Live Mail is such a shame compared to Gmail. What do you think? | The Coffeehouse

zhuo

I think Live Mail is such a shame compared to Gmail, what do you think?

mVPstar
I'm white because I smelt an onion.

You're gonna have to be more specific than that.

They both are equally good/bad imo.

I think Live Mail looks shoddy and Gmail reminds me of site designs from 1995.

Gmail contains a bunch of useless features (imo) and Live Mail loads slowly because of the features it has.

Live Mail has ads, Gmail itself feels like an ad.

In the end, Live Mail wins out for me b/c you can drag stuff around. Big Smile

LaBomba
Summer

Care to share more information on what is so shameful about it?

Sign-up for the beta and give feedback to make it better. Live Mail Team has been great with listening to feedback.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

LaBomba wrote:
Care to share more information on what is so shameful about it?

Sign-up for the beta and give feedback to make it better. Live Mail Team has been great with listening to feedback.

I haven't used GMail yet, but the adverts in Windows Live Mail are way to destracting, it's like they were slaped on top of an existing design, rather than building the UI around the inclusion of adverts.

WLMail would be more usable if they limited adverts to simple text-based or static adverts, please no SWF or animated GIF adverts, please!

zhuo

LaBomba wrote:
Care to share more information on what is so shameful about it?

Sign-up for the beta and give feedback to make it better. Live Mail Team has been great with listening to feedback.

I am already using Live Mail Beta.

1. Ads, Live mail offers useless Ads and is so in-your-face, you know Ads can actually be useful if it's done the right way? IMO, Gmail has done it right. Non-intrusive and down right useful and relevant.

2. Live mail UI is just no good, it's just not the smooth experience that you would expect after using Gmail. Live local has done a better job though and the Live Sign-In has gotten better, in fact much better.

3. Chatting and knowing the status of your friends while you are using your email is just so convenient, with the MSN user base, why shouldn't Live mail have something similar, why should I necessarily have to use messenger to contact my friends?

NB: when a user start thinking Ads are useful, somebody has done something right. Learn from it Microsoft. I am sure there are so many smart people at Microsoft, but please start thinking from the user's perspective.

James Zhuo
Application Development Consultant

dentaku

I just tried it out for the first time and I don't see much difference from Hotmail other than having the interface be more configurable, which I suppose is a good thing.
It's a bit slow too.

alwaysmc2
It's not stupid; It's advanced!

Well, a big plus for Live Mail is that you don't need to be invited. And you get 2 GB too, which I still think is too much. My inbox is still under 200MB, and I've had it for three years.

dentaku

For a while there I couln't figure out how to find the live mail site but now I see that if I log into hotmail.com it just uses the new live mail interface instead.

That was weird.

footballism
Another Paradigm Shift!

IMHO Live Mail is just a crappy product, I have adandoned it and moved to Gmail:D

Sheva

Jason Cox
Longtime C9 Lurker

The only reason I have a Gmail account is to chat with two friends on GoogleTalk that refuse to move over to WLM, however between the two, Windows Live Mail has a much more refined and user-friendly interface, it's also alot faster on inital load and comes packed with far more features. Gmail is a perfect example of a Google product, just slap the name 'Google' and '[beta]' on it, give it base functionality and get it out the door while kissing up to the anti-Microsoft crowd.

Windows Live Mail is a unified interface for email, calendar, etc. Gmail just happens to have links added in as an after-thought to seperate Google products that offer similar functionality but that deffinently arent unified.

Between the two, Windows Live Mail wins hands down, it has more features, looks better and is faster. Gmail gets some points for the built in 'chat' functionality but if you look past that, the old Hotmail interface is better then Gmail.

Xaero_Vincent
Sexy me

I like Gmail for one reason only.

2.7+ GB of free mail space. Microsoft doesnt even offer that much with their premium Hotmail service. Its pretty good at blocking spam too whereas on Hotmail I recieve about 50+ spam messages weekly (despite adding them to my spam-blocker list).

But maybe this is different. I havent payed much attention to Microsoft's "Live" products.

Regards,
Vincent

yman

Jason Cox wrote:

Windows Live Mail is a unified interface for email, calendar, etc.

They really need to update/rewrite their calender. The current version is just the old msn calender (ISAPI application!) slapped with an interface which looks modern.

zhuo

Jason Cox wrote:
The only reason I have a Gmail account is to chat with two friends on GoogleTalk that refuse to move over to WLM, however between the two, Windows Live Mail has a much more refined and user-friendly interface, it's also alot faster on inital load and comes packed with far more features. Gmail is a perfect example of a Google product, just slap the name 'Google' and '[beta]' on it, give it base functionality and get it out the door while kissing up to the anti-Microsoft crowd.

Windows Live Mail is a unified interface for email, calendar, etc. Gmail just happens to have links added in as an after-thought to seperate Google products that offer similar functionality but that deffinently arent unified.

Between the two, Windows Live Mail wins hands down, it has more features, looks better and is faster. Gmail gets some points for the built in 'chat' functionality but if you look past that, the old Hotmail interface is better then Gmail.

What on earth are you talking about? Well...... I guess it's just my opinion that Gmail is a far superior product. I wouldn't call Live mail a product, it's a shocker for reasons already mentioned. In addition I've just tried searching and deleting a bunch of thing, it doesn't work! Ahhhh!!! come on. Old hotmail works better than Live mail. Good thing I am just using Live mail for subscriptions.

Rowan
Look, no errors.

I've been using Live Mail since the early days before it worked on good browsers, and it has definitely improved a lot. I only use Gmail so I can POP all my mail to Thunderbird where it belongs, Hotmail/Live Mail doesn't allow this (freely) so I don't bother.

Gmail is also like an online backup service which I don't need to pay any attention to, I haven't logged in for a few months now and it even filters out all the spam before it reaches Thunderbird.

Zhuo is absolutely right that ads need to have some relevance, otherwise people will just get aggravated. The massive size of the Live Mail ads is unbearable, the fact that they're mostly animations makes it even worse.

But then again I don't see any ads in Firefox for some reason...

If I was to compare the Live Mail interface to Gmail's interface it would be very difficult to pick the winner. Live Mail looks mostly clean and 'innovative', however there's a lot of useless features and confusing navigation.

Gmail feels more comfortable to me, the layout just makes sense and it's always easy to understand what to do. It also makes much better use of the available real estate than Live Mail, and Gmail's ads are actually bearable.