Yahoo!

[mishj]

I am so glad to see this forum! With the end of the Google Guy Says website, perhaps I can be a kind of Yahoo! Gal?

I have lots of insider contacts at Yahoo! and can feed a lot of info in here, though obviously nothing that would be illegal to comment on.. however I think it should be stuff you are all very interested in..

Right now for example I can give you some up to date gossip from inside Yahoo!

Yahoo!s have breathed a sigh of relief that the GMail offering is not going to take off with the ferocity that had been anticipated.

The GMail email offering is not as complex as Yahoo!, is not integrated with Calendar, Addressbook, Briefcase, Notepad, any of the Messenger tools and is very much a beta - it crashed for me twice already, plus the Auto Complete feature is nowhere near as good as the Yahoo! equivalent and has a couple of obvious bugs.

With Yahoo! users getting 100Mb space for free now (with fantastic spam protection and access from just about any device), and Mail Plus users getting 2GB of space (with no ads and no privacy worries!!) for just $19.99 per year, I dont think Yahoo! needs to worry!

Mish

[Weedy Lady]

I think the increased Yahoo! storage is great, but it won't solve the problem of the people who never delete their "sent" folder items and manage to fill the whole thing in a short time anyway.

The best thing is that the bulk folder and the deleted items folder don't count toward your quota. THAT is fantastic!

The "fantastic spam protection" is a bit questionable I think. I am still getting 40 to 50 spam e mails in my bulk folder every day from an address that I have not used in public for over 2 years. I will say that I only get about 8 spam e mails a day in the inbox, though, so I guess that's pretty darned good!

You might ask why I keep the address since I am not using it "in public".........well, because it's there........and because I do use it in private correspondence upon occasion.........and because it's free.

Anyway, I for one am glad that Yahoo! rose to the G challenge. Now, if they would just give my web site better rankings I would be even happier. I still do better on Google in the rankings department.

Yahoo! y'all........

[janeth]

Hi Mish,
I agree I think Google really droped the ball on this one. I used it the first couple days it was out and did not like it at all.

[greeneagle]

Sorry, I didn't vote!, IMO - Should have been a 3rd choice: "Who gives a damn"! I will block the ads or shut them out and definitely not pay the $20 - No good outs in the poll! I was using 10-15 emails from 5 services before either started playing this game - TOTALLY NOT INTERESTED IN ANY RESPECT!

I probably have 75 unused e-mail accounts with autoresponers and anything I want in various webmaster hosting accounts just look at the "Extreme Webmaster Plan" here: www.acehost.com -

Why would I need to pay for something I have and probably most of us have 50 times over?

What's the attraction? How many people will pay 20 over hotmail with it's ananimity? No use for either!

Surely you don't really believe hallowed unproven conjectures of reduced spam!

IMO - YO MAMA AUGHT TO SPANK YOU! - She taught you better than that!

Ken

[ronniethedodger]

(bwack) Who ruffled your feathers today Ken? ;0)

Actually Gmail is great. And yes I have a Yahoo account too.

SpamGuard, at least on the free service, is a joke. Plain and simple. I have not yet tested the waters on Gmails spam filtering yet, but I think they will win in that department hands down.

I use Gmail to store web content. I see an article or story, and I stow it away. It is like my little (well large) scrapbook. The targeted ads offer "additional info" more or less, and that is a bonus.

Labels, while hard to adjust to, actually are a very good way of filing. As my scrapbook fills up, I will be able to leverage Google search to find what I need.

Privacy concerns, hah. It is kind of hypocritical to talk about how Yahoo is so innocent when they have signed on with Plaxo which is Search Utility for POP3 accounts (using Outlook, Eudora, etc.) This reads the text of your email too and is connected to the Yahoo engine, and I would trust Google over Plaxo-Yahoo any day of the week.

As far as the Address Book, Calendar, and oh boy Messenger -- who needs it. More of your stuff hanging out there on the Net. But in all fairness, I am sure Yahoo is very respective of your Privacy.

I have only ran into a couple of people who use all of that stuff anyway, mostly kids or somebody who used it once and never used it again. It is not one of those types of things that I would use on a professional basis.

It is amazing though. Google is only beta testing this Gmail, and it caused a hell of a lot of knee-jerk reactions from the likes of Yahoo and MicroSoft. Both of which are going to great expense to up their services -- and for what??? A little old search engine who is playing around with mail now. It is quite funny to see really.

Back to Gmail. It is very lightweight and loads instantly. Mail delivery is quick -- almost instantaneous. I have found no buggy behaviour in it at all, and I have been using it since the beginning. Outside of those (oh my gosh) hideous text ads that everyone is in an uproar over, I will take those over the Flash Banners and Ape Man who flys across the screen at Yahoo and plops his butt right on top of the paragraph you are reading any day of the week.

I use Yahoo as my throw away address. I filter all mail from the Yahoo and Hotmail domains and toss it in my spam bucket automatically on my POP3 account, for I have no personal or business contacts coming from those domains. (this is a good spam filtering technique people).


Yahoo!s have breathed a sigh of relief that the GMail offering is not going to take off with the ferocity that had been anticipated.

Sure. That is why Yahoo is tossing all Gmail invites into the Bulk Mail folder. I think they are very scared -- they are the ones that really got the ball rolling on all these other services getting hyped up all over it too.

Lets take an estimate of how many users of Gmail there are. How many bloggers are there. They all got 3 invites to hand out in the beginning. A month ago they got another 6, I heard of some people getting 10. Lets say that they handed 7 out total each.

According to this article http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/5195814.htm back in Feb 2003


Just 3 1/2 years old, Pyra's Blogger software (www.blogger.com) has 1.1 million registered users, Williams said. He estimated that about 200,000 of them are actively running weblogs. Pyra charges for some higher-capability services not available in the base configuration, but most of its registered users don't pay.

200,000 active users. Lets say that it is double that. There is a boom in blogging since Google took over.

400,000 x 7 =
2.8 million + 400,000 original Gmail accounts =
-----------------------------------------------
3.2 million Gmail accounts Total

Hmmm...I think Google is doing pretty good in just a few months out of the gate, eh?

This is what I see happening E-mail as a platform - Why Gmail Will Win (http://www.webstractions.com/news/2004/06/e-mail-as-platform-why-gmail-will-win.html). Very plausible.

[Dave Hawley]

I didn't bother voting either. The deck has already been loaded. Just look at totally biased wording of the 2 choices.

If you want to be serious simply use. Which would you rather: Gmail or Yahoo mail.

Leave all the propaganda out pleeeeaaaase!