The Email Thirst!!
This may all seem a little dumb, but when I recently set out to find myself a new email provider, it wasn’t so easy. Based on my experinence, this is what I came up with. Choosing an email service is an important issue for several people, because if you choose a bad email provider, then it can haunt you for years. Here I’ll compare and contrast some popular free email services, listing their merits and drawbacks along the way.
Gmail:- Google redefined email when they launched Gmail on April Fools Day, 2004 (everyone actually thought it was a joke at first). Gmail took the industry by storm by providing hundreds of times what the likes of Hotmail had been offering back then. Ever since, Google has regularly added new features like ability to access POP3 accounts, rich formatting(which hardly anyone uses). Storage is currently 2.4GB and is increasing. Spam protection is the best I have seen anywhere. The interface is very clean, with ads tucked away discreetly in the sidebar, and there are several innovative features like conversations, labels, etc. However, the drawback with Gmail is that you cannot directly sign up, but you must first get an invite from an existing Gmail user, but there is no longer any shortage of gmail users, so getting invites is no longer difficult.
Other possibilities include using Gmail as an online hard drive, either through software or online.
Gmail RATING:- :bingo:
Yahoo! Mail:- It is one of the most widely used email services and has an Indian version at Yahoo.co.in which is used by a large number of Indians. Features include 1GB free storage, ability to access emails from POP3 accounts, a good but not great spam filter, and you will get spam creeping through if you use it a lot. The interface is good, but a little cluttered at times.
Yahoo! RATING:- :tup:
Hotmail:- Once the king of email, Hotmail has not only fallen, but it has fallen to the absolute pit of email standards. Riddled with spam, phishing, and much more. In my opinion, this is one of the worst email providers out there. Microsoft are also discriminatory in nature and provide 250MB storage only to Americans. Everybody else must rot with a measly 25MB of storage :furious_tb: !!! The only reason I mentioned it here is so that nobody ever has to suffer it.
Hotmail RATING:- :tdown:
Bluebottle:- An upstart providing storage of 250MB but gaining popularity because it provides both POP3 access, import and also import from other providers such as Yahoo! and Hotmail. They are currently not accepting new sign ups because of an infrastructure upgrade.
Bluebottle RATING:- 
Rediffmail:- India’s most popular portal and email service is still going strong. It quickly caught up with Gmail’s 1Gb, while others could only stare, and saved a lot of users in the process. The interface is relatively simple and uncluttered. But beware, the spam protection is not very good, and there is a lack of features such as ability to access POP3. So, Gmail and Yahoo! would present better options.
Rediffmail RATING:- 
Indiatimes Mail:- Indiatimes has been late to catch up with the gigabyte generation of email and has recently upgraded to 1Gb plus Infinite Inbox technology (which allows you to receive emails even when you cross 1Gb, but with some limitations). However, it’s too little, too late for many, since Indiatimes lack several important features such as POP3, imports, etc. Moreover, Indiatimes is severely crippled with spam and advertising, so it’s not a good option.
Indiatimes RATING:- :boxed:
Sify Mail:- Yet another service that has miserably failed to cope with the gigabyte generation of email. From what I last remember, their storage was only a few MB’s and they don’t even have a features page for their email, so if you’re getting yourself a Sify mail account, then expect hell !
Sify RATING:- :sick: 
~~~~~ The Phishing Problem ~~~~~
With the recent advent of phishing (click to know more), email services have had to secure themselves. Gmail’s detection of faked/spoofed email ranks the best and Yahoo! comes a close second, but nobody else here mentions such features. Since phishing is being taken more seriously every day, all of these providers are likely to incorporate anti-phishing measures sooner rather than later, but for now, only Gmail and Yahoo! officially provide phishing protection.
Special Mention:- Mail2World ~ I have used very little of their service, and have found nothing extraordinary with it. They offer a lot of mail2***.com domains, but the interesting part is that they offer unlimited storage. If anybody’s used this, then they are welcome to comment.
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ahem, that’s quite nice but I can say that you are highly biased in favour of GMail.
For normal email uses, its OK, but then, you need to push the limits to really know what’s good and what’s not worth it.
GMail: True that its cool, spam protection is quite good, the storage is quite large and all that. But somethings that you said are not correct & I’ll point them out. The luxury of using GMail account as a storage drive is not exclusive to GMail. It can be done for any other webmail service as well, though no one seems to have done it. Attaching files to emails in GMail is quite easy, you don’t have to wait for the file to be uploaded to the GMail server as in other webmail services, but Google is extremely paranoid about the file types that attached. Besides simple attachments like images or text files etc. try attaching DOC or EXE files etc. & you’ll know what I mean, you can attach them, when you need to do it sometimes even when your files(DOC, EXE etc.) are pefectly on level.
So GMail is good but its not ready to be the primary every-day usage email for a lot of people, and I don’t use it too often either, not yet, even though I don’t attach the EXE or DOC files.
Yahoo! Mail: You didn’t think it up as a good enough service on par with GMail, but for me, its better than GMail, the reason being that I use it regularly, its my primary web-mail service and I check my other primary POP3 email accounts in Yahoo! as well. The problem with Yahoo! as I see it is its big banner ads but comparing to the service provided, I think that its acceptable. I don’t think why you consider the interface cluttred as I never thought so even when I first signed up on Yahoo! years ago. All its links are neatly arranged in the left menu and all your folders are displayed below them, just like in GMail where the folders have been replaced by labels.
SPAM is rampant but its not that bad in Yahoo! as when you mark an email as SPAM, Yahoo! filters it next time its received, its an ever-learning process.
Hotmail: Now you are particularly harsh on Hotmail, because I don’t see any problem with Hotmail except its storage size of 25MB, and I’ve been using Hotmail for about 7-8 years, longer than any other service that I use. Its SPAM filters are quite effective as per my experience and I’m obviously wise enough to not fall for any phishing attempts, however rare they’ve been with me. The storage of 25MB is quite enough for your normal email usage(the earlier 2MB wasn’t), if you are not planning to use your email account for storing heavy files/documents/images/softwares etc. Really, I’m quite un-surprised when people fawn on GMail & rave on about the GBs of storage provided by it even though they hardly use 50MB of it. I don’t believe in the concept of keeping emails forever and consider its believers to be nothing short of idiots, simply because not all emails are worth storing forever. So like I said, if you are not gonna use your email account as a storage device for your files, then 25MB is not meagre, my Hotmail account is barely 5MB full and I get quite a number of emails everyday. The reason is that I delete the emails which I don’t need to keep and forward important emails to my POP3 account so that I can download that email in Outlook Express to keep it on my PC, other emails which are required for short periods can remain in my Hotmail without clogging it up. Its a matter of choice ofcourse!!
Rediffmail: It offers 1GB, ok, and the interface is neat & its fast. But its plus points just end there. SPAM filters are not even at par to standards(ofcourse they are an Indian company and are used to providing sub-standard stuff like other Indian companies which take the consumer for granted), I don’t even think that they use the likes of SpamAssasin or Bayesian filters. One good thing is that it’ll notify you of new email, in your Rediffmail account, on your mobile via SMS if you can shell out few hundred ruppees annually.
Indiatimes Email: Even saying something against this service is the waste of my precious time, its not worth it. Talk about spam protection, I don’t think it has any spam protection as they themselves SPAM the users with their offers & don’t let the users un-subscribe, I wonder why their users suffer them. As a company they suck big time with XSS holes in their over-blown portal coupled with pathetic service and ignorance towards users safety being reflected in their arrogant behaviour of not patching up the security holes in their website even when they have been made aware of them repeatedly!!
Another Email service that is worth mentioning is Gawab.com. It provides 2GB of FREE storage(yes, that’s right) and the ability to send/recive your emails via an email client like Outlook Express or Mozilla Thunderbird etc. with full POP3/SMTP support. The webmail feature is ofcourse available, along with the ability to attach 50MB of files(its greater than anyone else with Yahoo! allowing 10MB and GMail allowing 20MB), SPAM and Virus protection, multi-lingual interface supporting 14 languages. You should look up its feature list to know more.
If you are looking for a free email service, then you should keep somethings in mind and most important of them is that you should not expect them to provide you POP3/SMTP support. Very few, like Gawab.com, will provide you with it, so don’t expect it. Secondly, be it a free or commercial service, don’t expect them to be good enough to block all SPAM, because its not sent by machines with a definite thinking thats been programmed into them, its sent by humans who think and a lot of them know about the working of the current SPAM filters and thus they keep refining their approach to defeat those filters. So SPAM blocking is an ever learning process where your software can keep on learning on how to block SPAM, aided by you all times ofcourse. Also, you also bear some responsibility for prevention of SPAM. If you know an email address(either yours or someone else’s) then you shouldn’t go around giving it to every Tom & Dick out there, or post it openly on public forums or blogs etc. either in plain text or like some smart people do( abc [at] example [dot] com ). You shouldn’t take spammers to be fools, not all of them are, and once your email is harvested and parsed into a proper email address, its put in lists which are shared with others, so you can bet your bottom dollar that the dumbest of the spammers will also get it somehow. So in this case, obviously there’ll be an increase in the SPAM on that email address and you can’t hold the email provider liable & curse it for being crap.
Biased ???
Well, if it has the best features, then it deserves top spot, and it’s almost as easy to obtain as signing up, mayybe easier.
PS - Don’t you think your comment is long enough for an independant article ?
On another note, if you want, you can access your Yahoo! Mail or GMail in email clients like Outlook Express or Mozilla Thunderbird by using some free tools available. YPOPs will allow you to send/receive emails from your Yahoo! Mail, using an email client(it features a built in small SMTP server for sending email). For GMail, you can either use Pop Goes The GMail or gPopper. None of them are now in development and gPopper was the next version of “Pop Goes The Gmail”.
Though its a point of view, I wouldn’t say GMail is best, not yet.
Because as per me(and a lot of people share my thoughts), you’ve got to be in the open market to compete with others & GMail is still not in the open market, its still under Beta and an invitation only service, the fact that invites are easily available doesn’t change its status.
Its long but not fit as a seperate article, simply because I’m commenting on your article, not explaining or writing something from scratch.
Despite its length, I think my comment is worth reading, it sort of adds to this article on where you missed out.
you don’t need pgthgm with gmail anymore. in case you forgot, gmail now supports pop.
for transfers, i just use the ren command in DOS to change the extension.
yeah, it supports POP3 access but only for retrieving mails, to send them, you still need to open GMail in the browser, login & send the email. But with PGTHGM or gPopper, you can do all that from the email client in which you are reading the email. To look at it, its rather inconvenient to download the messages to read them in the email client & then hit GMail to send a reply, reading the messages online in the GMail interface is a lot better, atleast you can reply then & there.
yeah sure, firstly it doesn’t work always(I’ve tried sending EXE files by changing their extension to TXT but GMail refused to budge) and secondly, even if it goes, the receiver still has to change the extension back to the original one to be able to use the file(and you’ll have to tell him which extension is for which file if you are sending multiple type of files), a bit too much of a bother in my opinion, considering the alternatives(gPopper?).
Gmail also supports secure SMTP. I’m using it everyday.
eh??
you mean you can send and recieve emails from your GMail account using a mail client without using any extension like gPopper? 
Basics for Surviving Online!!
Some basic stuff that should protect you in the nasty place, called cyberworld, from the unlikable…..
…
8 )) Ofcourse
here are the configs - http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=%67mail&hl=en&answer=12103
That’s pretty cool!!