by Lime Green Sphere

Created on: March 15, 2008

The simplest way to get an accessible email account is to create one online. These email accounts are free to set up and very accessible. To help you decide which email system best suits your needs, I have compared the three most popular online email offerings: Gmail, Hotmail (Windows Live Mail) and Yahoo Mail.

The competition between Yahoo Mail, Live Hotmail, and Gmail has led these three browser-based email services to meet or even surpass Outlook, Thunderbird, or Mac Mail in terms of quality and ease of use. The key advantage to browser-based email has always been the fact that email can be accessed from any computer with Internet. But which choice is the best?

Storage has always been an issue with browser-based email services because the email data must be stored on-line by the company hosting the email service. In the last couple of years, the combination of cheaper hardware and greater competition has led to huge storage increases in all three of these email options. Yahoo has gone the farthest in this category, currently offering unlimited storage and the standard 10MB maximum attachment size. Gmail has done the best with attachment size: a very generous 20MB maximum (allowing small videos or extensive documents and presentations/photos to be sent through email) and 6.2GB overall storage space, increasing at 1500 bytes every second. Many Gmail users comment that the combined attachment size and increasing storage limits to be a very attractive balance of space features. Live Hotmail offers a reasonable 5GB of storage with 10MB attachment size. With every provider offering at least 5GB, storage is not likely to be as major a consideration as individual attachment size.

The interfaces for all three services have been updated recently, making them intuitive and clean. One advantage to Gmail is that graphical ads are not present on any of the pages and instead, small text ads are displayed beside the messages. A Gmail user myself, I have discovered several interesting online stores because Gmail targets ads relevant to key words in the email being viewed. Gmail also offers the exclusive feature of conversation grouping, which keeps current email replies grouped together with archive material. It is good to have a look at screen-shots of each option to determine which interface you personally find the most attractive. Personally, I prefer Gmail's interface to Yahoo's, which I prefer still over Hotmail.

If you currently have an email address provided to you through

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