Jesse Kuhnert explains why splitpane views suck from an usability point of view. He uses two giant web-based email providers, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail, as the example. I agree what he said mostly but personally I don't have problem with splitpan views in Yahoo! Mail at all. I like both programs. It was hard to me to pick one of these at that time when I decided to dump my Outlook for home use and go with web-based email program. The main reason why I picked Gmail is its hosting plan that allows me to use my own domain as the email address right with Gmail without using forwarding or customized reply-to address any more. Now, I am using my own email address with my own domain rather than @gmail while still using Gmail services. What a cool service they offered! The current version of Yahoo! Mail is much better than the previous ones but Gmail is still faster and easy to use. Besides, there are other little features or user-friendly designs that make it looks even better. Here is one example.
In Outlook or other email programs, what happens when you try to reply an email in sent folder. Right, it will reply to yourself. You might say it make sense because my name is on the from field but no, it doesn't make sense at all in real world. In a lot of cases, I actually want to continue the conversion with the person whom I previously emailed. In Outlook, if I want to do so, I have to click Forward and manually type the sender's address again. But in Gmail, because all conversions are all groupped together you can reply to anyone among in the conversion and whichever you pick to reply it always automatically put the person you want to communication with rather than yourself into the To box, which is exactly what I want. Sigh...only Google knows what I want after using email many years. Thanks!!
I have to say that small thing like this makes Google much prettier.