Yahoo vs. Gmail

June 15, 2004 6:06 AM

Yahoofeels the heat. Yahoo webmail users logged in this morning to find that they suddenly have mailboxes with 100MB capacity, can send emails up to 5MB in size, and have a much nicer-looking interface.
posted by bingo (53 comments total)

Fantastic. Now I can sign up for 20 times as many chat forums and promotional giveaways.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 6:21 AM on June 15, 2004

Hmm.... First time in two years I went to use my yahoo mail web interface (I use the pop service instead), and I get mail.yahoo.com not found.
posted by psmealey at 6:23 AM on June 15, 2004

I can't get to either login...don't know if it's my dns resolution, or if there's something toes up about both sites.
posted by dejah420 at 6:30 AM on June 15, 2004

I love it.

Competition means that consumers win.

Hear that Micro$oft?

Hear that two-party political system?
posted by eas98 at 6:30 AM on June 15, 2004

Hear that Micro$oft?

From my parents' home in Wyoming, I stab at thee!
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 6:38 AM on June 15, 2004

It's actuall 10MB message size according to their information page.
posted by jaden at 6:41 AM on June 15, 2004

Drat. Just as I hit Post I saw my typo.

actuall -> actually
posted by jaden at 6:42 AM on June 15, 2004

Actually, message size is up to 10mb.
posted by armoured-ant at 6:44 AM on June 15, 2004

Not that it matters, given the vast majority of consumers who believe WindowsXP when it tells them that Hotmail is absolutely equal to email.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 6:45 AM on June 15, 2004

You knew Yahoo wasn't just going to let this whole Google thing slide, you know?

They were the best of a bad lot before, and they finally got called out, and they're raising the quality of their product.

I'm with eas98. Right on. I might not abandon my Y! addy just yet.
posted by chicobangs at 6:49 AM on June 15, 2004

Hmm.... First time in two years I went to use my yahoo mail web interface (I use the pop service instead), and I get mail.yahoo.com not found.

Yeah, today the normally very reliable service keeps going down more often than . . . . well, never mind.
posted by JanetLand at 6:52 AM on June 15, 2004

I have the yahoo plus mail service yesterday and received an angry message from Yahoo telling me that I was far over my mail limit, since I was using 5 mb of storage and that I was limited to -2048.0 mb of storage. You've got to admit, that's a lot of storage not to have.
posted by rks404 at 6:58 AM on June 15, 2004

The interface change is not an improvement in my opinion.
posted by rdr at 7:15 AM on June 15, 2004

I was using 5 mb of storage and that I was limited to -2048.0 mb of storage

Fuck, rks404, get your ass in gear and send a 2gb hard disk to Yahoo. Immediately.

Actually, I think you should. Buy one on eBay for a few bucks, then send it to them, with an apology. Please.
posted by armoured-ant at 7:16 AM on June 15, 2004

Whoops.. What looked awful this morning seems to have improved sometime in the last few hours. I must have caught yahoo in the midst of their transition.
posted by rdr at 7:22 AM on June 15, 2004

I, for one, welcome my new Yahoo mail 100MB overlord.

Just yesterday, I cleaned a lot of stuff out of my 6MB Yahoo mailbox to get my usage down to 40%. Now I'm at 2% of 100MB. I may never have to clean out again. Bad thing?
posted by msacheson at 7:22 AM on June 15, 2004

I'd already checked my Yahoo mail this morning and didn't get any space boost. And yeah, the interface looks nice but it doesn't render my messages well in Firefox at all.

I'd prefer an option to go back to the old interface, my scroll wheel finger gets enough exercise already.
posted by fenriq at 7:23 AM on June 15, 2004

armored-ant - you're right - I'll rush out to Salvation Army or Goodwill and see if I can track down a 2gb drive right now!
posted by rks404 at 7:27 AM on June 15, 2004

Me and the other dozen people who pay the 30 bucks a year for Yahoo! Mail! Plus! get 2 gigs of space (they seem to have cleared up the -2 gig problem) now in addition to our POP3/IMAP access.

I am glad to see this - I have a GMail account, but I really like Yahoo Mail (and Calendar and Notepad) and didn't really want to change my email address. Too much of a hassle.
posted by drobot at 7:28 AM on June 15, 2004

Well, the login screen claims I have 100 Mb, but after I log in it still says 6 Mb.
posted by pmurray63 at 7:31 AM on June 15, 2004

who needs a gmail account? i have two invites to give away.

email me at the addy in my profile with "gmail" in the subject. (to cruise through my filters, otherwise i may never see them)
posted by quonsar at 7:35 AM on June 15, 2004

Finally got into my Yahoo!Mail after trying for a couple of hours. Looks I have 2GB of space available, which is very nice (have had a Plus account for a few years now), so I won't be going to Gmail any time soon. Performance is unusually slow, but I'm sure it'll improve as they work out the bugs.

Unrelated note, Yahoo's spam flitering is actually pretty decent, for anyone who hasn't tried it.
posted by psmealey at 7:45 AM on June 15, 2004

i really like my yahoo premium account, i can send as my other addresses, check it on the road, and i use the calendar and notpad too, now i got 2 accounts w/ 2 gigs of space, what a dilemma!
posted by yeahyeahyeahwhoo at 7:53 AM on June 15, 2004

Well, the login screen claims I have 100 Mb, but after I log in it still says 6 Mb.
And I thought it was just me. Oh well if I have been bumped up to 100MB it gives me a bit of time before I next need to have a clearout.
Plus it renders horribly - the messages get shoved below the menu on the left hand side, on IE (at work) at least - just need to try it on Firefox at home.
posted by etc at 7:57 AM on June 15, 2004

Not to change the subject, entirely anyway, but the BUY IT NOW prices for gmail accounts vary from $5-100. It's not even worth bidding on the damn things. Just find the cheapest BUY IT NOW and "bid with confidence". I just picked one up for $5, and depending on how much I like it, I'll buy a couple more and send them to friends.

Sorry, I know it's off-topic, but interesting nonetheless.
posted by BlueTrain at 8:00 AM on June 15, 2004

my invites are now gone. you can stop emailing me :-)
posted by quonsar at 8:02 AM on June 15, 2004

Yeah, I just got the "You've been upgraded" screen saying I've got 2 gigs of space, blah, blah, faster interface, blah, blah, blah.

And then the site timed out checking my mail. Faster interface, my eye!
posted by fenriq at 8:13 AM on June 15, 2004

I've used Yahoo Mail for years, and have paid for it for about four years. The cost:benefit is pretty good, AFAICS: I've paid something like $30/yr (a year!) for a pop3 box with decent storage and the ability to check third-party accounts -- eventually, they even let me set up to send-as those accounts. (I have six email accounts that I use regularly. I know you're all so impressed. Right. Moving along...)

But what I don't like about Yahoo is that they don't want to hear anything from their users.

And they don't. I challenge you to find a link to a feedback form on any of their applications. I challenge you to locate a feedback mail address. I challenge you to find a way to report phishing. Or even to ask for technical support.

Yeh, $30/yr is a good deal, so I shouldn't complain. But they're not even giving me the small satisfaction of spitting into a black hole.

On the update glitches:

Their update process seems to be a bit wonky. For the first several hours of the day today, clicking on the tabs for Calendar, Notepad, and Addressbook returned errors after a long application grind. But loading them directly worked just fine.

I've noticed this kind of implementatin glitch, before.

As for the new interface, it's too heavy. It renders sluggishly. And they took away some Task control features from the Calendar display (ones I used -- they made Tasks substantially less usable for me, and I don't have a way to tell them that -- see above).
posted by lodurr at 8:17 AM on June 15, 2004

Plus it renders horribly - the messages get shoved below the menu on the left hand side, on IE (at work) at least - just need to try it on Firefox at home.

The same problem exisits on Mozilla, so I imagine Firefox won't be much different until Y!Mail fixes it.

Oh, and my allotted disk space is still only 6 MB.
posted by fredosan at 8:32 AM on June 15, 2004

I'm with rdr and lodurr on thinking that the new interface isn't much of an improvement.

An option to keep the previous interface would have been a nice touch and better still -for the nostalgia factor- would be an option to go back to the original beige Rocketmail interface (those were the days...)
posted by blogenstock at 9:11 AM on June 15, 2004

Yahoo is pretty shitty in any number of repects, but I could see this taking the wind out of gmail's sails.

I've got a Yahoo email account I use purely for commerce; it's registered with any number of websites, and this change has pretty much obliterated any thoughts I had of moving it all over to a gmail account.

And I had no rendering issues using Mozilla 1.6 - speedy and correctly displaying. And the interface seems like a small improvement at any rate, on the previous design.
posted by Blue Stone at 9:17 AM on June 15, 2004

I have 4 Gmail invitations laying about. Contact me at the email address in my user profile and I'll help out anyone who would like one.
posted by keli at 9:18 AM on June 15, 2004

Can someone please give me some advice

I have the yahoo acct with extra space - I get charged $50 annual for it. Normally don't have a problem with that, I like yahoo as a mail service. Three weeks ago I got re-billed for this year, another $50. Obviously I paid for bullsh*t, now. I'm looking all over yahoo for a customer service number or online form and can't find it. Any suggestions? Is there a contact phone number?

I get yahoo premium already with my account, so the extra space was added to that already. But now it looks like all premium accounts get 2Gigs. dag, I feel hosed.

Advice? Thanks.
posted by Peter H at 9:24 AM on June 15, 2004

Peter H, in the welcome email I got this morning, it said that if a user has ordered extra storage space, they will be given a prorated refund. If you are a YahooSBC DSL user who chose extra storage as one of your free extras, you can now choose something else instead.
posted by Hackworth at 9:41 AM on June 15, 2004

For me this is great. I got mine the first couple hours it was offered 7 or 8 years ago (quite by accident) and have used it since as the throwaway signup account and as a constant address through 5 moves and at least as many different providers. There was a period of time that the spam and the original 6 mb limit made it almost useless unless it got cleared daily. They put in decent blocking and here the last couple months bulk mail didn't count against the quota which made it as useful as any of my other accounts including work. They delete bulk when it gets a month old and I tend to ride at 12700 to 12900. Makes for a nice spam-o-meter to boot although it looks like bulk mail may count towards the quota again.
posted by mss at 9:51 AM on June 15, 2004

I'm all out of Gmail invites for now as well.
posted by keli at 10:05 AM on June 15, 2004

[Slight tangent.] How to get rid of those Gmail ads.../.

The day the music died. Hm?
posted by jaronson at 10:16 AM on June 15, 2004

Of course Yahoo would do this right after I got my gmail accounts. The interface is lousy (using Firefox) but there's plenty of space. Now I have to decide between keeping my Yahoo account which has a crappy username, but has all my email, and switching everything over to gmail, where I have a spiffy new name but have to see ads and also has a crappy interface, IMO. I'm already switching my RL email to a gmail account...ugh.
posted by livii at 10:27 AM on June 15, 2004

FYI, Yahoo's troubles maybe related to today's Akamai outage.
posted by costas at 10:33 AM on June 15, 2004

I use my Yahoo! mail for any sort of internet signup. The other one for personal use is with FastMail.

I've noticed less spam in my Y! box recently, perhaps my hitting the SPAM button is working.

I've also gotten used to forwarding spam sent from a Yahoo! address to [e-mail].

That seems to help as well, and they do reply back to me thanking me for the forward, and with specific follow up info concerning it, so it's not just a form letter.

I like my Yahoo!, it serves its purpose.
posted by linux at 10:47 AM on June 15, 2004

rks404armored-ant - you're right - I'll rush out to Salvation Army or Goodwill and see if I can track down a 2gb drive right now!

I've got a 2gb drive here I'll send to them for you. Just need your account name and the address to send it to.
posted by Mitheral at 10:48 AM on June 15, 2004

The extra storage space is nice, but they shouldn't have fixed what wasn't broken...I haven't been able to get into my account all god-damned day.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:59 AM on June 15, 2004

Card Cheat, scroll up, it may not be all Yahoo's fault.
posted by fenriq at 12:06 PM on June 15, 2004

i read this before i checked my yahoo mail, have only used gmail and another webbased pop3 today.

i just have one question where is my damn briefcase folder? Or was i the only person to actually use it?
posted by th3ph17 at 12:13 PM on June 15, 2004

about a year ago i wasn't able to log into my yahoo email acct, getting a message that said there was a temporary problem. i checked back once a week for a few months but got the same message, and emailed customer service countless times, getting no response. i just checked again today and i'm still getting that same message. clearly they want me to use gmail, so i do.
posted by t r a c y at 2:22 PM on June 15, 2004

I have three more GMail invites to give away. Send me an email to the gmail.com address listed in my profile with "mefi" in the title someplace.
posted by John Shaft at 2:23 PM on June 15, 2004

Update to above: they're all gone (for) now.
posted by John Shaft at 3:31 PM on June 15, 2004

Anyone else got an invite they wanna give away? I'd love one. Please leave a comment on the site in my profile.
posted by armoured-ant at 5:33 PM on June 15, 2004

A "Related Pages" link shown next to a gmail message in my inbox points you to an article from The Register discussing rks404's negative storage problem on Yahoo. The email is about the gmail service, and has no mention of Yahoo.
posted by quarantine at 5:52 PM on June 15, 2004

I'm a believer. Go with the wiki. Otherwise these request-and-answer threads are all going to balloon to 100 comments.

On topic, I'm wondering if the floodgates are opening, especially in the wake of Yahoo!'s big mail move. I got three invites this morning, gave them to MeFites, and not an hour ago, I got five more.
posted by pzarquon at 6:29 PM on June 15, 2004

lodurr: From my Yahoo! Mail home page I follow the links: "Help" (top, middle), then "What to do about errors", then "Other errors", then "Submit a bug report". (Alternatively, "Can't find the answer to my question, who do I email?" -- a slightly different link -- is currently the top question on the "Online Support" page.)

Direct links: Yahoo! Mail (Error) Feedback & Yahoo! Mail (General) Feedback.
posted by infravires at 7:55 PM on June 15, 2004

Regarding spam filtering & maintaining the same email address across ISP moves, I've been a Pobox.com customer for 3 years now: US$15/year for up to 3 email addresses which forward to 1 or 2 (or maybe more) other email addresses.

A couple of months ago they upgraded their spam detection system from what was a pretty rudimentary system: IMO it's now excellent as I now get 1-2 per week instead of 10/day.

Their service level has been so good I haven't had need to contact them. I migrated once mail.com/iname.com (who never replied to support queries) started charging for a similar service.
posted by infravires at 8:04 PM on June 15, 2004

I have two invites to give away. Email me at the address in my profile.
posted by jedro at 6:47 PM on June 16, 2004