A friend has been using Yahoo e-mail for her business but has found that too many times, it is inconsistent in receiving & sending e-mail. So she is using gmail, in which the bare-bones format just confuses her. It bunches up e-mails in threads, which results in her missing posts, & doesn’t easily set correspondents up on the contacts list. BUT all her e-mails consistently arrive to her & her correspondents. So what e-mail service will give her consistent service & has a user-friendly format?
I know it’s probably not what you want to hear, but when I first switched to gmail, I hated, absolutely hated, the threaded conversation way that email is displayed. I also hated how folders were replaced by labels, and you had to label, then archive, to get a message out of your inbox (this has been alleviated with the move to button now).
It took a bit of getting used to. I would just tell her to stick with it because, in my experience, it is far better and the intuitiveness grows on you.
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Since the OP is looking for opinions, I’ve moved the thread from GQ to IMHO.
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GMail now lets you ungroup conversations. Go into options to change it.
I agree 100% with RW. When I first began using Gmail, I hated it. It was so different than any email client I’d ever used, and I despised the Conversations format. Now I judge every other webmail client by it and have stopped using all others. Yes, Gmail takes a little getting used to but is, in my opinion, worth the effort.
I hate Gmail, but everyone else I know thinks it’s great.
She could use an email program such as Outlook Express on her computer to fetch mail from her gmail account. That way she’d have the benefits of the gmail service with the benefits of a traditional folder based interface.
You need to learn to embrace our Googley overlords.
I can’t find that option. How do we do that?
Also, is there a way to easily put new contacts on our contact list?
It’s not Options. It’s Settings, which is in the upper-right of the screen. When the Settings window opens, on the General tab, go to the middle of the window and select “Conversation View Off”.
Click on Contacts in the upper left of the screen, then click on the “Add to my Contacts” button.
ETA: You can also import your contacts if you have a lot and don’t want to retype them all.
Another chiming in to suggest Gmail.
I personally love them - almost zero spam, unlike other email services I have used.
Oddly, the school where I teach has banned Gmail from teacher’s computers, although the student computers allow access. Thus, I have to go to a student computer in the lab to read my email at school, and not at my desk (one foot away from my computer).
Stupid IT policy - something about potential access to secure documents or some such nonsense.
BTW, with a Gmail account, I get my free voice mail, web analytics and lots of other cool features. I have been a Google fan back from Day One and have had no bad experiences with them.
It sounds like the op’s friend is accessing email remotely. Try useing live mail (free from MS) and then turn off any filtering protocols with whatever server used. I access multiple accounts from one piece of software.
Your friend really needs to register a domain for her business and set up email hosting at that domain. Even if she’s not ready to build a website yet, she should have an email address that represents her business. Representing herself as a business with a gmail, ymail, live, hotmail or other free email account that are easy to set up anonymously will reflect poorly on her business. Why would you trust anyone with a disposable email address?
It’s inexpensive enough that it will almost certainly pay for itself with business from potential clients who would simply discount her legitimacy for using a free email service.
If her business is selling beanie babies on eBay, this may not apply. I don’t know anything about her business, but I believe my opinion on this is almost universally true.
She can use Gmail for Work and use her own domain. This way, she’ll have the benefits of Gmail and all of its features and collaboration tools, and her clients and vendors will never know it’s Gmail under the hood.
Right. She can use any number of email hosting options. My main point was that she really needs her own domain that is recognizable and tied to her company identity.
heather.williams@logisticsconsulting.com commands much more respect than logisticsconsulting@gmail.com
Especially since Yahoo! Mail accounts tend to get hacked pretty easily. I’ve seen it happen a bunch of times.
What do you mean by hacked?