GMail? WallaMail?
| July 9, 2004 @ 5:26 pm | Filed under Internet |
Today I decided to go log in to my Blogger.com account and take a look around at the changes that they made since I last logged in. I noticed there was an offer for Blogger.com members to receive a GMail account from Google. I went ahead and signed up for one of these accounts since they are rare and seem to be in high demand. I played around a bit with my new GMail account and so far I like what I see.
With GMail you don’t need to worry about folders because you can search for the message you are looking for. I find that I like this feature better than I thought I would, but I still prefer folders. GMail isn’t much different than your typical e-mail service when it comes to basic functionality. It was fun to poke around and test some of the features that are unique to GMail. For example, the “searching instead of filing???, the messages displayed as conversations, etc.. GMail also provides a label system which looks like a folder structure of some sort. The starred feature lets you “star??? a message which stores that message under the “Starred??? section. The starred section also acts like a folder. One thing I am not sure about is how there are no folders. Instead of folders, you keep your messages in the inbox. Personally I like having a small number of messages in my inbox, which is the reason I like folders.
After signing up for GMail I was interested to see what the media had to say about GMail, since all my information came by word-of-mouth and Internet snippets. Interestingly enough, when I searched for GMail I discovered WallaMail, another free e-mail service which has many things in common with GMail. I found an article on PC World’s website that talks about WallaMail and its aim to beet GMail.
The e-mail storage stampede continued its charge … with yet another Internet company taking on Google’s Gmail offering with its own free 1GB e-mail service.
Israeli Web portal provider Walla Communications has launched WallaMail, a new service offering users tools such as in-box search, an e-mail filtering system, an antivirus application, and, of course, a lot of space. It offers enough space, in fact, to archive 40,000 e-mails, 2000 pictures, and 50 one-minute video clips, the company says.
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WallaMail’s big play against Gmail is its entertainment features, however, such as the users’ ability to watch video clips in their in-boxes, and attach a digital image to a message to add personal style, Philosoph says.
“We think that features like stationery and smileys are fun and Gmail right now is very textual and very basic. I think in the broadband era people should have more fun with their e-mail,” Philosoph says.
After finding out about WallaMail I set myself up an account with them to see how it compared with GMail. WallaMail bombed out really fast. WallaMail was not written to be supported on all browsers, I found this out trying to use their system with Mozilla Firefox. When I tried to send an e-mail from my WallaMail account nothing happened; however, when I sent an e-mail using Internet Explorer it worked fine. That’s a slight problem for me since 95% of my computer time is spent under Linux. I also tried it in the Konquerer browser under Linux and that also did not work. It looks like WallaMail has made a mistake if they are looking to be on top of the market. If anyone has success on a browser other than IE please let me know. WallaMail may have the multimedia enhancements but that doesn’t count if a user can’t even send a simple text based message. In other words, I can receive as many messages as I want but I can not send a thing. The only sign of WallaMail being for IE is in their FAQ where it gives solutions only to IE users, nowhere does it tell me that it only works with IE. So, the only thing that WallaMail really has going for them is the fact that they are in full production and GMail is only a beta.
Of course there is Yahoo! and Hotmail trying to stay in the free webmail market by increasing their space allotments to 100MB and 250MB respectively. Is that enough to keep them on top? I’m sure they will keep those people who don’t care about space and those that don’t want to learn another system. Only time can tell what the majority of the populus will choose. As for me, I am going to give GMail a thumbs up and WallaMail a thumbs down. As for Yahoo, Hotmail, and all the other free webmail providers, we’ll see if they have done enough.