GMail has in its favour:

-POP/SMTP accessibility (yahoo.com wants you to pay for that)

-Security all the way through if you want it, both in the web interface(SSL) and the POP/SMTP stuff. Yahoo doesn’t allow SSL for the webmail and the free POP access that Yahoo UK provides is completely unsecured. I once watched an Ethereal sniff session while my mail cient was checking mail and saw my username and password being transmitted in the clear, which gave me pause for thought. I’ve since stopped using the Y!’s POP stuff. A shame that.

- Labels. Great stuff, much better than plain folders, even though they lack hierarchy.

- Useful addressing tricks: user.name+whatever@gmail.com is the same as username@gmail.com. This allows some useful filtering to be done.

- Ever-increasing storage.

- A nice and fast (most of the time) interface, though not perfect.

Y!Mail still has a lot of catching up to do.

I’m a Yahoo! Mail devotee among a gaggle of GMail chauvinist friends, and I’m quite happy. I organize my life with Yahoo! Mail, Addresses and Calendar. If I had a PDA, it would sync with my Yahoo!. When someone sends me a Yahoo! Invitation, I add it to my calendar with one (and then one more) click. The email interface is 100% intuitive, completing my form entries the right way the first time, almost every time, and I don’t have to navigate in the obtuse page order that GMail demands to send an email to a lot of people on my list.

For people who want what’s hot, GMail may be the thing, but for anyone who wants more features and a more transparent interface, YMail is superior by far.

I also have my own anecdotal evidence that the Google Search Engine is falling behind Yahoo! and MSN in the quantity and quality of search results… even if those were flukes it certainly confirms for me that there is no result dominance, and therefore no intellectual dominance, in the current search engine battle.

Keep it up, Yahoo!

“non-engineers are every bit as creative as engineers”

I am in this situation and I am mostly payed for this and I know what that means. Spending 52 days a year on a personal project will be just a waiste of time without a tech team backing me up.

Of course some Google guy might replay that they have only qualified engineers..