Here is the eighth edition of our Weekly Office 2.0 Roundup. Today, we will review 10 online email applications, from FastMail to Zimbra. We will identify some unique features that might help your own selection process — if you’re not already set, and you will get a chance to cast your vote for the best online email application.

With the help of many contributors, we completed the Email section of the Office 2.0 Database. From the 10 players we identified, all but one (Tamadaa) are actively developed by legitimate companies. Because there are so many online email applications currently available on the market, we focused on the ones that have been registered into the Office 2.0 Database by our contributors. Please feel free to point us to others that we might have overlooked.

Functionality
From a functionality standpoint, an online email application lets you read and write emails from any web browser. The simplest ones are tied to a specific email account, sometimes itself tied to a specific domain name (as is the case for Hotmail), while the more advanced ones let you manage third-party email accounts tied to any domain name. Most applications let you manage emails using either folders or tags, or both. Also, most applications provide ways to manage contacts, even though the set of features they provide is relatively limited, especially when compared to a full-fledged Contact Manager. The more advanced applications support user-defined filters, as well as filters for junk mail and viruses. All the applications we reviewed are limited by storage quotas, usually between 100 MB and 10 GB, even though some promotional accounts with 1 TB of capacity have been offered in the past. A heavy email user will use about 5 MB of storage capacity on a daily basis, which means that a 10 GB quota should be enough for about 5 years of continuous activity.

Ease of Migration
Migrating from an offline email client to an online alternative is virtually impossible if you want to preserve your email archives, unless you have been using IMAP. If all your emails came from a POP account and were removed from the server once downloaded to your email client, you’re pretty much out of luck. Other than that, migrating is fairly straightforward, especially if your online email client supports third-party IMAP and POP accounts. Migration of contacts is usually pretty simple, and can be achieved by exporting contacts into CSV or vCard formats from your offline email client, then importing them into your online account. Nevertheless, most online email applications offer a limited set of data fields for managing contacts, and most fields provided by offline applications such as Microsoft Outlook will be lost. The best solution would consist in using a third-party Contact Manager or a CRM application, but none of the applications we reviewed supported such a level of integration at the time of writing.

Price
Most of the applications we reviewed provide both free and commercial accounts. Prices for the later range from $1.25 per month per account, to $14.95 per month per account. Most of the companies we reviewed have fairly large user bases, and should be around for quite some time. For example, Zimbra was created in 2003, launched in 2005, and already has over 6 million paid mailboxes, most of them sold through an extensive network of resellers. That being said, it should be mentioned that some free alternative can fulfill the needs of small to midsize businesses. Among them, Gmail, through the Google Apps offering, provides free email accounts for your own domain name for up to 50 users.

Alternatives
The main alternative to a dedicated online email client is an online Operating System such as Joyent or Zoho Virtual Office. If integration with your contact manager, document manager, and shared calendar is paramount to you, this option should be attractive. Otherwise, most dedicated online email clients tend to provide a more complete set of features than the ones offered by online operating systems.

Top 10 Players
Several online email applications do make use of HTTPS, therefore the Alexa ranking is not as reliable as we would like it to be. Nevertheless, and according to this ranking, we can extrapolate a Top 10 list of players in the space, which is somehow corroborated by their respective Google PageRanks. Also, this ranking is somehow validated by this TechCrunch article, which provided additional user data.

Quick Reviews
There are only 10 applications in our database, so all of them got a review.

FastMail: FastMail is simply true to its name: fast email. It sports a simple user interface, supports both IMAP and POP, and provides advanced spam and virus protection. It does not let you use your own domain name, but lets you chose from a fairly extensive list of existing ones.

Gmail: Gmail was perhaps the first Office 2.0 application ever created. Through its creative use of AJAX technology, it demonstrated that web-based applications could provide the same level of user interactivity as their offline counterparts. Its use of labels and advanced searching instead of folders also changed the way people manage large amounts of email, and fostered a GTD influenced methodology consisting in leaving your inbox always empty. Over the years, the application did not evolve as fast as its competitors, but remains the benchmark for the industry.

Hotmail: Hotmail is the application that brought email to the masses, and it’s no surprise that 11 years after having been released, it remains the second largest email provider in the world. Over the years, the application kept closing the gap with Microsoft Outlook from a functionality standpoint, and adopted many elements of its user interface. Nevertheless, the best has yet to come, in the form of integration with other elements of the Live suite of online services.

Jubii: Jubbi is still under active development, but is pioneering an interesting model where email client and document manager are tightly integrated with each other, while adding some community management capabilities. As such, it could also fall under the Operating System category, alongside Joyent or Zoho Virtual Office. It also provides a cool 10 GB of free storage.

Mailroom: Mailroom is perhaps the most innovative of all the applications we reviewed for this article. It allows emails to be shared with team members, conversations to be re-assigned, recipient-based histories to be displayed, and customizable replies to be automatically suggested. It can also be used either in a standalone fashion, or in combination with an existing offline email application.

Tamadaa: Tamadaa promises to be a back-to-basic, no-nonsense, web-based email client. It will enable you to manage several email accounts from private domains, as well as from other email providers such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail. The application is the work of a single developer and is still under heavy development, therefore its long-term future is questionable at best. Nevertheless, some of the concepts outlined in its blog, such as shared folders, are definitely worth taking a look at.

WebExMail: WebExMail is the email client of WebEx WebOffice, which we have filed under the Group Manager category. It is one of the most advanced online email applications we reviewed, and delivers a desktop-like experience through right-click menus, drag-and-drop functionality, keyboard hotkeys, and fast page updates. From a functionality standpoint, it’s a direct competitor to Zimbra.

Webmail.us: Webmail.us is yet another generic online email provider, but delivers a fairly comprehensive set of features, including company directory and shared calendars. It’s also the only application that provides data migration services.

Yahoo! Mail: Yahoo! Mail is the most popular online email application, with over 250 million users today. Its user interface was entirely redesigned a couple of years ago, and now provides a level of user interactivity even greater than what Gmail offers today. It also comes standard with Yahoo! Web Hosting plans, which are among the most affordable on the market today (the IT|Redux blog is currently hosted by Yahoo!).

Zimbra: Zimbra is a little bit different from the other applications we reviewed, for it does not sell web-based email accounts directly, but instead relies on a network of online service providers that resell its commercial open-source software. Also, Zimbra is a lot more than a simple email application, and should really be registered under the Group Manager category. Nevertheless, its user interface for email is one of the most advanced today, therefore deserves a mention in this roundup. Take a look!

Personal Favorites
I have been using Gmail as my primary email client since it was released back in April 2004. I love its extremely fast search engine, its simple user interface, and the way it displays long conversations. I just wish it would offer more than 2,825 MB, for I will run out of space very soon now. I guess it’s time for me to upgrade to Google Apps in order to get bumped to 10 GB…

What’s Missing
Integration of something like Mailroom within a CRM application such as Salesforce.com would be great. Also, integration of Google Calendar with Salesforce.com would allow me to take full advantage of the already available integration between Gmail and Google Calendar. Similarly, integration with a Contact Manager or a CRM application for managing contacts would be much welcome. Last but not least, the ability to mass export emails for archiving purposes would allow heavy email users to better deal with limited email quotas. Surprinsingly, this is a feature that I could not find with any of the applications we reviewed.

Best Online Email Application
Now that we know what’s out there, it’s time for a vote:

Note: if you cannot see the voting form, please follow this link.

Final results will be announced next week on Your Office 2.0 Setup and as an update to this post. In the meantime, please help me build next week’s roundup on Feed Readers. You can use this form courtesy of Wufoo for suggesting new applications, or providing additional information about existing ones. I would also welcome ideas for domain-specific criteria that could be used for evaluating the players on our list.

See you next week!

Disclaimer: Google and WebEx were sponsors for the first Office 2.0 Conference.