By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, January 7, 2007

How is 2007 just like 2006 -- and 2005? Google's Gmail site is still in beta, as is Microsoft's Live Mail and the new version of Yahoo Mail.

Gmail ( http://gmail.com) has now spent 33 months in this testing phase, while Yahoo Mail ( http://mail.yahoo.com) and the Hotmail successor Live Mail ( http://mail.live.com) have lasted about 16 and 14 months, respectively.

Apparently, it now takes more time to finish developing a Web site than a Web browser -- or even an entire operating system. (Not even Windows Vista has undergone such a lengthy public audition.)

The fact that these three companies don't consider their free Web-mail sites housebroken doesn't mean that they don't want you to use them. They've got ads to sell. And time you spend reading and writing e-mail at these sites translates into money they can make off your activity.

The beta-testing status of these sites means each company's sales pitch often amounts to "trust us": Trust us that we'll add new features, fix the things that you dislike and catch up to whatever options our competitors already provide.

The developers of these Web-mail sites may have infinite patience, but you shouldn't. Choose a Web-mail site based on how it works today, not on how they say it'll work tomorrow, next month, next year or whenever they finally abandon the b-word.

By that standard, your choice should be easy: Use Gmail.

Google's Web-mail has the cleanest interface --dominated either by a simple vertical list of messages or the message you're reading or writing-- and loads the quickest. In comparison, Yahoo suffers a distracting delay after you log in, then wastes so much of the screen with a vertical ad banner that you must scroll sideways to read most messages; Live Mail works faster but has an equally inefficient layout that also requires frequent side-to-side scrolling.

Gmail is smarter about organizing messages, too. It groups related replies into "conversations" and lets you sort old e-mail by "tagging" it by topic -- in effect, filing it in two or more places at once. It takes a little getting used to, but this tagging system works much better for large volumes of mail than the conventional folders Yahoo and Live Mail provide.

Gmail's absurdly high quota -- you can squirrel away almost three gigabytes' worth of mail, compared to one each for Live Mail and Yahoo -- often draws attention. But unless you're a compulsive hoarder, you'll may never approach any service's storage limits.

If a fellow Gmail user is logged on at the same time as you, Gmail lets you sidestep the lag of e-mail altogether and open an instant-messaging chat session in the same browser window. (Yahoo and Microsoft say they will add similar features to their Web-mail services later on.)

Gmail is also the most compatible service around: If you use any modern browser -- Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera -- you get the same Gmail. Yahoo forces users of Safari and Opera to stick with its old interface.

Live Mail is even more exclusive. To use the service at all, you first need to upgrade a Hotmail account by signing in at http://ideas.live.com, then wait anywhere from a day to two weeks for it to be converted. Even then, Live Mail is missing some features in non-IE browsers.

Unlike its competitors, Gmail provides more than minimal access over Internet-connected cellphones. Its mobile-Web version allows you to view most attached documents right on the phone's screen, since Google extracts and displays their text for you -- a feature also available in its full-size identity.

If you want even faster access to Gmail on the go, you can install and run a separate, free Gmail program on many smartphones. Yahoo and Live Mail have nothing comparable.

Finally, Gmail is the only service of these three that lets you download your messages to any standard e-mail program, such as Outlook or Thunderbird, at no charge. (AOL's free Web-mail service, though unremarkable in many other respects, includes this option, too.)

To enjoy all these advantages, you merely need to let Google's computers read through all your e-mail.

While other Web-mail sites serve up large graphical ads on every screen, targeted only in broad demographic terms, Google displays text-only ads to the right of each e-mail -- picked automatically by its software to match the content of each message.

So, for instance, an update from a local farmers' market featured ads alongside for cookbooks, diets and somebody's "Infused Avocado Oil."

Not to depress Google's advertisers, but I had to scroll sideways to read these ads at all -- they're normally cut off by the right edge of my browser window.

The prospect of strange computers scanning your mail to match up ads may be unsettling, even though Google pledges that it doesn't sell or share any of this data with other companies.

But you shouldn't let it bug you unless, maybe, you fall into one category of Web-mail use.

If you only employ Web-mail as a secondary inbox for commercial correspondence -- an address you hand out when you shop online or register at sites -- you're not subjecting any personal secrets to Gmail's automated scrutiny anyway.

If you keep a Web-mail account as a backup for your regular home or work address, the same situation applies. (You might, however, avoid Live Mail in this case: If you don't log into your account for 120 days, Microsoft will deactivate your address and erase your e-mail until you log back in and reactivate it.)

But what if you plan to employ a Web-mail account as your primary e-mail address? That can be a complicated value judgment. Gmail's ads are generally in good taste, but do you want every bit of personal correspondence to arrive with its own marketing payload?

There's also the nagging issue of Gmail's developers not considering the service "done" after 33 months of effort -- thought it may be comforting to learn that Google employees themselves use Gmail.

But the real sticking point may be whether you want to trust your most important messages to any free service at all.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com.