Last week we talked about the top online email programs. Today I will discuss the top two I have heard about from readers and others in the area.
Although, Yahoo! Mail was listed as number one around the world, those I have heard from put Gmail and Windows Live Mail as their favorites. Mine is not a very scientific poll since I used emails from you all and asked people I work with. Keep in mind, the majority of my coworkers are geeks which could be skewing the results.
Windows Live Mail (WLM from here on out) has two different address formats. In 1996 there was Hotmail.com. Then in 2005 Microsoft decided to revamp the name and add more functionality so Live Mail was born. Therefore, if you have an older account you have a "hotmail.com" address, while the newer members have "live.com" as their address. Being the geek tester that I am, I have one of each but rarely use either.
With Gmail everyone has the same domain in their address. They are all formatted as, name@gmail.com. Gmail started in 2004 by invitation only and then went public for everyone in 2007.
WLM will very shortly (maybe by the time you read this) be expanding storage on the site to 25GB. They will allow this for email and all other types of files with their "Live Sky Drive" app. Gmail started out with 1 GB of storage and continues to expand daily. It is now at approximately 7.5 GB. The issue I have with Gmail is that the storage is not contained in one location.
As stated above Gmail provides an ever increasing 7.5 GB of storage for email only. Google’s Picasa Web Albums offers 1 GB of storage for photos and videos only. Google Docs gives you 1 GB for everything else; all of your docs, spreadsheets, presentations etc. You should know this free storage is not transferable from one product or application to another. My belief is that Google will be merging them together sooner or later. It will most likely be sooner, once Microsoft finishes rolling out their 25 GB.
Both WLM and Gmail offer calendars, address books and more online. One very important factor is that it is all free. Of course, both offer upgrades in storage size for a charge. The basics should be more than enough for the average user.
After doing a review of the two I found that even though I exclusively use Gmail; Live Mail has a lot to offer. Of course, there is Google Voice but more on that another time.
