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>> Hey everyone, welcome to Prizefight. I'm Veronica Belmont and today we're going to take a close look at something none of us can live without, email. For ease and flexibility, most would argue that free web-based services are the way to go. So today's match up is between the titans: Gmail and Yahoo! Mail Beta, Beta because of a new design. Yahoo! has seniority but Gmail has become a very popular option. Let's get started with round one, interface. Both email services use Ajax so the entire page doesn't have to reload every time you click on a page like HTML does. Yahoo! mail tries to emulate Outlook while Gmail has a simpler, less cluttered look to it. However, I do like that you can drag and drop emails into folders in Yahoo!. With Gmail, you have to click the check box to do an action on an email and you also don't have that right-click functionality like Yahoo! does. I'm giving Gmail a three because I do like the clean design and Yahoo! a four because you really do get a lot of functionality with this interface. Up next is features. Both services will let you work with their respective calendars but Google talk really has the best integration with the email. You can chat within Gmail and even save transcripts of your conversations for reference later. Yahoo! should be rolling out this feature soon, but it's not widely available yet. Gmail will also flag potential calendar appointments and map locations. As for capacity, Gmail has been raising the bar with two point five gigabytes of storage. And Yahoo! has a max at one gigabyte. In May, they're making unlimited for Yahoo's tenth anniversary, but that's still a few months away. Yahoo! had the better RSS integration in the interface, but Gmail lets you search by topic for new feeds. I'm going to flip flop the score and this round I give Gmail the four and Yahoo! the three. So how fast do these sites deliver? Speed is round three. This will be a short round. Gmail was far faster than Yahoo! mail. More often than not, it seemed like Yahoo! was waiting for its ads to load more than anything else. This could also be attributed to a more complicated interface, either way, I get my screens loading faster with Gmail. I'm giving Gmail a five and Yahoo! mail a three. Is your email overwhelming? Organization is our next round. Like I mentioned earlier, it's nice to be able to drag things into folders in Yahoo! mail. But Gmail brings Google's knack for organizing information to your inbox with superior filtering for content. With such good search, you don't need folders to keep everything straight. Filters will find your content for you. Gmail gets another five while Yahoo! gets a three. Finally, we all want to keep those Viagra ads out of our inbox so security will be our final round. Gmail and Yahoo! both have pretty good spam and virus filters but lately I've heard from users of both that spam has been sneaking over the walls and into their inboxes every so often. Spam is evolving after all. Overall, they do a pretty good job of corralling those baddies, so I'll give them both a four. So what's the final score? Well Gmail has a twenty one and Yahoo! has a seventeen, that's a pretty close one. All in all, I would choose based on the interface that you like the best and how much you want to integrate your chat and calendar functions. Thanks for watching. If you want to suggest a show, email me at prizefight at CNET.com. I'm Veronica Belmont, I'll see you next time.
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