Alternatives to Gmail?
September 24, 2009 9:02 AM Subscribe
What's the best alternative to gmail?
I ask for several reasons, not just that today there's another massive fault with gmail's system. I've used and dislike both Yahoo and Hotmail. I've been a gmail user since forever and have liked it until recently.
Time has come to search for alternatives. What's out there?
I agree, even though the recent (frequent) gmail outages are very frustrating. There's nothing nearly as convenient or efficient.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:07 AM on September 24, 2009
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:07 AM on September 24, 2009
Zoho offers a web-based email client.
Quite honestly, Windows Live Mail (or hotmail) has really improved over the past few years. If you are dissatisfied with Gmail, you could try it out again.
posted by KokuRyu at 9:11 AM on September 24, 2009
Quite honestly, Windows Live Mail (or hotmail) has really improved over the past few years. If you are dissatisfied with Gmail, you could try it out again.
posted by KokuRyu at 9:11 AM on September 24, 2009
I've been pretty happy with GMX. The web interface isn't as good as the Gmail interface, but it isn't a huge deal for me because I like using Thunderbird to manage all my email accounts, so I was mostly looking for IMAP access.
posted by puffin at 9:15 AM on September 24, 2009
posted by puffin at 9:15 AM on September 24, 2009
There's really nothing that has the featureset of gmail. It's worth noting, however, that during most of the recent gmail outages, there have been alternative ways to access your email. That is, the web interface was sort of broken but the mail servers still seemed to be working. So, it's possible that you can keep gmail but have alternative ways of accessing it. A few options that worked while gmail was down
- gmail app via iphone or ipod touch [don't know if this is true for other phone gmail apps]
- the igoogle page w/ gmail plug in/widget
- IMAP [that is, accessing gmail via standalone app on your home computer]
Other webmail options include fastmail, whatever comes with your ISP, and the ones you've already tried.
posted by jessamyn at 9:17 AM on September 24, 2009
- gmail app via iphone or ipod touch [don't know if this is true for other phone gmail apps]
- the igoogle page w/ gmail plug in/widget
- IMAP [that is, accessing gmail via standalone app on your home computer]
Other webmail options include fastmail, whatever comes with your ISP, and the ones you've already tried.
posted by jessamyn at 9:17 AM on September 24, 2009
If you really like the Gmail interface but want more reliability (and are willing to pay for it), you might consider Google Apps Premier. It's $50/year, but the SLA promises 99.9% reliability (8.76 hours of downtime/year). I don't have any direct experience with it, but I use the free version for my email and have been quite pleased.
posted by tellumo at 9:19 AM on September 24, 2009
posted by tellumo at 9:19 AM on September 24, 2009
I use both hotmail and gmail. Honestly I'm pretty happy with either.
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 9:21 AM on September 24, 2009
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 9:21 AM on September 24, 2009
Something else that might help is to enable the offline GMail in Labs that uses Gears. I don't know how useful it would be in a partial outage (like I have no contacts at the moment), but in a total outage it would be a good backup.
posted by smackfu at 9:21 AM on September 24, 2009 [1 favorite]
posted by smackfu at 9:21 AM on September 24, 2009 [1 favorite]
Take into account that most free/cheap email systems will fail probably as much as Gmail. Server uptime/reliabilty can be expensive.
posted by edmz at 9:27 AM on September 24, 2009 [1 favorite]
posted by edmz at 9:27 AM on September 24, 2009 [1 favorite]
What do you like about Gmail that you don't like in Yahoo Mail or Hotmail.
I've actually always been pretty impressed with all these products.
BTW I use gmail via Imap with the Mac Mail client. I still prefer these interfaces to web ones for email, though I can always fall back to the web ui if I'm on someone elses computer. Accessing your mail via one of these methods seems to be less error prone then through the gmail web interface.
posted by bitdamaged at 9:28 AM on September 24, 2009
I've actually always been pretty impressed with all these products.
BTW I use gmail via Imap with the Mac Mail client. I still prefer these interfaces to web ones for email, though I can always fall back to the web ui if I'm on someone elses computer. Accessing your mail via one of these methods seems to be less error prone then through the gmail web interface.
posted by bitdamaged at 9:28 AM on September 24, 2009
Not sure the last time you looked at Yahoo Mail, but if it was more than a year or two ago it's massively massively different now - it's almost desktop e-mail client-esque, and I think you can pay to enable more functionality and disable ads.
I still heart Gmail a lot and I don't really use Yahoo Mail, but it might be worth checking out if you haven't seen it recently.
posted by agentmunroe at 9:30 AM on September 24, 2009
I still heart Gmail a lot and I don't really use Yahoo Mail, but it might be worth checking out if you haven't seen it recently.
posted by agentmunroe at 9:30 AM on September 24, 2009
Data point: I use Yahoo in addition to Gmail and have found that the spam filter in Yahoo is horrible.
posted by JennyK at 9:33 AM on September 24, 2009 [1 favorite]
posted by JennyK at 9:33 AM on September 24, 2009 [1 favorite]
Nothing comes close, especially with the gradual accumulation of integrated Google services. Gmail/Documents/Calendar/eventually Wave/eventually Chrome is pretty much the inescapable future.
posted by Damn That Television at 9:37 AM on September 24, 2009
posted by Damn That Television at 9:37 AM on September 24, 2009
nthing IMAP suggestion. I view the web interface as an acceptable alternative, not as the reason I use the service.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:09 AM on September 24, 2009
posted by caution live frogs at 10:09 AM on September 24, 2009
They are still at about "three nines" of uptime for the free service, I believe. That is pretty impressive and I would take with a large pinch of salt claims by any other company that they can do significantly better. Getting that level of reliability out of a free service is impressive; the SLAed 99.9% for $50/year is similarly a real bargain. At least in my experience you won't get those kind of numbers for anything near that price in the outsourced-hosting world, especially if you include scheduled maintenance windows as 'downtime.' (Many hosting companies don't include scheduled downtime as actual downtime; Google does, or rather it doesn't have any scheduled downtime that I'm aware of.)
I wouldn't switch based on perceived reliability; Gmail's outages get a lot more press than a similar outage by another service would. This is the problem with being the market leader.
(You used to be able to go to host-tracker.com and get site uptime stats, but apparently they don't offer it anymore or make you pay in order to access them. This is too bad because I was pretty curious what Hotmail's was; back when I still had friends who used it, it seemed like they would get timeouts or overcapacity errors on a fairly regular basis.)
Also, keep in mind that with a few high-profile outages, Google has a strong motivation to stay on top of uptime issues. I would worry more about being on a different provider which hadn't just taken a beating for downtime and might be resting on its laurels. Given that maintaining capacity is a continuous process, not something you can just 'fix,' I'd rather be with the company that's taken its lumps and is going forward having learned a lesson, rather than the one that may not be making service availability a priority.
If you want a different mailhost for ideological reasons that's fine, but I think you'll be sacrificing reliability or features to get it. There's a reason why Gmail is #1 right now, and it's not (yet) inertia.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:35 AM on September 24, 2009 [1 favorite]
I wouldn't switch based on perceived reliability; Gmail's outages get a lot more press than a similar outage by another service would. This is the problem with being the market leader.
(You used to be able to go to host-tracker.com and get site uptime stats, but apparently they don't offer it anymore or make you pay in order to access them. This is too bad because I was pretty curious what Hotmail's was; back when I still had friends who used it, it seemed like they would get timeouts or overcapacity errors on a fairly regular basis.)
Also, keep in mind that with a few high-profile outages, Google has a strong motivation to stay on top of uptime issues. I would worry more about being on a different provider which hadn't just taken a beating for downtime and might be resting on its laurels. Given that maintaining capacity is a continuous process, not something you can just 'fix,' I'd rather be with the company that's taken its lumps and is going forward having learned a lesson, rather than the one that may not be making service availability a priority.
If you want a different mailhost for ideological reasons that's fine, but I think you'll be sacrificing reliability or features to get it. There's a reason why Gmail is #1 right now, and it's not (yet) inertia.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:35 AM on September 24, 2009 [1 favorite]
Yeah, I prefer to keep my personal email off the computers of the Evil Empire and of the Hopefully-Less-Evil-Empire (Google).
My cheap personal domain comes with POP and web-based access, and I am pretty happy with it. (I prefer to use a non-Outlook email client rather than a web interface.) Less cheap might be even better, without having to pay much.
posted by Idcoytco at 11:48 AM on September 24, 2009
My cheap personal domain comes with POP and web-based access, and I am pretty happy with it. (I prefer to use a non-Outlook email client rather than a web interface.) Less cheap might be even better, without having to pay much.
posted by Idcoytco at 11:48 AM on September 24, 2009
Who's your Internet provider? Have you looked into using whatever e-mail solution they provide?
Every Internet provider I've used has POP as well as web-based e-mail access, so you can still get to the mail even if you're accessing through some free WiFi somewhere.
posted by amtho at 12:03 PM on September 24, 2009
Every Internet provider I've used has POP as well as web-based e-mail access, so you can still get to the mail even if you're accessing through some free WiFi somewhere.
posted by amtho at 12:03 PM on September 24, 2009
I use Dreamhost's email servers. I use IMAP to check my email. I just use real email clients to read my email. Usually I copy my email off their servers onto my Mac at home every few weeks.
GMail is really better than all the other online email competition, if that's what you want. They are pretty damn good.
posted by chunking express at 12:11 PM on September 24, 2009
GMail is really better than all the other online email competition, if that's what you want. They are pretty damn good.
posted by chunking express at 12:11 PM on September 24, 2009
In terms of features and quality, nothing touches gmail.
posted by timdicator at 12:51 PM on September 24, 2009
posted by timdicator at 12:51 PM on September 24, 2009
I pay $50/year for google apps. That way, when stuff breaks, I actually have a phone number I can call. Trouble tickets actually get answered, without posting to random forums and whatever.
For whatever it's worth, migrating over wasn't too bad -- they even have imap import tools so I could move my old emails to my new account.
posted by ph00dz at 12:57 PM on September 24, 2009
For whatever it's worth, migrating over wasn't too bad -- they even have imap import tools so I could move my old emails to my new account.
posted by ph00dz at 12:57 PM on September 24, 2009
GMail's spam filtering is exceptional. You could use Gmail, then load into an email client like Thunderbird.
posted by theora55 at 1:34 PM on September 24, 2009
posted by theora55 at 1:34 PM on September 24, 2009
Fastmail.fm
Check it out. Not quite GMail, but then nothing is.
posted by megatherium at 2:43 PM on September 24, 2009
Check it out. Not quite GMail, but then nothing is.
posted by megatherium at 2:43 PM on September 24, 2009
Don't mean to derail, but how is gmail better than hotmail?
posted by Majorita at 10:21 PM on September 24, 2009
posted by Majorita at 10:21 PM on September 24, 2009
but how is gmail better than hotmail?
There's a long answer, but here's the short one:
Every conceivable way possible.
posted by allkindsoftime at 4:38 AM on September 25, 2009 [5 favorites]
There's a long answer, but here's the short one:
Every conceivable way possible.
posted by allkindsoftime at 4:38 AM on September 25, 2009 [5 favorites]
« Older Some questions about selling a car | How do I cash a Canadian Student Loan while in... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by Oktober at 9:06 AM on September 24, 2009