Yahoo Mail vs. Gmail

gmail vs yahoo mail

gmail vs yahoo mail

These are the 2 largest free email providers, and most people, have one of each. But which one is better overall? We’ll compare the details and give our honest opinion. Don’t worry we aren’t going to be spouting off a bunch of nonsense stats that do nothing more than make us sound smart, and confuse you.

A Few Similarities
Let’s look at some of the similar features, that make the 2 systems related. They both offer  inbox, drafts, sent, and all of this in a nice fast loading interface. They both now offer some sort of social chat or online friends report. I think yahoo has had this feature forever. Google picked it up at some point.

They both display advertisement, but this is expected. Something needs to cover the cost of the free email service. Managing servers, archiving data, managing spam filters, storing media, updates, and whatever else they might need in order to run a successful email hosting program.

They both do a decent job of taking care of spam. Just as good as any spam company like Barracuda.

I’m not going to talk about storage limits, I really don’t think this is a determining factor. No one runs out of space. If you want want to host large files there are more free file hosting services than you ever use. I think Yahoomail has unlimited and Gmail has 10GB or something. No one ever fills this stuff up.

A Few Differences
Gmail doesn’t seem to have a “trash can” or deleted items folder. If they do please tell me because there is all sorts of crap in there that I would like to retrieve.

Gmail does have an undo button. If you send an email you can “undo” or retract the message for something like 5 seconds. I’ve used this feature on more than one occasion.

Google Talk is an awesome new feature/concept. Google always has crazy stuff going on in their labs, but this is one of the tops.

YahooMail will ban any forwarding email address if you don’t watch out. It’s happened to be before. Say I have an email account at work mike@someworkplace.com and I want to forward that account to Yahoo so I check it while I’m on the road. If my mike@someworkplace.com account gets spam, forwards it to my yahoo account. I read it then mark it as spam. Yahoomail will blacklist the account mike@someworkplace.com that kinda sucks so watch out for that one.

Speed & Reliability
As far as reliability goes I would have to slightly give the advantage to Gmail. Sometimes Google crashes or hangs up, but this often due to local network connectivity issues and not gmail itself. Yahoo is fairly stable, but it does seem to crash more often.

I also get incompatibility messages when using different browsers and screen resolutions in yahoo mail. When this happens I’m prompted to use the old version of yahoo.

Gmail definitely presents a much faster and cleaner loading user interface. This may be because Google has way more data centers. I guess the data centers manage some of the gmail data. I’m not sure to tell you the truth.

Overall Winner
if i had to choose a overall winner I would have to go with Gmail at the momment. They seem to have the more stable platform with more features than Yahoo Mail.

What’s your oppinion? We’d love to hear it.