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Gmail allows you to sign in to multiple accounts at the same time (in different tabs).

I have two pinned tabs always open in Chrome - one for personal, one for business emails. Works incredibly well for me.

Except this only recently was made to work again (a year?) and it doesn't work across all Google properties. I agree that the new effort from Microsoft had no chance against the old gmail, against the current gmail the jury is still out :-).

What I find interesting is that its even a product. I know that sounds weird but bear with me for a moment.

Mail (the service) has changed hardly at all for a decade. You send an email, may be you attach a few files, you get the email. The biggest change was that you could send text that had been formatted with HTML so that it looked 'better' (not everyone agrees with this) than plain, monospaced text.

Its a bitch to monetize in any way except direct payment, and yet the Eudora's and other mail clients of the world have faded from memory.

Given the collective memory, is it time for mail as a service? You know you pay $12/year or something and it just works. Nobody futzes with the UI, the amount of space you get/use is entirely a function of what you're willing to pay.

The question I'm asking is this, "Have we collectively come to understand the intrinsic value of email?" If so is there a utility service business plan that makes sense now? I could certainly see how you might structure such a business.

> You know you pay $12/year or something and it just works. Nobody futzes with the UI, the amount of space you get/use is entirely a function of what you're willing to pay.

Id' argue Outlook UI changes with every version just as much as Gmail has. Gmail is also far less drastic, as updates are pushed regularly rather than a new version every 2 years or so. You can pay for GDrive and get 25GB for gmail.

E-Mail is a commodity and has been for quite some time. I don't see anyone disrupting the service side of it anytime soon.

I used to pay for Fastmail.fm as a mail service. It wasn't that cheap, but the top account which gave plenty of space and the ability to have my own domain wasn't expensive.

They kept the old versions of their web interface alive for many years after the active development of the 'default' moved on to different designs. Which was very helpful for me, as I much preferred their non-Javascript laden interface and kept the one I started with for many years of use.

I only moved on when I tripped their anti-spam/account hacked filter and didn't have my business e-mail for three days because the messages the interface gave me were misleading. Apart from that, I was very happy with them and they were very sensible about what they'd do with the interface.

As an aside, I think $12 a year is unrealistic for paid webmail as you'd need a good level of scale to make it pay for such a small amount. You're already talking about a service a small number of people want (interface staying the same and willing to pay for it) I'd expect you'd find the same people would be willing to pay enough to make the service worth running.

I think gmail is as close to a "mail as a service" as you can get. You can get your own domain pretty easily, and yes Google charges you for it.

You can hook up plenty of 3rd party native clients to it - if you want, you never have to use the web interface at all (9x% of my gmail usage is from Mac and iOS native clients).

True, and I pay for it for blekko.com, but there was no amount of money I could give them that would let me have the old gmail interface back. That was sad for me.

I've been able to get most of the old gmail interface back by following Jason Crawford's recommendations:

http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-...

The stuff I cared about anyway. I agree it is sad.

I find multiple sign in a great way of ensuring you're always using the wrong account for each service.

If you're OK with having separate windows, you can use a different profile for each one. Chrome handles this much better than firefox. For example, I silo my facebook browsing with:

chrome --app=https://facebook.com --user-data-dir=/home/jewel/.profiles/facebook

The other thing I do is use a different google account for each of their services, so a policy violation in one won't shut off the service in another. For example, I have calendar@mydomain.com for google calendar, plus@mydomain.com for google plus, youtube@mydomain.com for youtube.

Chrome supports profiles through the UI now, check out the settings page (under the "Users" category). It makes switching between them (and knowing who you're using) easier by adding a user icon/switcher to the top-left of the window.

Chrome handles this much better than firefox.

How so? What can Chrome do that using the Firefox Profile Manager can't?

Firefox doesn't seem able to connect to a specific open profile and make a new window, if you run Firefox without --no-remote, it always opens a new window for the oldest instance, which makes keeping multiple profiles open a pain. If you close your browsing profile while your have your email profile still open, now the Firefox icon will open windows in your email profile.

If you make an icon for your various profiles that uses '--no-remote', you can only open one window with that icon. To open more you'll have to find the running instance.

I generally prefer Firefox so if I've missed something I'd love to know, but I searched high and low for a solution and in the end I gave up and swapped to Chrome. Now I have launchers for Facebook, etc. that behave exactly as you would expect. You click the Facebook icon and you get a Facebook window, running the Facebook profile.

How does this work? If I sign out in one tab, it signs me out in another tab, on Google Chrome. Just tested it.

I click on my account picture in the top right, then click on "Add account" and log into the other one. Presto, two accounts.

Disclaimer: I am about 99% certain this is not some weird internal Google feature (not on the gmail team, don't worry), but it's also been > 1 week since I had to go through this performance so I may have forgotten some detail.

And then when you click on some Google service it always logs you in with a wrong account. Good luck trying to add something to calendar by clicking to a link.

I assume this is hyperbole (I'm not sure what magic you're expecting...maybe something like intents where it asks you every time which account to use?), but the logic isn't complicated. It just uses the first account you logged in with. I'm usually signed in to two accounts (and have a gmail tab for each open right now), so I just sign in to the one I do my primary calendaring, etc in first.

If you really want to keep them separated, you should just use Chrome's multi user accounts or their equivalent in other browsers.

@magicalist

Actually, you explained the problem without noticing it: "It just uses the first account you logged in with." Maybe it should be default account? Because "first account" will always change in round robin fashion because cookies will expire first for the newer account (which is second) and then after you login it will become first.

I've just had a quick test and it actually does okay; clicking on "calendar" opens the calendar for the account I'm currently looking at.

I guess it might not work well if you click a random link somewhere with two accounts open simultaneously, although I have a bit of sympathy for them there because that does seem kinda tricky to solve.

Apart from Google's multiple signin, Chrome supports account profiles, so you can have two Chrome windows with completely different cookies, logins, everything.

Just click on your account name in gmail, hit add account at the bottom of the little menu, and bam more accounts in more tabs.

Here's how I do it using Google Chrome:

1. Sign in to personal Gmail by going to gmail.google.com 2. Sign in to work Gmail by going to mail.google.com/a/foo.com (obviously, replace foo.com with your work domain)

http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...

I'm pretty sure with Google you can link up to 10 accounts, and you can have as many Gmail windows open as you want for various accounts that are linked. So if you want five different Gmail tabs open at the same time, just link the accounts behind them and it's possible. I personally have two independent Gmail accounts open at all times.

Gmail might warrant a second look. I have not touched it in more than two years. Yahoo Mail is good enough for me to pay for their enhanced service, Google would have to offer something better.

The free Gmail is better than Yahoo's paid service, though.

As a long-time Yahoo mail user, I'd say basically any email service is better than Yahoo Mail, at least if we're talking about their webmail interfaces.

(Protip: http://us.mc598.mail.yahoo.com/mc/launch)

You certainly can. It works well except for 1) from time time you get an odd gmail error and the only way to get it working is to log out of all your accounts, and 2) it would be nice if there was an easier way to log into 8 gmail accounts at once. It's a pain setting up your 8 windows every time you get logged out.

You're an email hipster.

Good point about the Google account bans, though. See also: Skydrive.

Bad point about mixing personal and business email in one window, though. That's a disaster waiting to happen.

I don't think I said that I mix personal and business email in one window. Yes, that is a disaster waiting to happen.

No, the idea is to have tabs that you can organize based on the context you need. One tab would be personal. Another might emails from one business. The other might be setup for the other.

I wear a couple of hats, so, for example, I'd love to have a tab that's just "Business #1 Engineering" and a separate tab that's "Business #1 Business" and keep those "personalities" separate. My engineering email address is different from my business email address as I've found that this keeps the individual mailboxes cleaner overall. Just my preference. Doesn't make it right. I also have hundreds or rules and lots of VBA code in Outlook making sense out of the whole mess.

I wouldn't have been able to do what I've been doing over the last fifteen years without the level of programming and manipulation available in Outlook.

I find Sparrow does that so incredibly well. I use 2 accounts daily, and have 2 more for "spam" accounts. It works really well at separating and unifying them.

Alas, poor Sparrow! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite utility, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorr'd in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it.

---

Here's hoping that other email clients learn well from Sparrow's success.

I've asked the question before: is modern spam filtering not enough? I used to have several accounts to void spam, but that was pre-bayesian. Filtering works great now and I use the same email for everything and anything..

Gmail has "Preview Pane" option under the Labs tab in Settings. I don't use it personally, but I am pretty sure it has been there for at least a few years.

Any unpaid account has a chance of being shut down without recourse. I haven't heard of this happening with any Google Apps accounts though (especially paid ones). Anyone else?

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Different strokes for different folks.

I realize this is Hacker News, but Outlook isn't the worst [email or otherwise] product someone can use.

Edit: The comment was originally:

"I've been using Outlook by choice" Sorry, but I just can't wrap my head around this. You say you have tried other clients and yet you keep coming back to Outlook? Did you only try a few web app clients a few years ago and not sense? Have you tried many other fat desktop and/or command line clients? I personally only interact with Outlook when my employer pays me to spend the extra time required to use Outlook. I am utterly baffled by your statement. Like when someone says they get up at 4am every day, but they are not in the military. Sure there might be some okay reasons to do that (a baby, international trading, long commute), but most normal people would still inquire for more information as getting up at 4am by choice is not normal.

I feel offended by your 4am statement... I really like getting up early and I don't know why so many people try to get up late - but I would never say they are not normal.

You offend easily.

Sorry, but how do I offend you?

What an arrogant comment. Can you tell us what it is you dislike so much about outlook and why, instead of inferring that the user base is unenlightened?

Even though it's no longer under development, I wonder if Thunderbird's default tabbed interface would meet your needs.

OMG, seems Yahoo Mail finally got https (I'm using the free version). Could be time for me to switch from Gmail.

Could you point me toward that multiple instance tweak? That's something I've wanted for a while.

Here are my notes on that (I'm running Vista 64 Ultimate):

RUNNING MULTIPLE INSTANCES OF OUTLOOK

Download and install "ExtraOutlook.exe" from:

http://www.hammerofgod.com/download/ExtraOutlook.zip

Copy the executable to the folder where outlook lives. In the current case that means:

  C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\

Create a profile for each separate instance of Outlook we want to run:

To create and manage profiles in Vista 64 go to

  Control Panel > View 32-bit Control Panel Items > Mail > Show Profiles

Create or modify the Outlook shortcut on the desktop to access the desired profile:

Profile 1:

  "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\ExtraOutlook.exe" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE" /profile "Profile 1"

Make a duplicate copy and then...

Profile 2:

  "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\ExtraOutlook.exe" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE" /profile "Profile 2"

Now two instances of Outlook can be opened and each is independently accessing the corresponding profile's data.

I go through the extra effort of assigning a different icon to each account and placing them on the quick-launch toolbar. I've been doing this for about two years and it works great. No issues whatsoever.

I can't believe MS doesn't implement MDI in Outlook so that one can do this using tabs and a single instance.

Thanks for posting your notes. I'm running into a "Function not found in Import Table" error when I try that with Outlook 2010. Have you ever run into that?

No, I've never seen that. I'm running Office 2007.