Rourke on Technology

Yahoo! mail and GMail are very usable services today. A majority of internet users are quite happy using web based email from one of these major providers for all their personal correspondence. There are, however, some major limitations to the web based email model that will make these offerings incomplete unless they add offline support via the IMAP protocol. Given these providers’ reliance on revenue from ads viewed while accessing email via the web interface, this is not something I see happening anytime soon.

The major providers of web based email have come a long way in the last couple of years. Most of the major objections I had to using web based mail — the speed, content page reloading, and lack of ability to use hotkeys — are gone from the big name offerings today. Of these, GMail is definitely the most palatable of the current web-based email services. Don’t get me wrong, the new Yahoo! mail is slick, but I prefer the speed and simplicity of the GMail interface. Even with GMail, though, there are some major things that you can do still can’t do:

• Take advantage of advanced SPAM filtering
• Take your email offline with you (eg: on an airplane)
• Synchronize email with a mobile device
• Perform in-line spell check (Firefox 2.0 will fix this)
• Synchronize your address book across business email, personal email, and mobile device

SPAM is huge problem. My email address is nearly 10 years old, so SPAM is a truly serious problem for me. With no SPAM protection, I’d get thousands of junk mail a day. GMail helps reduce that to under one hundred SPAM messages a day, but that isn’t enough. There’s a major market around SPAM protection, with a rich collection of services and software geared at dealing with SPAM. By not locking myself into a web based email service I can take advantage of those services and software packages.

I fly quite a bit. Spending large chunks of my time on airplanes means I need to be somewhat productive and therefore look for tools that allow me to do things while offline. This post, for example, was produced by Windows Live Writer while on an airplane. Email is no exception — I want to be able to clean out my 100+ message inbox by reading, responding to, and deleting email while offline. Services that expose my email via IMAP allow me to do this, while the major web based services expose my email via POP, at best. POP allows me to download a copyof my inbox, but does not allow for synchronization. IMAP access also allows me to synchronize my inbox with my Blackberry, rather than simply forwarding email the device. Synchronization means that when I read or delete messages on my Blackberry they get marked read or deleted in my desktop and web based inboxes.

Keeping my address book up to date in one place is hard enough. I constantly forget to update email addresses and contact information. There is no possible way I’d keep multiple email addresses books in sync. One option would be to just update a master address book and do a regular import / export to the other places I need the information. The problem is, manual processes like that have a habir of never happening for me. Automatic synchronization is what I’m looking for. Doing this via an open standard like LDAP would be the best solution, but I wasn’t able to find software and services that would allow it. I use Plaxo, which provides me with synchronization, web-based access to my address book, and an automated way to get my contacts to update their own entries. There’s no way to synchronize Plaxo and a service like GMail.

In addition to the real deal-breakers mentioned above, using an IMAP based email client is still a more pleasant experience and allows for a much deeper level of customization than with the web based equivalents. For example, I really like the three pane vertical layout that’s possible in Outlook and Thunderbird. Thunderbird also allows you to add extensions to do things like rapid text substitution (Quicktext), easily toggling of message headers (Headers Toggle), and rapid filing of messages to folders from the keyboard (QuickFolders). Lastly, with a for-pay service you are not subjected to advertisements pasted all over everything.

Of course, there is a trade-off. The web based interfaces offered by GMail and Yahoo! mail are nicer than the web interfaces offered by the for-pay IMAP service providers. The open-source software used by these IMAP providers is, however, catching up. In particular, RoundCube is an open source AJAX webmail client with a very nice interface that, with some more polish, could easily compete with the major providers out there. GMail and Yahoo! are also free and offer a truly enormous amount of storage. By comparison, TuffMail (my email provider) charges $28/year for 1GB of storage and $68/year for 4GB (a little more than the amount GMail offers for free).

GMail has a unique advantage, even among large, free, web-based email providers. GMail’s search capability is extremely fast and extremely intuitive. I’m particularly fond of the the fact that I don’t need to specify which fields in a message GMail should search when I enter the search term. Tuffmail, as well as some of the other high quality for-pay IMAP service providers, are starting to catch up. Right now, though, the search interfaces offered are not as nice, and the results either do not come back as quickly or are not as up to date (indexing occurs less often). For this reason I’m still forwarding a copy of all my email (received or sent) to GMail so I can easily search it. As I spend most of my time dealing with my email in Thunderbird, the ability to perform a search from within Thunderbird would be very nice.

Free, web-based email has come a long way over the last few years. Among such services, GMail is particularly attractive. A for-pay version of GMail offered IMAP would be a truly attractive offering, but is unlikely given Google’s current business model. In the absence of such an offering, there’s still a very real need for the boutique for-pay IMAP providers.