MSN mail* follows the Google mail wave (*eyes tight shut)

Is it me or is Google Mail brilliant?

I know I myself am behind the wave, somewhat, in finding this out now (April 2006), but I was only recently invited to get a Google Mail account and so only now have seen the surprising qualities of Google mail. I don’t mean to belittle Google or imply I expect ‘not-much’ of them, but I really didn’t expect anyone to produce a mail client that would impress me much, and certainly not impress me lots.

But Google mail did impress me. A lot.

I am more impressed with the UI, fresh thinking, dedication to solving the real problems with brave new solutions, execution, degree of intuitiveness, power and elegance in Google mail than I have been in any application I can recall at the moment.

I did not expect that.

Fresh from being-impressed, I had cause to access an old email account, Hotmail (as was), and it looked Horrid. Advert-city. Then, I noticed an ad for MSN beta mail or something, so I clicked and got this:

And it was this that made me write this post.

Ok, I have to admit I have not tried the new MSN mail (and also that I am not going to try it based on the past and more to the point on the screen-shot of the ‘new’ interface), so it is a bit weak of me to now criticise it, but…

One of the many things that Google Mail has done to make it a leader, the crest of the wave, is to have no folders. The bane, surely, of our lives. Use them and you’ve got to put effort in. Fail to use them and you’ve got a jumbled mess. So, folders gone and tagging, archiving and search ‘in’.

I won’t bore on here about how Google Mail does it, but, it does. Brilliantly. And by the look of the same-as-before (ok, fewer adverts and more negative space) ‘new’ MSN mail, it looks as if the MS offering is, once again, not at all setting the trend but instead, following along, and in this case, with it’s eyes closed and consequently falling down all the holes that Google Mail has so elegantly avoided.