone else is using a computer you forgot to sign out on, you logging out from the new computer logs you out of that one too.

If you have multiple Gmail accounts, you can enable multiple log in. That allows you to log in to multiple accounts and toggle between them as needed. You can also enable one account to control another. For some reason this seems to pre-load the controlled account into your list of toggleable accounts instead of you having to log in each time. Or you can just have all accounts forward to the main one (though that's not unique to google)

Also you can customize your Gmail view so you don't have more panes and gizmos than you want. For example you can hide the People widget so that you don't see that out to the right of an email. You can turn off web clips. You can disable or minimize things like Calendar, Docs, Invites, preview pane, etc. You can use Google's signature conversation view that groups all the emails in a conversation together or you can turn that off and go traditional. You can have multiple sections in your inbox (important, starred, etc.) or not. That's all just to say that you've got a basket of customization options that may trim it down to something you like better.
posted by Askr at 7:01 PM on November 11, 2011

As someone who has a lot of email addresses, one of my favorite things about Gmail is the ability to show them all in one inbox. You basically tell Gmail to get mail from these other addresses, too, and then set criteria for how things are displayed. So when I log into Gmail, I get my personal email up top, and then there's a spacer and a different account name, and then there's the email for that account. Then I have two more addresses. I think that you can have up to five different inboxes. I use this and the multiple login feature, above, to manage seven different email accounts. I can't imagine having to log in and out of each of them.

Email threading, contact syncing, and the amazing search function are also bonuses.
posted by MeghanC at 7:49 PM on November 11, 2011

I have gmail, but I also have a zoho.com account for job-related mail. you might want to check it out - lots to recommend it. don't let "for business" scare you off - they're ok with personal usage, too.
posted by batmonkey at 8:09 PM on November 11, 2011

Zoho is great, if I wasn't married to google because of integration of google voice, I've probably go to Zoho. I sent them an email asking about something or other and got a highly personalized response the next day. By which I mean, a response from a real person who had really looked into what was happening. I sure liked that. And they equal or exceed googles offerings of docs and calendar and all of the rest of it, from what I could see, and beat live, too.

But I'm a sprint cell phone user and the integration with google voice is just the absolute best thing that can happen to voice mail, just overall to a phone account. The contact management is great, the fact that I can shunt anyone who calls me off into either a spam account or, even better, just tell them "This number is no longer in service" — how great is that? Answer: really great.

But I've come to really like gmail since they now allow us to use heirarchical arrangement off our email account, and not just use their stupid labels idea/ideal. I mean, okay, great, if that's what you want, cool — use it. But they forced it down everyones throats for long years — THAT left a bad taste in my mouth for a long time.

I'd say to just try gmail for a few weeks, set it up so you can still use your yahoo account from inside the webmail interface, you'll not be losing anything.
posted by dancestoblue at 10:00 PM on November 11, 2011

I love Gmail.

However, you say that you don't, so the obvious choice is live.com. Microsoft products are mildly attractive because of great products like SkyDrive, plus online syncing of Word, PPT and OneNote.

I myself would switch to Live, but Gmail just has so many great features.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:34 PM on November 11, 2011

@Ideefixe I have 3 Gmail accounts open in one browser right now. You just have to enable it in each account. It works fine. There was a glitch a few months ago when they integrated some stuff, but now it's fine.

Yahoo's spam filters are out of whack: it both lets through stuff I don't want to see AND regularly catches stuff from mailing lists and people that I DO want to read. Drives me nuts! This doesn't happen on Gmail.

There are many nice features under the gear in the top right of Gmail -- both Labs and Settings -- that make it easier to use. You can kill threads if you don't like them (I think), add an Undo Send (for a few seconds), and so on. Some of those tweaks might make it more palatable to you.
posted by wintersweet at 10:54 PM on November 11, 2011

Try GMX mail. It,s front end is more like Yahoo (of old) and it has a lot of the extras of gmail. Lots of other stuff too such as having up to 10 addresses in the same account and same login.

GMX.com. Well worth the look. I am confident enough in the spam filters to list my address in my profile.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 11:15 PM on November 11, 2011

I assume you are paying an ISP for internet access. Is there a reason you don't use their email service? I can't think of a single one that doesn't also have a webmail function.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:02 AM on November 12, 2011

Can you use another browser only for email? Chrome, Firefox, Opera, whatever. You could also login with a Chrome incognito page.
posted by Salamandrous at 6:08 AM on November 12, 2011

I switched from yahoo and hotmail to GMail a long time ago, when they became large, unwieldy monsters. I don't like Google on principle - large behemoths stifle competition, innovation and consumer choice, so I use only GMail - no Google docs, picasa, Google+ etc.

After about 6 years now, I am slowly using Live, but there are a few caveats

Yahoo still does not allow email forwarding, but allows aliases-, which pretty much similar in the end. Hotmail does not allow IMAP (the paid version does), ostensibly because most people access web-based email from a browser.

Hotmail has long had the stigma of being a cause of originating spam, so some sites still don't accept hotmail addresses (stupid!).

From a long term perspective, I would suggest that you find a reliable web hosting provider and get your own domain name - this usually comes with 20 email accounts at the minimum. You have to spend a bit at the first, but gives you a professional email address and you can then auto-forward your emails to a web provider that you like.

If not, then either fastmail.fm or Live is your best bet.
posted by theobserver at 10:33 AM on November 12, 2011

The recent design changes mostly suck, but GMail is one of the best pieces of software I have ever used. It's sort of like a graphical mutt with all the advantages of running in a browser and very few of the defects of old-school webmail systems. With keyboard shortcuts enabled and some tweaking of Labs features, it's hands-down the best experience of e-mail I've ever had - years of archives readily searchable, grouping by conversation, easy filtering, multiple labels per message (as opposed to a single folder), near-perfect spam protection - all this stuff is so nice that it's pretty much ruined me for any other mail system.

Which is why I think that if I had it to do over, I'd probably choose not to start using it, because I'm basically an addict, and I'm getting more than a little worried about how much of my life is mediated by Google products. If you feel kind of squicked out by them tracking your login across all those sites, that might be a pretty good reason to avoid GMail.
posted by brennen at 10:47 AM on November 12, 2011