what kinda question is THAT?

there is virtually no competition between the two!

Personally I like the Hotmail user interface better than Gmail's. It looks nice even with many many e-mails. It's eye pleasing. Gmail looks a little ugly with many e-mail inbox in your inbox.

Feature wise Gmail wins. You just try it and you will know. But I will still vote for Hotmail because it is more developed as a web mail and is more integrated. Gmail is good but it will still be a long way before Gmail can catch up with MSN. Furthermore, more people use MSN messenger to talk. You can also be alerted of any new mail. For Gmail, I know there is a Gmail desktop notifier. I am using it too. But the only thing it does is to inform you of new mail but it takes up a certain amout of system resources. MSN messenger is more effecient. I am currently using Gmail along with my MSN account. The only reason when I will totally switch to Gmail is when it is more integrated into the web as not just web mail but a communication tool. (E.g MSN Messenger)

I'll go for Hotmail. But still, work hard Gmail team. You still rock!

This post has been edited by Shackman: Dec 31 2004, 07:29 PM

sorry mate, but ive gotta disagree with just about everything youve just said!!

gmail looks a lot better than hotmail - its simple and its not cluttered with ads all over the place. but i guess thats opinion.

you can also use your gmail with msn messenger, all you need to do is get a .net passport for it.

you can also set up messenger to check your gmail for you as well. i havent actually tried (i use gmail notifier) but wht u need to do is get msgplus. then u need to enable POP access for your gmail (thats something hotmail doesnt give btw).

i hear what your saying about the integration, but what does gmail have to integrate with?

I like hotmail, it has many good features, except all the dating banners and advertisement. Ok, maybe gmail's better.

Yeah, none of this accidentally clicking on the giant ads that take up most of the space with hotmail... I even have a look at the ads in gmail 'cause they're often applicable to what I'm currently thinking about...

Someone offered me a gmail account about 6 months ago, and I nearly turned them down... thank God I didn't. It loads faster, I can search it, I can organise my folders, automatically forward, etc... etc... if there's a feature not there, I can request it, and if they like the idea, they'll add it... Gmail wins hands down...

I would have to say Gmail hands down because of several reasons. Gmail has much more space where I can store my attachments which may include pictures, slideshows, downloads and I can store my regular e-mail. We are talking about 1 GB of space which is plenty. Gmail also has really good spam protection and knows which e-mail is spam and what is good. Gmail also has POP3 and you can use a Google inbox search if you are looking for a specific message and don't want to look for it manually.

I used to use Hotmail but I had a problem with spam and my inbox would get filled kind of easily. Now with Gmail I know I have enough space to store a lot of stuff. There are still Hotmail users out there that think Hotmail is better than Gmail and that is fine by me.

And POP3 is useful because...? It entirely defeats the purpose of gmail... a huge amount of storage where you never need to delete anything... if you're downloading it to your computer, it's no longer in your inbox... so, POP3 is really no bonus.

I thought you could download your emails from your Hotmail account as well through Outlook? - and as dexter said, POP3 defeats the purpose of Gmail.

I love my Gmail, the only thing I would have against it is how Google can store your email even after you've deleted it. Even though they have an extensive privacy policy, it wouldn't do any important transactions on it (but I guess you wouldn't on Hotmail either seeing how it gets hacked).

As for loading/space/functions - Gmail wins hands down, my Hotmail has just become a spam box.

You can choose to let the mail stay in your GMail inbox if you want to. You don't have to remove it from the gmail server. Say you want to do some batch saving of emails for some reason or other, you might want to use an email client to download all your mails, instead of copy/pasting them individually

Hotmails mail fetching only works with Outlook, nothing else.