Memorable moments: Hotmail vs. Gmail
Gmail:
- The initial suprise (and fun!) of conversation-style organization.
- Noticing for the first time that my allowed disk space increased significantly.
- Finding out that other google services could be connected - calendar, google homepage, etc.
- Annoyance at not being able to divide into a hierarchy of labels/folders (ie., I can't have a 'work' label with sub-labels and a 'personal' label with sub-labels).
Hotmail:
- My wife's oldest messages from our dating and wedding planning being deleted by Hotmail without notice because she had used up her megabytes. Yes, they deleted the e-mails she had saved the longest, and left the newest spam in her in-box.
- Yesterday I went to check my hotmail and again they had closed the account saying I hadn't logged in in 30 days, so they had deleted my account, all of my e-mails, my settings, contacts, and everything else. Wiped completely.
- Repeatedly finding that Hotmail wouldn't load on various computers.
- Junk mail from Hotmail that you cannot unsubscribe from.
- Slow loading pages due to the rediculous numbers of banner ads on every page.
- Annoyance that when you log into hotmail.com you don't go directly to your mail, but to a little homepage. where you then have to find the link to your in-box before they'll let you see it (if you have any left after they gleefully delete your e-mails that you were saving.)
Can Microsoft stand a chance? and when is Google going to come out with the linux based "Goodows" OS?
Thankfully I never had to "use" hotmail. I've been using Gmail a lot lately, and in fact set it up to receive/send my work POP3 email, too (new feature that's rolling out in limited numbers). It's working pretty well.
One thing regarding labels: while you can't set up a hierarchy, you can search tags using conjunctions. if you type "label:A label:B" in the search, you'll see all items tagged A and B. There are also "hidden" tags for Inbox, sent mail, etc.
See: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/10/hidden-labels-in-gmail.html
Thanks for that link gregor, I just used the "l:unread" to tidy up my unread e-mails. Handy.
I don't use my hotmail account, except for some online sign-ups to use as a spam account... but some people from a decade ago may still have that e-mail, so I look through what's come in every once-in-a-while to see if anyone is trying to get in touch with me. Unfortunately, unlike gmail, hotmail won't forward, or be available for POP download (without significant hacking).