tintedpane.com

Fastmail, Gmail, Mailsnare

Fastmail:

• Awesome interface, very easy to be productive
• Very fast, even on dialup
• Redirecting email — much better than forwarding: you can redirect mail to any email address and make it look like it came from the original sender other than a different time stamp
• Very good spam management
• Subfolders
• Subfolder addressing: send an email directly to a subfolder. e.g. important@username.fastmail.fm
• Plus addressing: basically the same thing — important+username@fastmail.fm
• File storage
• if you have aliases you can setup different aliases to point to different storage folders
• the ability to password protect folders
• customizable themes through stylesheets
• IMAP access for all account levels
• hosting your own domain’s email and even website using file storage
• create personalities — say you have a work email address that you use POP to pick up. you can send messages that appear to come from said address so you can keep all mail consolidated to fastmail.

negs:

• can only search single folders — I hope they improve on this soon. Like they say, what good is all the info in the world if you can’t find what you’re looking for.

Gmail:

• innovative way of organizing email — seems similar to Opera’s M2 mail scheme where messages aren’t tied to any specific folder but instead to a categorical listing.
• threading
• very powerful and easy to use search — no performance problems searching through message bodies
• decent interface usability — still not as fast as fastmail — more clicks needed to do same tasks

neg:

• can only use latest and greatest browsers due to complex web code
• no imap access

Mailsnare:

• calender
• also has file storage
• integrated rss reader

neg:

• poor mail interface

Plusses of webmail:

• No local virus problems
• Available everywhere
• Especially fastmail because you can use it on any browser unlike Yahoo and especially Gmail which uses very very complicated DHTML

Plusses of paid webmail (Fastmail, Mailsnare) and Gmail:

• no graphic heavy ads to distract and slow down productivity.

Other paid mail providers:

www.oddpost.com
www.fusemail.com - sketchy privacy policy
www.hushmail.com
www.cryptoheaven.com
www.geekmail.com - canadian, good privacy policy
www.mailsnare.com
www.runbox.com