April 21, 2005

Web E-Mail: The Best is Yet To Come

I've been using Earthlink's web e-mail client for years and have played with AOL's web based email system. Sure, you can get your email, but that's about it - their is no rich interface.

Now I am using Google's Gmail and frankly it has a better interface than any desktop email client I've used - and I've used Eudora, Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Pegasus and Netscape.

Hope is on the way!

Business Week writes A NEW WEB MAIL PROGRAM from America Online and a forthcoming one from Earthlink show the technology to good advantage. The new AOL Web mail service is superior in some ways to AOL software you install on your PC. In addition to being fast, it shows all your folders in a pane to the left of the message list, and you can move messages simply by clicking on them and dragging them to the appropriate folder. This won't sound like a big deal to users of Microsoft Outlook or other programs that run on your desktop. But it's a big change for Web mail.

The new Earthlink Web mail program, which will be made available to subscribers in June, is a more dramatic step up. The limitations of traditional Web programs often cause them to spawn multiple windows on your screen. That doesn't happen with the Earthlink mail, which bears a strong resemblance to Microsoft Outlook Express and lets you handle most tasks within a single, multipane window. All your mail appears in a single list that you can scroll through, rather than being broken into pages of 25 or so messages each. You can read the text of a selected message below the inbox list. You can also move messages by dragging them to folders, and you can resize the panes and columns simply by moving the dividers between them.

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