Yahoo Email: The Pros & Cons Compared To Other Email Programs Like Gmail, Hotmail, And Outlook

I’ve had a Yahoo Email account since 1997 — and for the most part I’ve been very happy with it.

There are some features on the new Yahoo Mail that I’m not as happy with, however.

For example, whenever you login to your Yahoo Email account now, it automatically opens up a chat room tab for everyone in your Contact List who happens to be online at the moment. Since I have a lot of people in my Contact List, this can be really annoying and even slow down the program.

Fortunately, Yahoo allows you keep the Classic email version if you want to. In the past, you had to just accept whatever changes they had made to their newest version. But apparently, with this Yahoo Mail new version, I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t as enamoured with it as they’d hoped.

Here are the advantages and disadvantages of Yahoo Mail, as I see it…

Great Things About Yahoo Email

#1 – Yahoo Email Has the most storage for free.

You get the most free storage with Yahoo Mail — which is one of my favorite things about using Yahoo. Compare this with other email programs such as Gmail (which gives you 15 GB of mail storage before you have to pay for extra) and Hotmail (which gives you 500GB of email storage for free). Yes, both of those give you lots of space… but it’s not nearly as much as Yahoo!

Now there is a catch with Yahoo… if they believe you are abusing their service, your account can be flagged by their anti-abuse office. However, I’ve never had that problem in my many years of using Yahoo Email. I think you’d have to really mess up to have this happen — like not checking your e-mail for months at a time and clearing it out, that sort of thing.

#2 – Saves hard drive space.

Web-based Yahoo Email is far better in my opinion than desktop applications — such as Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. The reason: you can save all of your emails online and not on your desktop where they would take up space on your hard drive.

Anyone who is trying to conserve space on their hard drive would be better served by using a Yahoo Email account than one of those offline desktop applications, in my opinion.

#3 – Can chat without downloading anything.

Yahoo Chat is available without downloading Yahoo Messenger.

That’s right, if you don’t want to download Messenger, one nice thing about the new Yahoo Mail (and which they are supposed to make available even on Yahoo Mail Classic too) is the chat function.

While I personally find Messenger extremely annoying, it is nice that you don’t have to download an application to chat with your Yahoo Messenger buddies anymore. Again, this saves space on your hard drive.

#4 – Has free calendar functionality.

Yahoo Mail has a very nice calendar feature. I really like Yahoo’s calendar, and I use it to keep track of my writing deadlines.

Also, you can set up Yahoo Calendar to send you e-mail reminders about events that you have scheduled on your calendar. This is very useful and means you don’t have to worry so much about forgetting deadlines.

#5 – Keeps your notes in one place.

Yahoo Mail has a notepad feature which I also really like. I use Yahoo Notepad any time I’m doing research online.

When you click on the Notepad tab, you can open a new note or edit your existing notes.

You can use Yahoo Notepad to take notes or to copy & paste sections of text from different web pages to use in your research, for example.

Notepad also allows you to set up folders to organize all of your notes in one place.

#6 – Scans emails for viruses.

Yahoo Mail uses Norton Virus Scan to scan all your emails before you read them.

It scans quickly, and ultimately protects you from getting a virus which can then attack your computer.

In my opinion, this is one of the best things about Yahoo Email — because I don’t have to worry about downloading an email with a virus that is then going to mess up my computer.

When you’re using an e-mail application like Outlook Express for example, you have to be sure to have some kind of antivirus software on your computer. And even then, an e-mail with a virus has been known to slip through.

#7 – Has free stationery options.

With Yahoo Stationery, you can choose to use to dress up your emails if you want to. Along these same lines, Yahoo Mail also has emoticons built in, plus the ability to change the color, size, and font of your text, the ability to use bullets, change the alignment of any line, and highlight any word or line of text.

All of these features make Yahoo Email fun to use!

Not So Great Things About Yahoo Email

#1 – Lots of ads

There are ads in your Yahoo Email — that’s what keeps it a free service.

That’s another reason I’ve stuck with Yahoo Mail Classic — because there is only one ad banner at the top, plus one at the top and bottom of the side of the page. That’s it.

In the new Yahoo Mail, ads appear everywhere making the page look so busy that you can barely tell where your email starts or ends!

Here’s how to remove ads from Yahoo Email.

#2 – Grouped emails

Conversations are sorted by the newest first — but some people don’t like the way email exchanges are grouped into single “conversations” (which is also how Gmail does it). Somen of us want the option to control whether the oldest or most recent message appears at the top of our Yahoo inbox.

Here’s how to switch back to the old way of looking at Yahoo Mail.

#3 – Removal of the save button

If you’re like me, we liked it! I always worry when a program says it will “automatically save or update” something — I want to be able to do it myself.

Here’s how you can still manually save drafts in Yahoo Email.

The Bottom Line

All in all, the advantages of using Yahoo Mail clearly outweigh the disadvantages, in my opinion.

I’m certainly willing to put up with a few ads (and even the chat rooms for every person in my address book who is online) –if it means I get to keep using Yahoo Email for free.

After all, if I really don’t want these 3 things to annoy me, I can just switch to Yahoo Mail Classic instead, and that would solve the problem.

More About Yahoo Mail

We love Yahoo Email around here. These are some of our other articles with helpful tips for using Yahoo:

• Yahoo Mail Advanced Features That I Love
• Google’s Free Web-Based Apps Compared To Yahoo’s
• Reasons To Make Yahoo Your Homepage
• Google vs. Yahoo As Personal Home Pages