Earthlink to Join Webmail Fight

Flash is evil, EEEVIL! And annoying as hell! Besides, Earthlink already had webmail, just what was wrong with the old one? Huh? I really hate Flash. It's not cool to have a site made entirely out of flash, it's annoying!
/rant...

It's all in how it was developed. 95% of Flash apps are just "all flash". However, given a good developer you can have quite a good application. Problem is that most flash developers come from strictly a graphical design background and don't take good GUI design into consideration.

Exactly. It's not the technology that's bad, it's the use of it. Saying all Flash is bad is like saying all digital photography is bad (as a way of arguing for film). The technology itself has nothing to do with whether the product produced with it is not good. Give me a break.

It ain't the pencil, it's how you write your name.

I agree. Flash has come a long way, and with new development tools like Laszlo and Flex, it is being used to build real applications better than anything on the web already. I look forward to seeing this.

I agree, it makes even the most mundane tasks take longer.

And i thought that AOL was bad. Who on earth would create a Flash webmail application and pimp it like it were the next generation of web services?

Cool! An even slicker way to view all that spam that get's by Earthlink's spam filter!

Not that their service will bring something new that you can't get now for free. It is like 25th brand of aspirin. I would understand if Earthlink would add something that is needed but not available anywhere else... Like 30MB attachments or something. Also, a flash site... It is a bad move.

I agree who cares, until the top 10 isp's dump pop in favor of forcing users to use their ad laden webmail interface....

and 100MB...too little too late. Everyone who wants that kinda stuff already has GMAIL.

Why am I paying for 10 mb of space on my earthlink account when they are going to give away a 1 gb?

My account may be getting deactivated soon..

I agree! Even Hotmail gives you 250MB...

I wondered how I was going to justify building a Pentium 4 640-based system to replace my aging Dell P3.

Thanks, Earthlink [I think].

Ah Yes, Another email provider for Verizon to block, Unless They will use a compatible SMTP server with a compatible Server Authentication scheme of some sort.

I use to love Earthlink but with SBC so cheap it's hard to use them and validate the extra cost.

More abusive flash crap

abusive? Just don't use the service, problem solved. I should be a consultant; that'll be $10000.

I use a PDA.
To the best of my knowledge, PDA's don't support Flash.
I've tried and have not been able to get to work.
So anyone who uses a PDA can't check their mail?
Sounds stupid to me.

Why does everyone forget about accessibility when building websites? Screen readers don't work with flash.

How will you control what you want to see and what you want to block such as advertisements?

Also, it is true that using an all-flash approach is wrong if not coded properly, I can only hope the dev team will at least consider a hybrid approach.
A great demonstration of how flash can spice up any web applications is available on... you guessed it, www.Macromedia.com... Can't find the area, but they have a pretty slick form in there; alternatively, you can check the "exchange area"...

Finally, many people don't like Flash because it takes eons to load on slow connections and/or because the noob-designer just made one mega movie/scene, instead of a collection of small, fast loading ones.

Earthlink wanna try a new approach, let them do it. I'll try it just to see how they implement it... Can't criticize a free service now come on

Just as JavaScript is abused mercilessly, Macromedia Flash is similarly used to obliterate perfectly fine sites. I've ceased being a customer of some businesses simply because they decided to convert their site to Flash. I can't think of a single sane reason why Flash needs to be involved AT ALL with reading email.