Review of the New Rediffmail

Intrigued by the relentless campaign of RediffMail v/s Hoohah
commercials on various TV channels last month, I decided to take some time out and
give Rediffmail a try and experience the promised lightning mail.

I wasn't disappointed as upon login, it straight away jumps into an Outlook style three pane view
of folders, Messages and Preview, and on clicking on the message instantly shows the preview , the clever use of Ajax is impressive, and gives a first good quick impression.

The attach files functionality was really fast, and it allowed me to upload an attachment, and still continue my email writing.

I also looked at the import contact functionality, which seems to have been extended further as it offer contact imports from not just Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook but also to Netscape Communicator, Yahoo Mail, Pine, Windows Palm Desktop and Mutt User Agent.

Rich text editor worked without glitches, and the various smileys were really cool.

Auto completion from addressbook is a big time saver.

Another cool feature (like Outlook) is the "drag & drop" feature which
allows for Instant Save of emails. Users can drag & drop mails into any
folder. Search works on attachment as well, great feature.

Also it is now possible to preview mails instantly in the Inbox and even attachments as well.
On clicking on the paper clip icon, you can see the contents of an attachment
(file size, file name, format, tags) before opening it.
For zip files, it shows the list and names of the files within the zip!

Wishlist

While previewing I created my own set of wishlist for Rediffmail or for
that matter any email app, it would be really cool for me to have the
following functionalities.

- Search Contact should be extensive to include notes, as well as tags

- Todolist would be nice to have, specially in sync with emails, if i
want to set some reminders to send emails to some contacts on a given
date, or if i can set a remidner on an email or reply to be expected.

- Voice and Video emails have been launched in the International
market,, hope rediff will be able to come up soon with those features.
In India, NowPos have introduced a cool voice email functionality.

- Also cool feature to have would be similar to the ones, most mobile
phones have these days, i.e. it can show the photo o f the caller, a
similar feature is desirable, where if a photo is attached for the
contact, it is displayed in the pane of emails recd.

- Email functionalities can be further extended as application,where if
would like to get rsvp's or do a small survey with all my friends about
a picnic idea, i should be able to easily integrate and give asy and
quick wasy for my friends to respond back on the email itself

I was unable to check the multi-lingual functionalities, which seems
very unique offering to Rediff compared to yahoo, gmail, hotmail etc.

Overall, Rediff seems to be matching up with competition from yahoo and
gmail, and should be able to maintain its leadership as the first choice
web mail for the Indian Internet community.

Please share some of the unique features u like of different email clients.

Regards,
Ajay Sanghani
CEO, ITVidya.com