rebron.org: Everyday Life, Work, Ironman Training

Here’s an insider’s blog post (Ryan’s) about Yahoo!Mail which is in beta. It’s based off of Oddpost. They’ve taken care to support Firefox (so kudos to engineering and product management). It’s cool, it’s a long time coming, so congratulations to the team.

Now, what they should really do is learn how to integrate with Outlook/Outlook Express and Thunderbird. The best email experience remains email through a client over IMAP, others I’m sure will disagree. The issues holding webmail providers back are setup costs (e.g. hard for users to set up the email client but this can be remedied), no control of the client experience (which is false w/ Thunderbird), and then displaying ads within the email message or email UI (which also can be controlled).

The reason why a client experience is so much better is because you can do more heavy lifting and processing via a client that you can’t do with just a web based solution. A tangible example would be offline support and another would be junk mail blocking. A webmail service can utilize the server end to block spam, but then through a client, a user can block junk mail too that may have gotten past that initial server-side filter. I guess this can be done on the server-side too but maybe dificult to do now.

The other reason is that a lot of people have more than one email account now. So via a client you can access multiple accounts (IMAP), not so for web based email apps.