What Could be Better than Hotmail? | Traffick.com

TEST DRIVE by Andrew Goodman - January 11, 2000

What's better than Hotmail?

If the other contenders in the battle for your Internet-frazzled eyeballs had their way, you'd be using their web-based e-mail services rather than Microsoft's Hotmail. Should you?

We test-drove the contenders. While most are good, they aren't good enough to justify switching over from the two leaders, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. The best of the rest? Altavista Mail, closely followed by Excite Inbox.

Things to watch out for:

There are several things to watch out for with web-based e-mail, especially for those who have never used it before.

"Time outs." For security reasons, these apps will often time users out and require them to re-establish their login. Generally speaking, these timeouts kick in after 30-60 minutes of inactivity, but Xoom Mail’s can be as quick as five minutes! This can cause you to completely lose the text of a message you might have spent 15 minutes typing in. So make sure you don’t linger interminably over messages, and if possible, set the time-out interval to 30 minutes or more. At the other extreme, there was Lycos MailCity. There was no need to log in to access the mailbox, even after several days! That’s not good, either.

Inactive accounts tend to be deleted or deactivated after 90-120 days. Try to check everything once a month.

Set the preferences so that sent e-mail is always saved in the "sent mail" folder for those rare but vital times when you need to dig up an old message you sent. This tends to be automatic with your regular e-mail software; not always the case with web-based mail.

See if you can set the "return address" to your regular e-mail address.

Be very sure of the name you use for your registration (the "sender name"). Unless you double check this, you could wind up sending an e-mail with the outgoing name set to "Crushed Beer Can Head" to your statistics professor. You’ll be wondering why he didn’t sympathize with your "strep throat" excuse.

Experiment with the appearance of the inbox, the size of your composition and reading windows, etc. In short, a lot of apparent drawbacks can be overcome by familiarizing yourself with the e-mail application’s "preferences" or settings.

Use common sense: use passwords that are not easy to guess.
If you are drowning in a sea of usernames and passwords, consider a utility which can help you remember them and enter them automatically, such as Gator .
Some users will have very specific goals, such as an unusually large message capacity, which can’t be satisfied by any of the major portals’ offerings. In that case, you’ll have to do a bit more exploring to find a satisfactory solution.

Without further ado:

1. Altavista Mail

Capacity: 3.5 MB
Address book: Full-featured with an extensive help file.
POP Mail checking: Handy to set up; unlimited accounts.
Automatic forwarding: We don't see it here.
Spam filter: Yes, and full-featured.

Cool Extras: HTML mail can sometimes be unreadable. Altavista has an answer. The link to "read HTML as text" is prominently displayed here - nice going. Comes with a vacation reply setting; the ability to send mail from a drop-down box set up to different "identities" (handy if you want to "send from" different e-mail addresses); and a host of other powerful features. Quite customizable, though colors appear to be non-negotiable.

Comments: The most usable of all those we tried. The speed seems to be better than others, which suggests Altavista has taken care to provide sufficient server capacity to handle the heavy load. The interface is plain and attractive (if you don't mind brownish hues).

As Altavista is a relatively new entry on the portal scene, integration with other services is not as advanced as we'd like to see. On the other hand, there is considerably less advertising to contend with; another plus. The help files and the responsiveness of customer service representatives are excellent. It almost feels as if Altavista cares about us!

Rating: 2.5 stars and our rating as the best of this lot!

2. Excite Inbox

Capacity: 3 MB / 1,000 messages
Address Book: Full-featured.
POP Mail checking: Yes: up to 5 accounts.
Automatic Forwarding: No.
Spam filter: Yes. Excite is working on an improvement of the filter and is conducting a user survey to facilitate the upgrade.

Cool Extras: You can (and should) customize the color. Free fax/voice (your own toll-free number with 10-digit extension).

Provider: Excite Inbox is powered by Intermail from Software.com.

Comments: The Excite Inbox is a recent upgrade to Excite Mail that offers a host of enhancements. Unfortunately, Excite's unreliable authentication system has once again been causing headaches. However, once the problems are solved, this is a robust new inbox. Don't expect to check your mail after 10 p.m. PST on Saturday night. This is when the system maintenance is done, and it can last until 4 a.m.

Some useful features have been added. For example, if you have one of Excite’s free toll-free voicemail/fax numbers, that number is prominently displayed in the upper right-hand corner of your mailbox. Still, this doesn’t compare to more full-featured free services offered by newer companies focusing on unified messaging (Jfax, Efax, Canbox, Onebox, Ureach, and so on). If you’re looking to do fancy stuff like send faxes from your computer or get your own fax local area code fax number, you’ll need to check out the latter services. I personally have a Jfax Personal Telecom number, and I love it!

The look can be a bit garish, but the inbox itself is easy to navigate. Adults: for a soothing color scheme, try "CEO" (ahhhh, a white background so I can actually read the text), or for the J. Peterman experience, go for "Khaki".

Integration is a strong point for Excite, giving it a lead on most other portals save for Yahoo. Excite has really stepped up efforts to make it more convenient to go from using the e-mail program to adding a task, contact, note, or event to the Excite Planner. Also, using something called Truesync by Starfish Software, you can import and synchronize your contacts with those you keep on your mobile, wireless devices, and also with the standard corporate software like Microsoft Outlook.

Rating: 2.5 stars. Very good, assuming the slow and unreliable logins are fixed. Users who want features and visual pizzazz will be more impressed than those seeking simplicity. The help files are very extensive and include a detailed explanation of POP mail fetching.

3. Snap mail (email.com)

Capacity: 5 MB (upgrade available for a fee)
Address book: Basic and straightforward.
POP Mail checking: Yes. In excess of ten accounts can be checked.
Automatic Forwarding: Yes.
Spam filter: Yes.

Comments: Don’t pay good money for the "upgrade" offered by Mail.com. Simple and speedy, with a clean layout. Has the odd quirk. Will hold messages in a frame if a link within an HTML-format e-mail takes you outside of Snap, giving you an irksome warning message in the process. Hotmail also does this.

Provider: Mail.com

Rating: 2 stars (good). The degree of difficulty here is not as great as for more integrated, full-featured offerings from Excite and Yahoo, but at least they don’t screw it up.

4. Lycos Mailcity

Storage limit: 4MB
Address book: Fairly comprehensive, very easy to use.
POP Mail retrieval: Very good, with good basic help information.
Automatic Forwarding: No. Apparently this and other premium services have been discontinued.
Spam Filter: Of course.

Neat stuff: Support for "fun addresses" like @cyberdude.com is coming soon.

Comments: Mailcity is the "new" Lycos mail, and is being implemented to ensure that Lycos usernames and passwords are better integrated across all Lycos services. Old Lycos Mail customers are going to be supported, but new subscribers will use MailCity. Unlike Excite and Yahoo, the association or integration with other features like calendars and organizers is quite loose.

One quite disconcerting aspect of MailCity: a couple days after setting up the account, I typed the URL into my browser window to visit the site again, expecting to encounter a "login" page. Instead, due to the cookies left on that computer, I was already inside my mail account! This is totally out of sync with how other web-based applications make use of cookies. Yes, my username might reasonably be displayed, but putting me inside the mailbox after typing the URL www.mailcity.com into my browser? That’s unforgivable. Don’t use MailCity if you like privacy! A downright inexcusable situation.

Rating: 1.5 stars. Even if the privacy situation is corrected, there's no compelling reason to use this.

5. Go2Net Mail: Review coming soon.

6. Go Mail

Capacity: 3MB
POP Mail Checking: Coming soon
Forwarding: No.
Spam Filter: Yes. Undergoing an upgrade.

Comments: Go is currently testing a Beta version of an upgrade (from Go Mail 2.1 to Go Mail 3.1).

Rating: No rating until the upgrade is complete. The old version of Go Mail works smoothly but lacks key features.

7. Xoom Mail

Capacity: Unlimited, we think. Xoom offers unlimited webspace, so perhaps they're using that gimmick for their mail accounts, too.
POP Mail: Up to eight external accounts.
Address book: Yes, but not very full-featured.
Spam Filter: There are filtering options, but they aren't full-featured.

Comments: This was the least satisfying of all the e-mail applications we surveyed. Frequent problems in displaying HTML mail. Interface is different enough from the norm that it’s disconcerting.

Rating: 1.5 stars. It's not all bad, but the worst of those we tried.

And the winner...

Altavista Mail, by a nose over Excite Inbox.

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