Free webmail is nothing new. But the field is pretty much dominated by big names like Google, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Zenbe is a startup that hopes there's room for one more. And the company's webmail client makes a pretty strong case that there should be.
Zenbe is a free email service that gives users 4GB of storage for emails and attachments. But that's just the start. The service features an attractive interface that combines some of the best aspects of Gmail and Outlook. For example, you can star messages and add tags like you do with Gmail. But you also ahve access to an integrated calendar and task manager like you get with Outlook.
There are also a few featues you won't find in other services, like the ability to star messages with different colors, or create ZenPages that let you organize messages, appointment, attachments, and other information on a single web page which you can share with other users.
Zenbe is currently in private beta, but you can request an invitation from the company's home page.
Update: We've got invites for the first 100 people who sign up through this link.
Yahoo! Mail has been one of the most popular free web-based email services ever since its humble beginnings. Not too long ago, Yahoo! started to feel the pressure from the brazen upstart Gmail, which offers a gradually increasing mailbox limit. Not to be outdone, Yahoo! introduced an unlimited mailbox size, promising that users would "never need to delete a message again."
As many of us expected, there is a limit, and it has been found. The Wall Street Journal has found a bug in the system that renders a account inoperable if it has too many messages in one folder. According to their findings, 55,000 or so is the maximum that the system can handle. Yahoo! is working on fixing the issue (of course), but be sure to point and laugh in the mean time.
Last week a Download Squad reader wrote in to let us know that when he logged into Yahoo! there was no "beta" label under the logo. This morning we went and logged in ourselves and lo and behold, the beta is no more. Yahoo! is also highlighting some of the previously announced new features in its mail client, including the ability to send SMS messages from Yahoo! Mail and to chat with Windows Live contacts.
When you login there's also a good chance your default color scheme will be blue. But you have the option of choosing from 6 different color schemes, so customize away.
If you're less than smitten with the new Yahoo! Mail, you can still switch back to the "classic" view. While the newer version has nifty features like drag-and-drop folder management, it tends to load a lot slower than the classic version of Yahoo! Mail.
Yahoo! Mail celebrates its 10th birthday today. Or it would if it were, you know, a person and not a web-based software application.
Anyway, 10 years ago today Yahoo! launched its webmail client. At the top you could get a whopping 3MB of storage. Now Google offers 3GB of free storage, while Yahoo! users get "unlimited" space for their messages.
A lot of things have changed in ten years. Spam wasn't much of a problem in 1997, and most people wouldn't think of attaching digital photos to e-mails because digital cameras weren't widely available.
Yahoo! has put together a little survey to find out how your e-mail habits have changed over the past decade. But we just have one question: do you still use Yahoo! Mail or has Google, Microsoft, or another service stolen your heart in the last ten years?
Webmail is a hot industry these days, with Gmail, Yahoo! and nearly every provider in between vying for users by adding as many features as they can dream up. Fortunately, a small provider named Litepost is taking a different approach, offering a streamlined webmail interface with just a dash of web 2.0 to help bring your email into the 21st century web. We found Litepost back in June when they announced very limited private beta testing of their product, and it seems as though they have quietly lifted the veil so the public can sign up. While there is no official announcement on the company's blog, the Litepost registration page is live and working, and we were able to sign up for an address just fine.
Litepost stands out with a number of unique features, including email tagging and rating, as well as interesting 'Who, What, When, Why' sorting methods with which, for example, you can sort by date first, then sender (or vice versa). You can also arbitrarily group messages together for any reason, solving one of the complaints of the message threading or conversation view that Gmail made popular. Another strong appeal of Litepost is the fact that it is open source, and a Litepost Webmail Server is in the works, which will allow individuals, organizations and businesses to download and install the Litepost software on their own server for domain and security goodness.
If all this has sparked your attention, take Litepost for a spin. In our testing we found its features and unique UI to be quite compelling, and its open source, portable nature will likely give it some legs with which to grow.
Despite having literally dozens of blogs related to Google products, the internet giant has never had a Gmail blog. Until today that is, however, as Google has now posted introduced an Official GMail Blog!
Given that it's only just launched, there's not anything other than an introductory post, however the Gmail team describe it as a "place where we want to highlight interesting and useful posts from elsewhere". Gmail junkies everywhere will want to sign up for the feed. They also point to a pretty amusing video we featured back in February which I couldn't help but repost because given the amount of Spam I get (and caught by Gmail's filter), it's so darn rewarding to see the Gmail scissors cutting Spam puppets in half.
With so many great webmail offerings out there, only two are considered the frontrunners. Yahoo, the oldest player, has just revamped with unlimited storage and some drag and drop interface changes, while Google has the threaded simplicity thing going on adding built in Chat, Doc, Calendar, and Spreadsheet applications with a less cluttered appearance.
In this battle, who is the real leader? Veronica Belmont from Cnet put up both Yahoo Mail and Gmail up to the test on which one of these AJAX email applications is the leader. She weighs in and compares all of the strengths and weaknesses of both services in interface design, features, speed, organization, and security to come up with the end winner.
Microsoft has announced that they will be keeping the Hotmail name when they officially launch their Live email service worldwide, with some users seeing reference to the Windows Live Hotmail name in their beta versions. Microsoft also announced their two major goals when they chose to take on the building of the new web mail service: Build a faster and safer mail service and create a powerful service to meet the needs of a broader customer set.
A lot of buzz with the new name as well, apparently some users think it's a bad idea that Hotmail was kept in the name, hinting at the fact that it's a dated name that reeks of old technology. Microsoft says that they are bringing the best of both worlds together. What are your thoughts? Should they have left the Hotmail name out of the mix and stuck with the fresh Live that has been so heavily marked over the past year?
Apple finally realized that .Mac users were bailing in droves because of the service's lack of recent updates updates and the march of progress to distant locales like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Windows Live Mail. In response, it has unveiled a new version of its .Mac webmail offering. The service takes a lot of cues from the new batch of Ajaxy webmail clients, but also from Apple's own Mail.app. In fact, the app looks quite a lot like a desktop app with an interface that fits very well alongside OS 10.4 Tiger. It features IMAP syncing, organization by drag-and-drop, a new message pane just like Mail.app and Outlook's, a Quick Reply feature that lets you "Dash off a response without leaving your Inbox," address book integration, keyboard shortcuts, and Gmail-esque "message previews." Overall, it looks like it will fit in reasonably well with the current crop of webmail offerings, but keep in mind that .Mac still costs $99 per year, which gets 1GB of storage, including what you might use for iDisk backups.
So I want to hear from .Mac users: Is the new .Mac webmail really awesome? How does it compare to Gmail or Yahoo! Mail? Is it worth $99 per year when free webmail (Gmail, 2.8GB) and online storage services (Xdrive, 5GB) are out there? It's not rhetorical--I haven't used .Mac and I really want to know, is it really worth it, and if so, why?
Update: TUAW's David Chartier has penned a nice long review of the new .Mac webmail entitled New .Mac webmail delivers, mostly. He concludes, "Let's face it: no one can please everyone, but this new webmail is pretty hot, considering everything .Mac is up against, like a segmented demographic and high expectations from the nerdier half of it."
A few weeks ago I wrote about ePrompter, a standalone (Windows-only) email notification app with a UI reminiscent of Windows 3.1. Responses in the comments ranged from nonplussed to downright offended (including speculations about malware). Now, I'm no ePrompter cheerleader; I just report on what I find. And today I've found a much better - and much more Web 2.0! - solution for managing multiple email accounts. Jump2Mail bills itself as a "free web-based email retrieval application" that lets you check all your email accounts from one central location. Its web-based approach to email management makes a lot more sense than the desktop-centered approach offered by ePrompter, since these days most of us move around and use more than one computer.
In addition to allowing users to send, receive, delete, and reply to emails, Jump2Mail also includes:
Planning and reminders
Spam filtering
Personal rules
Contact management
Ajax-based RSS reader
Support for 7 different languages
More features are in progress, such as an RSS feed of new emails. Jump2Mail currently supports POP and IMAP, which can pose a limitation if you use a web-based mail service such as Yahoo (which doesn't allow free POP access). However, support for purely web-based accounts may be available at a later time.
Oh, and did I mention the delicious-looking strawberry icon?
If you're like a lot of people these days, you have at least two email addresses. And you probably have more than that. (Personally, I've got five.) It can be a pain to keep track of all of them.
Enter ePrompter, a free Windows app that will monitor all your web-based and POP3 email accounts (up to 16 accounts) and notify you of new messages at regular intervals. ePrompter also lets you compose, forward, and reply to emails without having to visit the actual webmail site or open your mail client. Furthermore, it gets brownie points for not being named ePromptr.
When you have new messages, ePrompter notifies you via a tray icon that displays the number of messages for each account. You can also activate a screensaver that shows the same information.
What could make ePrompter even better? Well, why not turn it into a Firefox extension akin to Gmail Notifier - or offer the option of installing it as either a Firefox extension or a standalone app. Hey, ePrompter developers: you know where to look if you need help creating the extension!
Google has reportedly opened up access to Gmail for users in Japan, after a successful launch of open access for Australia and New Zealand users. Google is trying to raise its presence in the mobile phone capital of the world, where more people access the internet from mobile phones than from personal computers.
Some new features are rumored to be on their way into Google's Gmail web mail application.
Garett Rogers checked out the source, only to find that the code for them is present, but the variables are set to false.
The new features in question are:
Deleting all spam messages - no need to select>all, then delete. Apply filter to - creating and applying filters to messages, helping to keep mail organized
There is no news as to the release date of these new features, but there have been rumored sightings of individuals who have been getting the "delete all spam" button.
To be honest, I'm starting to
get confused. It's been known for some time that the next version of Outlook Express, the one that will ship with
Windows Vista, is going to be called Windows Mail. Windows Live Mail, on the other hand, is Microsoft's
web-based successor to Hotmail. We've got the web and the desktop covered, right? But now here comes Windows Live Mail Desktop. Uh.. wuh? Fortunately the
product has its own blog which gives us some
hints, in particular this
post that has a handy chart comparing Mail and Live Mail Desktop. Here's what (I think) I know: Windows Live Mail
Desktop is going to be a free desktop e-mail client that will sort of be the missing link between Windows Mail and
Windows Live, offering support for multiple e-mail accounts in separate folders (including webmail from AOL and Gmail,
they say), a new contacts interface that has something to do with Live Messenger, RSS and blogging features, emoticons
and inline spell-checking, and a UI that matches Windows Live. And it's currently in a very small managed beta.
Okay, so it looks like there's some interesting work going
into Windows Live Mail Desktop, but if it's so much better than Windows Mail, why have two different free e-mail
products? Why not offer one really great product with one name rather than confusing the hell out of consumers (and
bloggers)?
Google is beta-testing
the next logical step in Gmail's life cycle: providing hosted Gmail-based webmail for other domain names. At Gmail for your domain you can put your name on a list for a limited beta
that'll provide 2GB of storage for each of your users plus a control panel for managing accounts, aliases, and mailing
lists. No word on whether the service will eventually be subscription-based or AdSense-supported, but I'm guessing the
latter.
Despite having literally dozens of blogs related to Google products, the internet giant has never had a Gmail blog. Until today that is, however, as Google has now posted introduced an 
Some new features are rumored to be on their way into Google's Gmail web mail application.
