ComScore may have announced Yahoo Mail as the current leader in free email services but it also reveals that Gmail is growing at a much faster pace than either Yahoo Mail or Windows Live Hotmail. Not surprising considering the fact that Yahoo has struggled to keep pace with Gmail’s innovations.
Of course, it’s pretty obvious why Gmail is gaining grounds over the competition. Google is employing its search engine formula of using a clean intuitive interface in its webmail. Gmail already beats Yahoo Mail hands down by offering free POP & IMAP access to all its users and much superior spam filtering.
In addition, Gmail is introducing new power features through its Gmail Labs experiment. Just a glance on Gmail’s Official blog or its Unofficial blog reveals that Gmail has been listening to its users and rapidly introducing several new features on a continuous basis.
We feel that all Gmail needs to do now is rectify its “sent on behalf of” problem while sending mail through your other email addresses and we are happy to note that they have promised that this feature is also on its way. This is the only aspect where Yahoo Mail currently scores over Gmail & Windows Live Hotmail.
Yahoo Mail – Where is the innovation?
Whatever Yahoo is doing to improve its Yahoo Mail is more centred around making your inbox more social by integrating email with Social Networking and Instant Messaging. There are no improvements whatsoever to the core email offerings. So if you are lucky enough to be on a non-US domain which has free POP access, then you are forced to choose between either POP access or email forwarding. You cannot enable email forwarding and also keep a copy in your yahoo inbox for POP retrieval. Similarly, there is no filter based email forwarding either.
Also surprising is Yahoo’s decision to allow its US users to read mail offline by installing their own proprietary Zimbra software. This comes at a time when Microsoft realised its mistake of allowing offline access to Windows Live Hotmail only through its proprietary Outlook connector and decided to enable standard POP access for its users.
The only positive thing Yahoo has done is open up new domains such as ymail.com to allow new users to get their email address of choice.
Google gets criticised for keeping Gmail in beta ever since it was launched. However, Yahoo mail which launched its Outlook styled “All New Mail” interface way back in 2005, still shows the following message while trying to edit filters or POP and forwarding settings in its new interface:
Pardon our appearance during construction : We’re still tweaking the Yahoo! Mail Filters option. Temporarily you’ll need to access it through the Yahoo! Mail Classic interface. But, rest assured, any changes made will take effect once you’ve reloaded the Yahoo! Mail.
This “construction” has been going on for close to 4 years now and considering the fact that the new interface itself has been due to its acquisition of Oddpost, even that is not really “innovation”.
Conclusion:
Gmail is by far superior than Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Hotmail and both have reason to be threatened right now. Further, Google has now made the process of switching to Gmail from other email services much easier. Yahoo needs to innovate much more than what they are doing right now otherwise Google will rightfully end up eating Yahoo’s lunch.
[...] Gmail Innovates as Yahoo Mail Continues to Stagnate [...]