This was the subject of a recent (March 1, 2013 ) Computerworld article by Serdar Yegulalp. Here is my summary of
this interesting article.
Google,
Microsoft and Yahoo have all rolled out major changes to their free webmail
services. Which now offers the best organization, message handling, mobile
options and advanced features?
In his roundup, he looks at what's changed for each email service
during the past year -- both cosmetically and functionally -- and the ways each
implements commonly used features: mail organization and searching, POP
The article includes a “Bottom Line” comment for each of the three
major free webmail services:
Gmail, from Google, continues as a fine choice for an
email service, rich with meta-organizational features and external connectivity
options. However, gmail’s highly useful sync features for Outlook are now
only available for paying customers.
Outlook.com, formerly Hotmail.com, is clean
looking and works well, but the lack of IMAP support and the uncertain state of
its mobile apps and mobile site is inconvenient.
NB: I’ll have a discussion on the phase out of
Hotmail in an upcoming post.
Yahoo mail is easy
to work with and approachable, but all the features that would make it
even more useful are either behind a paywall or absent entirely.
The article concludes by saying that Outlook.com is a welcome
surprise, even if there's no support for IMAP and its mobile experience could
still use some work. It's going to be one to watch, especially with Microsoft's
growing push toward being a services outfit for end-users instead of just
all-Windows, all the time. Meanwhile, Yahoo Mail is a decent entry-level
product for undemanding users, but it's easy to see people outgrowing it
quickly.
Folks who are uncomfortable with the way Gmail offers up ads based
on the content of email might want one of the other services. Another big gripe
with Gmail is how a key piece of its functionality -- client sync -- has been
shunted out of the free product and into the for-pay tier. I hope this isn't a
trend.
But in the end, it's hard to go wrong with Gmail. It's been
broadly adopted, has a solid feature set and supports most of the popular mail
protocols.
You can view the entire article at:
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