What's the obsession with Gmail? (Open letter)

Okay so I was searching for my tax returns from the past couple of years in my email inbox. My Dad, as a CPA, does a great service for me every year by doing my taxes and sends me those returns via email. I'm glad to have him as my CPA because he really knows his stuff. Anyway, my point is that I have two main email accounts, my Yahoo and my Gmail and my Dad has

started to send me emails exclusively via my Gmail account. So I have long been a fan of Yahoo over Gmail for various reasons that I will soon enumerate. While searching for the forms in both

my Gmail and Yahoo accounts, I was reminded of those differences and said to my wife (who is an avid Gmail user), "Seriously, why do you use Gmail when Yahoo has such better functionality. I don't know what the big deal is and why more people don't have yahoo accounts." She said,

"why don't you blog about it...?" "I think I will!" Now please don't think I am against have a Google account. It is almost a necessity for other things. I love Reader. I like my iGoogle. I love Google chrome and the bookmark bar and the extensions you can add (although I do like Bing a

lot too, especially for maps and travel). I think Google Voice is awesome, and Blogspot is generic, but okay, but seriously people Gmail has been long overdue for an upgrade. I mean after the initial launch all the college people got an account and never checked to see what the competition was doing. Yeah the mass storage was awesome back in 2005/6, but everybody has that now.

So anyway, here is my list of what makes Yahoo better than Gmail.

Tabbed messages - seriously Google, how easily would this be to implement. I mean do you know how nice it is to be writing an email and to be able to stop and reference something that is in another email without having to save and exit your existing message. Any major email client has that and if you want to be taken seriously Gmail, it is a must.

Message previews - I don't want to have to open every message that I get if it is only a couple sentences long. I can quickly scroll through all the messages and then if I want to open it, I can. You do this in Reader, why not in Gmail.

Your search function is awful - Yeah you can do an advanced search and get better results, but Yahoo's is superior in so many ways. All you have to do is enter what it is that you are looking for, in my case it was "tax forms". There were a lot more results than I was expected, but no matter. Over on the right hand there was a bunch of quick filters. Year sent, sender, mail folder, attachment, etc. I didn't have to do an advanced search because that option is available with every search. You just narrow it down after you see you got too many results. See the pic below.

Gmail also doesn't sort by date, by sender, file, etc. Yahoo does. Sometimes it's really nice to have that functionality.

I've heard it argued that Gmail is nice because it has all your chat contacts right in the mailbox. Guess what? Yahoo does too! It's just that everybody uses Gmail for some strange reason so you have everybody has more contacts there. Anyway, let's be honest, everybody uses Facebook now for chatting and messaging, right?

Oh and what's the deal about grouping all "like messages" together? I hate that! We use Google for our email server at work (but use Outlook as the client). Every now and then I have to go into the main Google account to check for Spam because some legitimate emails to get sent there. Well Google groups all messages that have the same subject line and a "Re:" even though they aren't related in the slightest.

Yahoo also offers some pretty cool features like Other In Box that organizes those annoying (but sometimes important) messages from bank and credit card accounts, Linked In updates, shopping. I don't want to be completely removed, but I don't want them cluttering up my inbox either. So now I just get a daily update from OIB and I can scan through to see if there is anything worth reading.

Oh and I also like how they have top news stories right there on hand on one of the tabs.

By the way, while I am at it Google. Why do you make it so hard to add people that I want to share with on Reader. Maybe I don't have their Gmail account. If they are sharing publicly, why can't you make it easier to search for people and add people by other mail accounts? I'd like to see what more of my friends are sharing. I use Reader a lot more than Facebook and if you made it easier to search and add people than maybe a lot more people would switch over. And you can never tell who is actually following you and posting stuff for you to see.

Okay, I've given my opinion, now give me yours. If you are a Gmail user, why do you use it? Because you are comfortable with it and don't want to make a switch and give out a new email? Well you did it before when you switched to Gmail a couple years ago, right?