A Comparison of Live Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail

The three applications, along with AOL mail, account for the vast majority of the roughly 500 million webmail users worldwide (see the chart included in this post). Most of these users are still using the outdated, tedious Yahoo Mail and Hotmail user interfaces that lack Ajax, requiring a page refresh for every click. The new applications, together with Gmail, provide a much richer experience, similar to Outlook or Mac Mail. When these webmail clients are functioning well, their speed and ease of use rival those of desktop clients.

Overall, we prefer Gmail over all other webmail applications because its performance (speed) is consistently fast, and emails can be tagged, making searches much more effective. Gmail also offers more storage and additional features, and it’s free. However, Yahoo and Live Hotmail provide more mainstream Outlook-like user interfaces (although Live Hotmail does not allow you to access other email accounts from within their application), whereas Gmail takes some time to get used to. If you prioritize speed and tagging is important to you, Gmail is the best choice. If you're looking for the closest equivalent to Outlook online, go with Yahoo Mail.