Gmail vs. Outlook.com vs. Yahoo! Mail: An Ultimate Comparison by Hotmail Support Australia
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Outlook.com: Pros and Cons
Pros
1. Outlook.com is clean and fresh with an intuitive design. There are no ads in my account (I exactly don’t know why). But anyways Outlook.com’s tile ads are not as annoying as Gmail’s spammy text ads.
2. You can Delete, Move, Categorize, Mark as read/unread, Sweep, Junk a message in one-click using Instant Actions.
3. You can sign in to your account using a one-time password (via SMS) so that you don’t have to enter your password if you’re using a shared PC.
4. You can recover deleted messages in Outlook.com.
5. You can create an alias (can be renamed or deleted) and it can be used as an additional e-mail address that’s linked to your primary e-mail account.
6. You can clean your inbox by deleting and blocking all future messages from a sender in 3 clicks by using the “Sweep” feature of Outlook.com.
7. You can sort your messages by file size.
8. I love Outlook.com’s “Reading pane“. You can easily turn it off, or change the view to horizontal or vertical in a click.
9. The “New Message” and “Reply” space is huge with no annoying sidebar with ads.
10. The “Right-click” menu on Outlook.com is cool. Of course, Gmail supports right-click with “Message Sneak Peek” labs feature and it’s nice but Outlook is awesome.
11. You can connect your Outlook.com to your Facebook account and can chat with your Facebook friends.
12. Your Outlook.com inbox is tightly integrated with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Cons
1. It will take ages to move emails from your old email client to Outlook.com as they limit the number of messages to 60 at a time. I’ve over 100,000 email messages in my Gmail and that’s the reason why I’m using Gmail’s email forwarding instead of the POP-in feature in Outlook.com.
2. There’s no official Outlook.com app for iOS but you can access Outlook.com on your Windows Phone, iOS, and Android devices.
3. I’m a fan of labels ever since I started using Gmail. Outlook.com supports folders and labels (known as categories) but there’s no option to delete the default labels.
4. Outlook.com supports “Rules for sorting new messages” but it’s not as flexible as Gmail and moreover you can’t create a filter with multiple parameters. You have to create a separate filter for each rule.
5. One of the most appreciated features of Outlook.com is its automatic categorization of emails. Well, it may be useful but I won’t call it perfect as Outlook’s algorithm is not clever enough.
6. I hate categories in Outlook.com. In Outlook.com, it’s possible to move messages from Sent folder to say Inbox or any another folder. It’s really absurd as I expect my sent messages to stay in that folder even though I accidentally moved them to another folder. In Gmail, you can move a message from “Sent Mail” to “Inbox” but it continues to appear in “Sent Mail” as Gmail uses labels and not folders.
You can create Outlook.com account by Clicking here
Gmail: Pros and Cons
Pros
1. Gmail’s killer feature is its powerful search. The search combined with labels and filters is just amazing.
2. Never delete a message ever again as you have tons of storage! I don’t delete any of my messages instead I “Archive” them so that Inbox remains clean. Of course, both Outlook.com and Yahoo! Mail has unlimited storage but it’s Gmail which started the storage war with free storage that’s 250 times bigger than Hotmail.
3. You can send attachments up to 10 GB as Gmail is tightly integrated with Google Drive.
4. You can star any message in one-click. Outlook.com lets you flag (equivalent to Gmail’s starring feature) only incoming emails and not the sent emails.
5. You can also use Gmail to send messages from your other e-mail addresses using Gmail’s “Send mail as” feature. You can hide your Gmail address by sending the emails through your other account’s SMTP server settings.
6. Gmail’s filters are so powerful and flexible that you can define the filters the way you want. You can create a filter with multiple parameters. For example, I can create a filter to “Star” messages that are coming from abc@example.com and then apply a Label and mark automatically as important and send an automatic reply or forward to another e-mail address. They’re all possible using just one filter.
7. Like filters, another feature that’s worth mention is its Labels. Instead of using folders Gmail uses Labels. In Gmail virtually there’s only one folder and everything else is labels. You can add as many labels as you want to a message and you can search messages using labels apart from using other criteria.
8. Gmail Chat is so addictive and so powerful that it supports Instant Messages, Group Chats, Video Chats, Group Video Chats (Hangouts), Phone Call, etc. That’s not all! All your conversation history is archived online and is searchable. Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail later followed this feature and are now saving all chat histories on the cloud instead of saving on your local PC.
9. With Gmail Labs (experimental new features in Gmail) you can boost your email productivity. And my favorite Labs are “Undo Send” (you get up to 30 seconds to stop messages from being sent), “Canned Responses” (create email templates), “Inserting images” (it’s a killer feature that allows you to paste images directly into the message body), “Quote selected text” (quote only a part of the message instead of including the whole conversation when you reply) “Message Sneak Peek” (enables right-clicking on a messages).
10. Now when it comes to security Gmail is probably the best among the trio. With 2-step account verification Gmail is almost hacker proof.
11. With Gmail, you can now track your recent login sessions (Access Type, IP Address, Data, Time) and can also sign out remotely. Click on the “Details” link present at the bottom right corner of your Gmail inbox.
12. Google offers a simple task manager called Google Tasks. Though I no longer use Google Tasks it’s really a cool product that’s integrated with Gmail.
13. Gmail allows you to create custom e-mail signature for each account that you have added.
14. Gmail’s app for mobile devices is just awesome with push notifications.
Cons
1. Gmail is not social and is integrated only with Google+ that nobody uses. But you can use the third-party add-on called Rapportive to connect your Gmail account to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more.
2. Gmail is heavy with too many unwanted features.
3. Gmail’s reading pane, known as Preview Pane, is a mess with ads, horizontal scroll bar, etc.
4. Gmail’s sidebar is ugly with distracting and spammy looking ads.
5. Replying to an e-mail message is awful as the reply window is very narrow with annoying ads.
6. You can’t recover a deleted message.
7. Gmail has got a simple interface but it’s really boring.
You can create a Gmail Account by Clicking here
