Why can't anyone get email services right?

Email is often cited as the killer application that turned the Internet from a novelty for geeks into a serious business tool. Why then is it so hard to get right? The recent changes to Gmail and Yahoo Mail  sparked a bit of debate amongst the BetaNews team as to what makes a good email service. What are the features we really want and what can we happily live without?

Until around 12 years ago you were most likely to access your email via a client program, downloading messages from the server and dealing with them on your PC. This was mostly down to slow dial-up connections which meant that you weren’t online all the time. Since then -- for personal mail at least -- there’s been a shift towards webmail services. Mainly this is thanks to broadband connections and ever increasing storage allowances which mean that you never have to throw anything away. But despite this shift a whole generation of mail users still think of Outlook Express, with its classic three-pane view, as the way email should be.

There’s a lot to be said for the OE approach. You can see your inbox contents, preview a message with a single click -- though security obsessives like to switch this off -- and have easy access to folders to organize your mail. You can send, receive, compose and reply using simple toolbar buttons. This simplicity and familiarity is probably why, at its core, Outlook.com (the service formerly known as Hotmail) works in a similar way if you dig beneath all the newer enhancements.

Gmail by contrast seems to have set out to be willfully different, even at the expense of being less usable a lot of the time. It no longer allows you to see a large part of a message without opening the whole thing, which seems like a backward step. When composing a message the pop-up window isn't widely liked, though you can -- at the moment -- still switch back to the old way of doing things. The priority inbox is popular but Google's recent implementation of tabs has missed the mark by leaving out the ability to create your own.

What Do We Want?

So what do we really want from a mail service? Above all we want it to be usable. We want to be able to send, receive, reply to and organize messages -- this after all is what email is all about. These key functions should be as easy to use as possible, if you have to hunt around the screen to find a reply button then the service isn't doing a good job.

We’d like some way of previewing messages without fully opening them too. Whether that's via a traditional preview pane or by hovering the cursor over the message, we don’t really mind.

Decent spam filtering is important, though few services manage to get this right. Gmail used to be really good but lately allows rather too much junk through whilst stopping legitimate newsletters. In fairness this might be down to the spammers getting better rather than Gmail getting worse.

Other features are nice to have -- trusted senders, automatic sorting, customizable views, message threading -- but not if they get in the way of basic usability.

What Don’t We Want?

Advertising is top of the pet hates list, especially if it appears in your inbox rather than elsewhere around the page. We'd also rather mail providers didn't scan our accounts to target us with more ads based on the mail we receive.

Because email is something that we use every day we tend to be resistant to change. We don’t therefore take kindly to providers moving the furniture around or making "improvements" that don’t seem to have been properly thought through.

Email really should be straightforward. Outlook Express got it pretty much right in 1996. But since then it seems that mail services have forgotten what they're really about. They start out well but then they spend all their time adding social media connectivity and other flashy features, when all most of us want is to be able to send and receive mail simply and reliably. Is it too much to ask for a mail service that just does mail?

What are your email likes and dislikes? Have you found a service that's a perfect fit for your needs? Do let us know on the comments thread.

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