Yahoo To Update Mail Service

tonyq writes "Yahoo! is beginning beta testing of a completely reworked UI for Yahoo! Mail that incorporates DHTML technologies. The web-based application resembles a desktop e-mail client. Features include message preview; drag-and-drop filing; the capability of quickly searching e-mail headers, body text and attachments; and the ability to view multiple e-mails at the same time in separate windows and scroll through all message headers in a folder rather than one page at a time. Other niceties are auto-complete, right-click menus and standard keyboard shortcuts. A user who got an early look has graciously posted screenshots. Yahoo is also taking signups on their what's new for Mail page."

Comments

It looks impressive

[madstork2000]

I saw the new interface when my cousin, who works for yahoo was visiting. He was borrowing a computer, and I looked up and saw what I thought was Outlook Express. I went over to tell him the virtues of Firefox, when I realized what I saw was really an impressive browser based mail client.

This was back in early August, he said employees had been using it for a while, but it was hush-hush. He seemed pretty sheepish about it, and made me promise not to post on Slashdot, apparently yahoo wanted it under wraps for as long as possible.

He did give me the dog and pony show, and I must say that it really is a pretty slick application. Though I did not get to really test it, just watched him walk through it.

I own a small hosting company,and wanted to see what web-based mail clients were out there that I could use for my customers. Squirelmail and TWIG looked pretty ugly in comparison. Incidently I found an open source mail client that has a lot of similar functions: Round Cube I haveinstalled that and it is almost as impressive.

Anyway, it is amzing how far web applications have come in such a short period.

-MS2k

Re:It looks impressive

[vigyanik]

What has firefox got to do with outlook express? Are you referring to Thunderbird? I lost you some where between "web-based mail" and "installed"

Re:It looks impressive

[pete-classic]

Squirelmail [. . .] looked pretty ugly in comparison.

Hey! Don't call my baby ugly!

-Peter
Former SquirrelMail "Head Nut"

PS: It's spelled with StudlyCaps.

Re:It looks impressive

[Elwood P Dowd]

I lost you some where between "web-based mail" and "installed"

He installed it on his web host, smart guy.

Re:It looks impressive

[Seumas]

Yeah, I'm going to trust my email and privacy to a company that worked with the Chinese government to imprison a journalist for a decade.

Re:It looks impressive

[uberchicken]

> He seemed pretty sheepish about it, and made me promise not to post on Slashdot

You're claiming some kind of twisted "first post" aren't you.

Re:It looks impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this new interface make it easier for Yahoo! to turn Chinese dissadents over to the government for immediate torture? That's an important feature!

Re:It looks impressive

[wyatt12]

Hi,

I too own a small web hosting company. I just send my users to http://www.myemail.com/ They provide a gmail/yahoo interface that allows users to not only check their pop3/imap accounts, but also store 1GB of emails for free. They have google advertisements within their interface, but very minimal advertising. The interface is extremely light yet very functional with address book, etc.

Wyatt

Wyatt

Re:It looks impressive

[madstork2000]

Whoops, I did mean Thunderbird....

Re:It looks impressive

[carlivar]

You're right, Yahoo should refuse all requests from the Chinese government and ignore the soon-to-be largest Internet users in the world (since the government would kick them out). In fact they should pump their money into a Chinese revolution towards true freedom.

Oh, wait, no one does that, not even the "do no evil" Google. I wonder how Google operates in China at all without doing evil, given that some might argue any support of the country is evil?

Re:It looks impressive

[madstork2000]

Some babies have faces only a mother could love :)

Seriously, though thank you for SquirellMail. It along with TWIG, and Iloha mail have been open source staples for my clients for a long time.

In many cases these mail clients were the first direct exposure (hands on) that those users had to open source software. I have many users insist upon using SquirrellMail as their sole email application.

Thanks again,
Brandon

Re:It looks impressive

[kamapuaa]

You have a good point! Yahoo China should operate by US law! In fact everywhere should operate by US law! Go USA!!!

Sorry about the sarcasm. I suppose you could live in China and have a legitimate concern.

Re:It looks impressive

[jazman_777]

Yahoo should refuse all requests from the Chinese government and ignore the soon-to-be largest Internet users in the world...

Even though McDonald's is in China, Americans have many years' head start on being big. And the Internet users here! Whoa, they're big.

Re:It looks impressive

[pete-classic]

You're certainly welcome for the small bit I contributed.

I said "my baby", but I'm really more of an estranged uncle. The project was Luke Ehresman's brain child.

And there are a score, or more, developers who deserve far, far more credit than I.

Anyway, I'm glad you like it. It still gives me a little thrill whenever I see it in use or see a reference to it.

Thank you for exposing people to Free Software, and thank you for fulfilling the important and often overlooked role of providing commercial end-user support.

-Peter

Re:It looks impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

Group hug!!! :-p

Re:It looks impressive

[IGnatius T Foobar]

I own a small hosting company,and wanted to see what web-based mail clients were out there that I could use for my customers. Squirelmail and TWIG looked pretty ugly in comparison.

There are lots of good ones out there now. If the customer doesn't already have an email infrastructure, you might also want to have a look at Citadel, which has all of its data stores and protocols built in (even its own HTTP engine so you don't have to integrate it into your Apache server). It has an attractive web UI with a small but growing number of Ajax-style features, as well as an address book, calendar server, a simple instant messaging server, and a real-time chat server.

(Disclaimer: I am a developer on this project so I'm admittedly a bit biased towards it. But, the hosting company I work for has committed to offering it as its standard mail server package in the near future, so I think it's worth something.)

Re:It looks impressive

[suso]

Round Cube is pretty nice and a real step up in interface design over squirrelmail, but still has some bugs and is a bit slow if you have large mailboxes. But then again, it was just released last month. ;-)

I'm working on encorporating it into suso.org already. I submitted some code back to the author to deal with long folder names and stuff.

Re:It looks impressive

[McCarrum]

hehe, I know that feeling. I worked on Geeklog a while back, and when I saw it was being used for Groklaw, I was smiling for hours. In many ways, that's what brings me back to working within Open Source projects when I find a bit of time.

Re:It looks impressive

[Seumas]

When was the last time Google was responsible for aiding the government in imprisoning a journalist for a big chunk of their life?

So, because it's "doing business as usual" for whatever country they're in, you wouldn't have a problem if some manager in an American company - working in, say Iran, ratted out a woman who was cheating on her husband so that she could be stoned to death by the neighborhood? Because, hey, they're only doing what they have to do to facilitate business in that country and get in the good graces of the government, huh?

Re:It looks impressive

[Seumas]

How dense are you?

You're fucking right an American based company owned by American citizens should have some semblance of decency and adhere to what is generally considered "right" back home when they conduct business abroad.

That's why we get pissed at oil companies that screw over small towns and cities in third-world-ish places. Just because their corrupt local governments allow it doesn't make it right. It's why we get pissed when K-Mart uses child labor, even though it may be legal and condoned wherever they are doing that actual work. It's why we get pissed at IBM for working with/for the Nazis.

You can't just say "oh, well, it's what they do over there - so it's all good".

Should an American company aid a government that will imprison and maybe torture someone for exercising what we consider to be basic human rights and liberties (and not just in America, but throughout most of the civilized world)? Should we just look past that, because it's "what's done" there and because that's what they "have to do if they want the government to let them operate in their country"?

If so, then your viewpoint fucking frightens me and should frighten most people.

Re:It looks impressive

[carlivar]

When was the last time Google was responsible for aiding the government in imprisoning a journalist for a big chunk of their life?

Hmm, that's a pretty specific question. When was the last time you have eaten a hamburger on a Tuesday after riding in a red car?

In seriousness, let me get this straight:

There are no details yet from Yahoo on how this happened exactly (they are "still looking into it"). Of course, the spin on this is it is Yahoo policy to provide such information, not the independant action of 1 of 10,000 employees. We don't know.

No details are known on how the Chinese government requested the information. Was it "may we please have this information?", was it "give us this info or we shut you down, capitalist pigs", or was it "give us this information or YOU are going to jail, Yahoo worker person".

Did Yahoo screw up? Quite possibly. Is there enough information yet to condemn them and boycott everything they do? Hmm, not sure there.

Given that you are so passionate about Chinese civil rights, I hope you don't own any products made in China. Perhaps you are conscious about this and if so, I applaud you.

I am not defending China either; I absolutely loathe the Chinese government. What I get annoyed with is the hysterical anti-corporation mentality. People are innocent until proven guilty but a big bad corporation is ALWAYS guilty without trial.

Re:It looks impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

You would be far better off not putting your trust in any company regardless of past actions. If you care about the secrecy of your email and your privacy you should be encrypting it anyways.

Re:It looks impressive

[drsquare]

On the contrary, like I'm going to trust my email and privacy to a company that refuses to cooperate with the law and protects criminals.

You're probably a Google-fanboy in disguise, I'm suprised you manage to talk with all that Google semen in your throat. Remember that your precious Google cooperates with the Chinese government in censoring free speech in order to make profit there.

I wonder if the same people who criticise Yahoo would refuse the FBI entry to their house if they came with a warrant. Probably not, but then hypocricy is rampant on this site.

Re:It looks impressive

[ray-auch]

adhere to what is generally considered "right" back home when they conduct business abroad

like not turning over user details or log files to authorities looking for authors of material they disagree with ?

*cough* Rackspace *cough*

So far looks like turning over such info *is* considered "right" in the USA - at least according to your government authorities.

Re:It looks impressive

[Library Spoff]

>>I looked up and saw what I thought was Outlook Express. I went over to tell him the virtues of Firefox

why did you do that? Firefox is a web browser. You would of been better trying to show him Thunderbird...

Re:It looks impressive

[Fred_A]

When was the last time Google was responsible for aiding the government in imprisoning a journalist for a big chunk of their life?

I'd say that every time a journalist has been imprisoned, a Google search certainly took place shortly before.

So ?

Re:It looks impressive

[kamapuaa]

Well, living in China, I have this view that Chinese law applies here. Call me dense. I think definitely there's a view that "our country is perfect and every other country should abide by our standards" and it's not just limited to U.S. citizens.

Either you have to decide a country is *evil* and refuse to work with them except in a humanitarian basis, or you have to respect their national sovereignity and obey their laws. China is not the Nazis.

Re:It looks impressive

[aclarke]

Thanks for your contributions to a package I use every day. Oh look, a Mozilla tab open right now that says "SquirrelMail 1.4.1". I think the interface could use an optional rich DHTML version which would make it really cool. It's one of those "gee wouldn't it be neat to do" sorts of projects that someone else will likely get to before me, unfortunately.

But even without that it's an awesome package, so thanks for whatever contributions you made!

Re:It looks impressive

[tm1rules]

PS: It's spelled with StudlyCaps.

Actually, that's CamelCase.

Re:It looks impressive

[pete-classic]

From the article you linked:

The term StudlyCaps is similar - but not necessarily identical - to CamelCase. It is sometimes used in reference to CamelCase but can also refer to random mixed capitalization

I got involved with SquirrelMail around the time I started using the Mailman mailing list manager. That page is the first place I saw the term "studly caps". I think that studly caps is largely used in place of camel case in at least a subset of the email world. I think that studly caps to mean random capitalization is more of a BBS/IRC thing (since no sensible person writes that way).

One of the cool things about being a geek is all the great jargon, and the pseudo-etymology that goes with it!

-Peter

Re:It looks impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

"Given that you are so passionate about Chinese civil rights, I hope you don't own any products made in China. Perhaps you are conscious about this and if so, I applaud you."

I'm too busy avoiding products "Made In America".

Re:It looks impressive

[Fuzzy Eric]

Have you looked at Zimbra http://www.zimbra.com/. It seems to aim to be an Outlook/Exchange replacement, is implemented "in" AJAX, and is open source. So the (/.-ish) geek factor should be biggish.

Argh.

[DrEldarion]

I hope this new interface is optional. Part of the reason I've been using Yahoo Mail for so long was BECAUSE of its very simple and straightforward interface. Taking that away removes yet another reason to stay with them instead of finally letting go.

Re:Argh.

[tonyquan]

yes, the new interface is optional and you can switch back and forth between old and new.

Re:Argh.

[superspaz]

At a glance, it doesn't seem to innovate, just cherrypicks features of other mail clients. Truthfully it looks like a cross between msn and outlook with a search my messages box.

Re:Argh.

[mike.newton]

I hope this new interface is optional. Part of the reason I've been using Yahoo Mail for so long was BECAUSE of its very simple and straightforward interface. Taking that away removes yet another reason to stay with them instead of finally letting go.

I agree. If only they'd made it with that new 'AJAX' technology instead of DHTML...

Re:Argh.

[raylu]

Same here...what's the point of making it look the same? I have a stand-alone client for when I want to really do stuff; the web interface is just a convenience.

Re:Argh.

[Anonymous Coward]

They forgot to include something in the screenshots... the wonderful and intrusive Flash ad banners and in-message advertisments. If they are going to display their ads the same way as they presently do in the current interface... then screw yahoo.. I'll stick with Gmail.

Re:Argh.

[Anonymous Coward]

i hope all you guys are joking. otherwise, you're a bunch of retards.

Re:Argh.

[glens]

Which old? It's already a pain in the ass to get it back to the current "old" interface after visiting from "somewhere else" (other than home) using a browser with all the javascript &c. bells and whistles running.

I've pretty much quit using them since they moved away from free pop anyway. It sounds like they're trying to get me to go away for good...

Re:Argh.

[Antony.S]

POP3 is still free, and has never been not-free, I remember the first mail Yahoo sent about POP3 going to pay-to-use but it has never once forced me to pay.

I've had free POP on Yahoo since as long ago as 2000 and it hasn't stopped working once, and I've used 3 different accounts in that time.

Re:Argh.

[glens]

Not for me. It went unavailable at the time they made the change a few years ago, and is unavailable as of 1 minute ago.

Invite

[karvind]

Does anyone have invites ? :)

Re:Invite

[TwoTailedFox]

Sign up for a Normal Yahoo Acount, and then fill out the Beta test. I'm a UK Resident, and I've had a Yahoo.com email account for years now, so it appears to have been accepted. Time will tell.

Re:Invite

[Anonymous Coward]

I only have 10,000, its very exclusive.

Re:Invite

[rinkjustice]

It said it's only open to U.S. citizens

Still no encryption?

[Catamaran]

I might switch back to yahoo from gmail if they ever allow me to log in encrypted and remain encrypted (I know that I can log in via https, but after that the connection reverts to unencrypted).

Re:Still no encryption?

[temojen]

If you want worthwhile encryption on your email, use a host based email client that supports GPG. If your email is open to the world as it flies between servers and sits in their caches and spools, it doesn't really matter if it's open to the world as it flies between you and your webmail host.

Re:Still no encryption?

[Catamaran]

If your email is open to the world as it flies between servers and sits in their caches and spools, it doesn't really matter if it's open to the world as it flies between you and your webmail host.

It matters that the sys-admins at the company where I work can't read it.

Re:Still no encryption?

[Anonymous Coward]

Use http://fastmail.fm/ . The free version has a small inbox, but everything is SSl'd, and there's IMAP support.

Re:Still no encryption?

[temojen]

They can still read it.





(Unless you take the computer home every night and they never have physical access to it.)

Re:Still no encryption?

[Catamaran]

But they wouldn't know how to read it because my computer runs linux.

Re:Still no encryption?

[Anonymous Coward]

But they wouldn't know how to read it because my computer runs linux.

You just keep telling yourself that.

Re:Still no encryption?

[benna]

Why don't you just use hushmail then?

Re:Still no encryption?

[Ambush Commander]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Enigmail all the way, baby. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32) - GPGshell v3.40 iD8DBQFDKNDpqTO+fYacSNoRAiDLAJ9SwsCk9L0zS3BSDLVddS qYuybq5ACfXu3i PxFublPT97snB4HRNh9Ku3Y= =kt/N -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Re:Still no encryption?

[thegameiam]

Well, it would improve security while using an unsecured wireless access point...

-David

Re:Still no encryption?

[DuctTape]

I might switch back to yahoo from gmail if they ever allow me to log in encrypted and remain encrypted

Try Slashmail (no relation to /. btw). It's all https, all the time. But it's all text (no formatting) all the time, too. Boring, but secure.

DT

Re:Still no encryption?

[yador]

In my experiance you will stay encrypted if you start your session using https (https://gmail.google.com/ Give it a try.

Re:Still no encryption?

[Bnderan]

From this screenshot it looks like they've got in situ text encryption.

Re:Still no encryption?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they offered encryption, then it would be harder for them to turn in the chinese dissidents that are using their service.

Re:Still no encryption?

[BobGregg]

Maybe I'm not following you, but it's easy to use GMail encrypted:

https://mail.google.com/

If you go to the HTTP variant, it encrypts the logon but reverts to an unencrypted connection for the rest of your session. But if you specify HTTPS for the original connection, it stays that way throughout.

Re:Still no encryption?

[cjsteele]

use an ssh tunnel -- tunnel out and forward a local port to a remote proxy then the local admins can't snoop your traffic because you're shovelling everything through SSH until it leaves 'campus'.

Re:Still no encryption?

[Catamaran]

I should have been more clear. I am currently using gmail because it provides that functionality.

Re:Still no encryption?

[Catamaran]

I should have been more clear. I am currently using gmail because it provides that functionality.

Re:Still no encryption?

[yador]

no, you said it right. i realized my mistake a bit after i posted but it was a bit too late.

Re:Still no encryption?

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone has tapped an Internet backbone link, I'm sure they're looking for something more interesting than my e-mail.

But, my jackass coworkers, with freely available sniffer software, would be much more interested to know that I'm into "Hot Asian Coeds", or that I'm desperately trolling Craig's List for dates.. There definitely is a big need and benefit for local crytpo. The farther my packets get from me, the less likely anyone seeing them will know me or I will care if they see my message.

I agree that end to end is better. But, we've known that for many years now, and that global standard PKI is still no closer today.

yahoo's answer to gmail.

[Brigadier]

I'm guessing this is Yahoo's answer to gmail. If so where is my 2Gig mail box.

To be honest I think simplicity is paramount there is a reason I don't use outlook. I've found the gmail interface to be almost perfect for my personal back and forth e-mail.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[winkydink]

Yahoo doesn't need an answer to Gmail. They have an order of magnitude more users (63.3 mln vs 5.4 mln).

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[brunes69]

My Yahoo! mail box is 2 GB.

It has been 2 GB before GMail even existed.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[Brigadier]

yea didn't netscape use this argument againts microsoft.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[soft_guy]

That's right. I've probably signed up 10 or 12 times for Yahoo mail accounts, but I've never even had a GMail invite.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[Anonymous Coward]

... difference is gmail is free, MyYahoo's 2G offering was only for paying customers. Also, gmail offers pop access for free, MyYahoo's is, again, only for paying customers.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[winkydink]

Well, once you get one, you can invite yourself a whole bunch of times and set up 10 or 12 there too.

The numbers represent the number of unique visitors to the email portion of the site each month. RTFA.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[winkydink]

google lacks an OS to bundle its free email service with.

Different argument.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[rolfwind]

Then you must have a paid annual subscription to a mailbox - before GMail my biggest free account was only 100MB (had many yahoo accounts, they seemed to increase some mailboxes' size with age or something for loyal 'customers').

Switched back in June. Right now, I still like GMail just for the "conversation" feature which keeps my mailbox from being cluttered with "re:re:re:adinfinity" crap. I'm probably gonna stick with it unless Yahoo really comes out with something killer.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[Anonymous Coward]

But you still can't get GMail without advertisements plastered all over the inbox and the messages.

And Google have always said that they may discontinue pop access without notice. Which isn't going to happen with Yahoo since it's a paid service.

So I guess it's like most things - you get what you pay for. I'm quite happy to pay for Yahoo mail ($19 a *year*), as it's a convenient way to handle my email.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[bjbyrne]

My gmail account is at 2594MB and growing every day.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[Jugalator]

I'm guessing this is Yahoo's answer to gmail. If so where is my 2Gig mail box.

With all the features Gmail like POP3 has for free, is a mailbox over 1 GB all you're looking for?

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[Anonymous Coward]

But you still can't get GMail without advertisements plastered all over the inbox and the messages.

You know, when I read this I was genuinely surprised. I remember reading about how the contextual ads depend on keywords found in your email etc, but don't actually remember seeing any.

I just logged into my GMail account, and whaddaya know? There are adverts there! I swear, I've never even noticed them before. I don't class that as "plastered all over the inbox", I class that as "low-key" or perhaps "almost unnoticable".

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[mancontr]

Yes.. it's true for now...

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[Parallax Blue]

Just because Yahoo has more users, does not mean it's better. I might also add that Gmail is invite only, whereas anyone can sign up for a Yahoo account.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[damiam]

Not any more; GMail is public to anyone with a cell phone (or a friend with a cell phone).

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[lupin_sansei]

You're forgetting how bad Netscape 4 was compared to IE 4 - that's why everyone switched to IE. Back when windows came with IE 3 everyone just downloaded Netscape. And pretty shortly after IE4, IE5 came out, which ran rings around Netscape.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[cmacb]

"Yahoo doesn't need an answer to Gmail. They have an order of magnitude more users (63.3 mln vs 5.4 mln)."

It's about an order of magnitude slower too. I can be in and done with Gmail (which is receiving most of my mail now) in the length of time it takes yahoo to respond to my first click. Not to mention the ads they run take up half the screen.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[tommers]

Depends on what I'm doing. If I am checking my messages frequently then checking and opening a few new ones is much easier. But if I've received tens of emails since last checking, I find the preview pane in Yahoo makes everything much quicker after the initially slower load time.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[gbdc]

Yes, but for how long?

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[0xC2]

63 mln accounts or 63 mln users. Big difference. How many of those Yahoo! accounts are for spam.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[ScriptedReplay]

by the same argument, invite-only does not mean better. But you were deliberately trying to sidestep the issue, right? 'better' is irrelevant - if yahoo has more active users and it tunes itself to 'at least good enough' for the majority of them, they won't leave. Switching one's email address is a tedious business when too many people use it as a contact point. Not to mention yahoo messenger - if you have enough friends on one network you can't strong-arm them into switching just because you like a different webmail interface better.

A more pertinent point would be discounting all the bogus/spam yahoo accounts when checking numbers.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, isn't that scary? In a subliminal messages kinda way?

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[leonmergen]

63 mln accounts or 63 mln users. Big difference. How many of those Yahoo! accounts are for spam.

I think about just as much percent as GMail has spam accounts... at least I use my GMail account for spam... heck, GMail accounts are being used for remote filesystems, too!

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[jred]

+5
That's totally right. Every time I hear the MS bashers whine about Netscape I think about how bad NS4 sucked. It's why I switched.

Firefox rox u, though!

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[lupin_sansei]

Exactly. I left Netscape in v4, but switched "back" to Firefox around 0.6.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[furrywithwings]

Quality Not Quality. I have 17 yahoo counts, and I know most people have at least two or three. So those numbers are most definately inflated. Real users, not accounts. Yahoo mail is still bollocks compared to gmail. It was a shame as it was a good service back in 1999 and 2000, and the 6MB! was an amazing amount of storage back then.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[furrywithwings]

If gmail cancels pop access then there isn't much point to using it either. It's impossible to train some people to use webmail interfaces. They get used to some archaic email program and that's what they want to use. I'm not going to embarass them and say which pop3 program it is, suffice it to say that it's one that you have to install a new instance of it in a new directory for every email account you want to check!

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[aaron_hill2]

Take one and try it out: http://mail.google.com/mail/a-29268a69d8-b67e279c4 4-c24c8d5d08

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[Anonymous Coward]

google lacks an OS to bundle its free email service with.

No, they've just hijacked the Mozilla project, forced them to cancel the suite for a bunch of bloated programs that do little more, and embedded their search bar and web tracking features into Firefox.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[winkydink]

RTFA. The numbers represent unique visitors each month, not total accounts in existence.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[kesuki]

Actually, the mozilla project was floating around with no real support, as AOL decided they didn't need a browser coding group. or an open source browser, so Mozilla was given a bunch of cash, and let loose, open source deveopers kept working on mozilla, but they choose to 'promote firefox', over the whole 'suite' of mozilla 1.x mozilla is still being developed, firefox continues to get the 'attention' and has gotten a more and more IE style feature set, while Mozilla 1.x retains it's netscape style interface and capabilities.

Clearly the mozilla foundation must be getting something for having google integrated, but without some kind of support they'd just be YAN 'all volunteer' open source project that 'gets worked on when the volunteers have time to' google has the motto of 'don't be evil' but 'tracking people, to better serve them ads' is apparently not evil, when said ads as 'unobtrusive text that can't be blocked by not loading images..' ;) well, the people clicking on those ads, and paying to support empire google would probably be paying to support someone elses ad empire, either via tv, or other internet companies etc.. at least google has the philosophy of being unobtrusive, about it. to the point that the code is running on there systems not ours, and the data is data that anyone seeing the packets could have collected... so i suppose one could call it 'not evil' if one accepts that advertising is an unavoidable consequence of increased capability for sharing data.

Unless you have some evidence that google has pressured the mozilla foundation to 'drop' the netscape style suite then don't jump to conclusions. It's more likely that once AOL dropped support they could only do so much to stay afloat, and part of that included a massive push for browser share. Firefox is closer to IE in capabilities, so it was the target they choose to push.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[Alan]

Isn't gmail out of beta now? I though you could just sign up on the main page.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[FlashHamster]

So Yahoo provides Mail-Accounts since >6 years vs. <1 year GMail (public) and GMail already has nearly 10% of Yahoo's size.
Well done, Google.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[winkydink]

63 million unique visitors each month.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[aaron_hill2]

No. It's still invite only.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[Anonymous Coward]

So what? Yahoo provides 1GB storage space. Do you really need more for mail? Yahoo has a superior mail client, and the new optional client will kick Gmail's ass.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[bjbyrne]

Oh please. First off, I get free POP access, cool tags (lables) for sorting, ability to have a different send from addy, and fast searching on and off line. And my mailbox is at 90% (2351MB) now. Who needs more then a gig? Plenty of people do.

blah!

[SARSpatient]

Without user created chat rooms, it's nuthin'.

Re:blah!

[WillAffleckUW]

Without user created chat rooms, it's nuthin'.

You already get that with Yahoo! Messenger. I've done long-distance web chat with tallgirl in NYC and I live in Seattle, including the webcam traffic, and all over a basic 11b/g wireless setup (and she's on - get this - DIALUP!!!)

Who needs chat rooms when you already have it?

Re:blah!

[Malizar]

I think he is talking about Yahoo recently removing the user chat rooms from their chat program, due to the fact that they could not control the content and some paid ads ended up in rooms discussing illegal activities. The user chat rooms are still not back in the chat software.

Beta-test is US only

[RonnyJ]

Yahoo is also taking signups on their what's new for Mail page.

Unfortunately for a great number of people (including me) who don't live in America, the page states 'The beta version is only available to Yahoo! Mail users in the U.S.'.

Re:Beta-test is US only

[Werkhaus]

>Unfortunately for a great number of people (including me) who don't live in America, the page states 'The beta version is only available to Yahoo! Mail users in the U.S.'

It's available if you are an Oddpost account holder. I signed up for Oddpost a couple of months before they were bought out and received my invite for the Yahoo beta a couple of days ago.

Re:Beta-test is US only

[Matt Perry]

Then create a new account and choose United States as your country when prompted for personal information.

Re:Beta-test is US only

[Daengbo]

Quite odd, considering that Yahoo! is owned by Daum.net, the Korean internet giant, don't you think?

Re:Beta-test is US only

[Your Pal Dave]

Wrong, it's a publicly held corporation.

Re:Beta-test is US only

[Xarius]

So much for the World Wide Web then. Is there any single reason whatsoever for, what is essentially, a webpage to be restricted to any one country?

Re:Beta-test is US only

[Daengbo]

I must've had a brain fart, because daum owns Lycos ... not even in the same league. Oh well, morning postings!

No plaintext protocols for login, please

[gdav]

Or, for that matter, for my data.

Why do any webmail services still use unencrypted http? I'd be quite glad to see nothing but https on any services that I log in to.

Re:No plaintext protocols for login, please

[Bogtha]

Why do any webmail services still use unencrypted http?

Have you forgotten that typical emails will pass between a number of hosts unencrypted as it is being delivered? Where's the advantage in encrypting the last leg of the journey if none of the others are encrypted?

Re:No plaintext protocols for login, please

[temojen]

Because your mail is still unencrypted on their disk and when travelling between servers.

If you want confidentiality, authentication, and non-repudiation, use GPG and a host based email client. If you want a throw away account for signing up to web forums and personals sites, use webmail services.

(But I think they should be using TLS for the login stage of webmail services)

Re:No plaintext protocols for login, please

[dragonman97]

Actually, I read a bunch of the YoSucker(..sf.net) source code awhile ago, and as far as I could tell, Yahoo! apparently did Javascript hashing (~MD5) of your password before sending it over HTTP, with some kind of session negotiation/salt done before the form submission page. I thought that was pretty damn cool. Personally, I always hit "Shift-tab, 'sec [enter]" in Firefox before ever logging into Yahoo! mail, but I think you stand a bit more of a chance with security on their site than others.

Re:No plaintext protocols for login, please

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a hell of a lot easier to target an individual user on the last leg of the journey. Not a big deal for people with real security concerns, but more crypto is better than less.

HTTPS solves the angry-roomate-running-the-router problem.

--
Phil

Re:No plaintext protocols for login, please

[Anonymous Coward]

because during the last leg of the journey is when people who know you personally are likely to interfere. for example, the network admin at your job may find out that you have been quitely trying to sue the corp, and your vulnerabilities were discussed with the lawyer over personal email. now, any other admin spying wouldnt care except for the fact that this is YOUR admin at your job.

Re:No plaintext protocols for login, please

[hhghghghh]

Have you forgotten that typical emails will pass between a number of hosts unencrypted as it is being delivered? Where's the advantage in encrypting the last leg of the journey if none of the others are encrypted?

The last leg is either at home, in which case you don't care much typically, or at work. At work, you don't want your sysadmin snooping your mail, or if you're at a client's, have a client's sysadmin snoop mail that might be all about other clients. The last leg is where a webmail connection isn't just one connection out of a zillion, all from people you don't know, but a webmail connection from that guy, there, at that table.

Re:No plaintext protocols for login, please

[ggvaidya]

*blinks

I thought you were supposed to do that, if you couldn't afford to get a SSL key/for small websites where the money could be better spent? I been doing it wrong all along?

Re:No plaintext protocols for login, please

[Quattro Vezina]

I don't know about him, but I'm on a wireless connection when I'm at school.

I'll be lax about some things security-wise when I'm on a wire, but if I'm on wireless in a room where I know damn well half the people with laptops are running Ethereal for the hell of it, I become very paranoid.

No, that's not an exaggeration--many of my friends have talked about running Ethereal in class for fun.

I'm certainly not sending my passwords over the air for every geek in the area to sniff. When I'm on a wireless network, and I want to access something I need a password for (or want to keep private), I'll either ssh into my server at home, or find a secure connection. I'm also about to set up some sort of encrypted proxy on my server, once I get around to doing it.

Re:No plaintext protocols for login, please

[IanNewson]

If you're sending personal email at work about sueing the company then you're asking for trouble regardless of what protocol your webmail uses. I know that my boss for one still favours the over-the-shoulder spying technique. Tried and tested is the appropriate phrase I believe.

Technology

[shawb]

Does it bother anyone else that an article with the headline Britney Spears gives birth to baby boy is listed under technology news?

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

im sure they used a sonogram or something tech. why isint that posted on slashdot?

Re:Technology

[lunartik]

Does it bother anyone else that an article with the headline Britney Spears gives birth to baby boy is listed under technology news?

We can rebuild her. We have the technology.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it bother anyone else that an article with the headline Britney Spears gives birth to baby boy [yahoo.com] is listed under technology news?

Nope ... but it bothers the hell out of me that she's getting a C-Section.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope ... but it bothers the hell out of me that she's getting a C-Section.

Highly off-topic for this article, but... seriously, that bugged me too. I mean, she said a couple of weeks ago that she planned on having a C-Section because her mother told her that childbirth was the "most painful thing" she ever experienced. Apparently she has made good on her word.

What an incredibly irresponsible, selfish thing to do. She can't stand some pain, so she undergoes a major surgical procedure which could have harmed herself or the baby. For what? So she could avoid some discomfort, and maybe so she wouldn't have to deal with embarrassing "conehead" newborn pictures being leaked out to the media.

C-Sections are fine when they are actually needed, such as a baby being turned around the wrong way ("breech position" I believe it is called), but to have it for the reasons that Mrs. Fedorov had it, is inexcusable.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. I hope she has a large, nasty scar on her abdomen for the rest of her life. Which would pretty much mean she would never be able to make another video as well, since baring her midriff seems to be a necessity for them.

The new interface is optional

[brianerst]

According to this article, the new interface is optional. You can actually switch between the two interfaces.

...and it takes 30 seconds to load the javascript

[Serveert]

in order to read your 14 character "buy viagra now" spam message.

Get in line, folks.

Zimbra's offering is very similar to Yahoo's

[Anonymous Coward]

This new company called Zimbra launched a few days ago a web-based email application that looks very similar to Yahoo's new mail service.

I guess it sucks to be them (Zimbra) now. They thought they created a very innovative email app.

Some screenshots:
http://www.zimbra.com/screenshots/

Re:Zimbra's offering is very similar to Yahoo's

[Anonymous Coward]

Zimbra looks far better than anything other web based email client that I have seen so far.

Re:Zimbra's offering is very similar to Yahoo's

[wtanaka]

Zimbra's UI is sluggish on a slow computer. Yahoo Mail won't make that mistake.

Re:Zimbra's offering is very similar to Yahoo's

[mikis]

Zimbra is much more than just mail client. To quote a SitePoint mailing list,

"Billed as an online collaboration server with an AJAX-powered Web client, Zimbra will run on a Linux server and behave as a dedicated email, calendar, and directory server (in fact, it has Postfix, an open source email server, built in), accessible with desktop email, calendar, and address book applications like Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird/Sunbird, Apple Mail/iCal, and others.

"But Zimbra also provides an enhanced Web interface that works much like Gmail, except that you can extend it with your own plug-in modules to link it to other applications you use, like Skype or Google Maps.

"What we're basically talking about is an open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange, with an AJAX-powered Gmail alternative as a Web interface instead of Outlook Web Access.

Re:Zimbra's offering is very similar to Yahoo's

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, Zimbra looks hella cool. That's the best web-based interface I've seen for e-mail yet. Too bad I have to install it on my own servers. It would rock if one of the big free providers adopted that. Very nice.

Looks Great, but...

[ackthpt]

Where are the ads? This is Yahoo and they need to generate revenue. I don't like Yahoo mail because of all the ads in the current incarnation. I think this is probably a bit deceptive. There's gotta be ads in there somewhere, lots of them.

Re:Looks Great, but...

[value_added]

There's gotta be ads in there somewhere, lots of them.

If it makes you feel better, I'm sure there will be "Do You Yahoo?" advertising footer on every piece of outgoing piece of mail ... the same kind of footer the rest of us need to go out of our way to strip out when receiving mail from folks insisting on using web-based email.

Re:Looks Great, but...

[QunaLop]

maybe this is an account for ISP based yahoo accounts or a plus member? i don't have ads in my yahoo mail, because it is through my ISP. i rarely use the webmail version, except when i am on the go, so i don't notice too much

Re:Looks Great, but...

[foote]

In the current version of Yahoo Mail, There are no ads in the paid version. And no ad signatures tacked onto your messages either.

Re:Looks Great, but...

[CdBee]

Probably in the POP3 downloads (if allowed). Yahoo UK graciously alows its users to access it with POP3 but they must agree to receiving targeted advertising mails as well. I'll stick with gmail...

Re:Looks Great, but...

[Yer Mum]

Not if you untick all your interests - I've never received a single advertising mail since I did that (two years ago).

Any good IMAP services?

[Eunuch]

Does yahoo do IMAP? I'm settling on either mac.com or fusemail. All others seem to have bandwidth limits or are lame. For-pay is fine (actually preffered).

Re:Any good IMAP services?

[Bogtha]

AOL's free webmail is available through IMAP as well.

Re:Any good IMAP services?

[andykuan]

I've been trying to use AIM mail for the past couple weeks and have found its spam filtering to be abysmal. I really wanted to have IMAP support, but at this point, I'll just live with Gmail.

Re:Any good IMAP services?

[rathehun]

Well, Fastmail.fm is a really, really good email service. Really lightweight, does IMAP, and if you pay a little more ($15 IIRC), you get to use their SMTP servers.

R.

Yahoo vs GMail

[Saiyine]

Ah, the good ol' competition. What the Google answer will be?

--
Superb hosting 4800MB Storage, 120GB bandwidth, $7,95.
Kunowalls!!! Random sexy wallpapers (NSFW!).

Re:Yahoo vs GMail

[JoshRosenbaum]

I guess they'll have to up their storage space. Their new storage plan will probably be called:
  infinity + infinity + 1
or
  my dad's bigger than yours

I just hope

[blue_adept]

I just hope that it still works if you turn off your javacript!! IE I hope they still serve a non-DHTML version for old browsers and/or custom crawlers/userAgents.

Re:I just hope

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up. Seriously, how old are you?

Re:I just hope

[l_bratch]

He has a good point. I often use Yahoo Mail through my home proxy no matter where I am so I have my normal IP, and the fact that it detects no Javascript and asks if I want to use the old plain HTML interface is really useful. Neither Gmail or Hotmail work through using this method because of their lack of "old interface" choice.

Mirrordot

[aembleton]

Mirrordot have cached the screenshots: http://mirrordot.org/stories/657bff49a3acdb9421bf2 24780af814f/index.html

Coral link

[fejikso]

The server is beginning to be sluggish...

Try the snappy Coral link:
http://patcavit.com.nyud.net:8090/2005/09/14/y-mai l-beta-impressions/

Re:Coral link

[TopSpin]

Unfortunately, the images are (not) being served from another server entirely; tivac.com, which is now also slashdotted... Here are the images linked through Coral.

contacts.png (long lines make slashcode happy)
drag.png (long lines make slashcode happy)
nodrag.png (long lines make slashcode happy)
editcontact.png (long lines make slashcode happy)
message.png (long lines make slashcode happy)
resized.png (long lines make slashcode happy)
indent.png (long lines make slashcode happy)
centered.png (long lines make slashcode happy)
rightalign.png (long lines make slashcode happy)
addcontacts.png (long lines make slashcode happy)
colors.png (long lines make slashcode happy)
smilies.png (long lines make slashcode happy)
autocomplete.png (long lines make slashcode happy)
hyperlink.png (long lines make slashcode happy)
hyperlinkoptions.png (long lines make slashcode happy)
writing.png (long lines make slashcode happy)
confirm.png (long lines make slashcode happy)

"Bigger" Doesn't Mean "Better"

[TwoTailedFox]

Sometimes, aiming to make a UI *too* feature-intensive, can be it's undoing.

Take Gmail. It's clear, concise, and uses Basic HTML to navigate. Frankly, DHTML is just the web-equivalent of "Feature Bloat". Fine, it looks good, and it'll dazzle the users, but it may also overwhelm them, too.

I saw DHTML in practice when Barryworld still existed. The DHTML interface was so slow, and so horrible (Even on a 4MB Line, with Dell Optiplexes), I went back to POP3. I'm hoping Yahoo won't make the same mistakes, and at least offer a more "Streamlined" approach for the users that don't care about bells and whistles.

Re:"Bigger" Doesn't Mean "Better"

[larry bagina]

Take Gmail. It's clear, concise, and uses Basic HTML to navigate.

No it doesn't.

Re:"Bigger" Doesn't Mean "Better"

[TwoTailedFox]

Sorry, it uses Javascript too. Can't forget that.

Still, it *is* Clear, and Concise.

Re:"Bigger" Doesn't Mean "Better"

[Bogtha]

Take Gmail. It's clear, concise, and uses Basic HTML to navigate.

The special version provided for older browsers does. But normal GMail certainly doesn't. It's really frustrating to try and open links in new windows only to find that they aren't links at all but some kind of pseudo-link created with spans and onclicks that doesn't work properly.

Google really don't have a clue when it comes to Javascript. Yeah, they come up with good features, but their implementation sucks. For example, it took them two years to fix a relatively simple Javascript security hole in their site, which could have allowed phishers to use Google to con people.

Frankly, DHTML is just the web-equivalent of "Feature Bloat".

Er, GMail uses what most people describe as "DHTML". You are saying GMail is better because it doesn't use something that it does, in fact, use.

I saw DHTML in practice when Barryworld still existed. The DHTML interface was so slow, and so horrible (Even on a 4MB Line, with Dell Optiplexes)

You know how GMail is so much faster than most other webmail services? That's because they use DHTML.

You've got some very odd ideas about DHTML. All it is is Javascript that alters the composition of a page. There's nothing inherently slow about DHTML; in fact in many cases, DHTML is used to speed up web applications.

Re:"Bigger" Doesn't Mean "Better"

[Malc]

(Score:5, Interesting)????? WTF?! Do you even know what DHTML is?

Using JavaScript to inject client-side generated HTML in to a DIV, or to modify a small section of the DOM document is orders of magnitude faster than a round-trip to the server, which involves: network time (the biggest factor), the server calculating the new page, and the client re-rendering the whole page. Look at the .Net web controls (but could be PHP, or CGI, or Cold Fusion) that that maintain state between each - you spend half the time waiting for pages to load. So much slower than DHTML

Re:"Bigger" Doesn't Mean "Better"

[Monkier]

the implementation of their JS/AJAX works on a good variety of browsers - i'd give them big points for that!

Re:"Bigger" Doesn't Mean "Better"

[Anonymous Coward]

is "interesting" the new "stupid" ?

Wow. Tabs for multiple message windows!

[WoTG]

It's too bad that I've been phasing out my Yahoo email account. Anyone know of an opensource webmail package that is even close to this interface? Squirrelmail is looking a little shabby in comparison.

PS. Screenshots are /.'ed. Try mirrordot or coral cache

Does it have Google-like labels?

[jvj24601]

I use Yahoo for nearly everything (all family events in Calendar, saved Maps for soccer fields and restaurants, Weather, and Contacts/ToDo), but I switched to Gmail for email as soon as I could.

I am so reliant on Labels - it just makes so much sense that any email can really be in more than one folder. (In fact, since being forced to use Outlook 2003 at work, I've forgone folders and used it’s Category feature which work remarkable similar to Gmail Labels to organize my work email - I can use Outlook's search to organize/search by Category).

If Yahoo Mail were to offer anything like Labels, I’d switch back.

Re:Does it have Google-like labels?

[whovian]

If Yahoo Mail were to offer anything like Labels, I'd switch back.

SBC Yahoo! has 8 color labels. (I assume it's the same as the Yahoo! Mail that you would pay for.) I have the color labels associated with my disposable email addresses.

Compatibility?

[pwnage]

How come none of you goofballs has asked the important question yet: does this new interface work with standards-compliant browsers, or is this just more crap that will require Internet Explorer?

Re:Compatibility?

[Anonymous Coward]

it works with IE and firefox.

Re:Compatibility?

[tonyquan]

Both IE and Firefox are supported.

Re:Compatibility?

[saleenS281]

probably because the main article says it works with firefox 1.0.x and 1.5 beta....

Re:Compatibility?

[Aimak]

Because it can be clearly read from one of the given links:

It works in both IE and Firefox (both the 1.0.x branch and 1.5 Beta).

Re:Compatibility?

[glens]

Naw, the really important question is:

"With the new design, will the poor saps who compose in HTML (i.e. in IE) be able to reply within the quoted portion and have the results be like email is supposed to be instead of the crap it makes of it now?"

Re:Compatibility?

[Anonymous Coward]

Works very well in firefox on linux.

Yahoo += Oddpost;

[Anonymous Coward]

I will bet good money that the people from oddpost had alot to do with their improvments.
Simply put, the aquisition of oddpost, which included their engineers was the best move they made in the land of Email.
Oddpost engineers did/do things with DHTML that you could only have a wet dream about.

Yahoo 2Gig account = $19.99/yr =! free

[Brigadier]

Get more control and more capacity. Mail Plus includes virus protection from Norton AntiVirus, personalized spam filtering with SpamGuard Plus, no graphical ads, POP access, 20MB message size, virtually unlimited storage 2GB and more. Learn more.

                Give your email that personal touch with mail made just for
you get you@your-name.com or any other address that is available! Personal Address includes your own domain and five different email addresses that you can assign to anyone you'd like. Learn more.

only $19.99/year
less than $2/month

Re:Yahoo 2Gig account = $19.99/yr =! free

[furrywithwings]

Thank you for quoting the yahoo mailplus page.

Thanks for the mirrors

[Tivac]

I didn't really figure on getting slashdotted, but it's kind of exciting at the same time.

I really enjoy the new interface and can see myself using it a lot. The initial load time isn't horrible, and not having to go through page after page of 50 email lists like Gmail is really nice.

Re:Thanks for the mirrors

[klui]

Can you clarify?

You can set it to 25, 50, or 100 conversations per page. If you get tired of them, archive 'em. You'd get more emails because Yahoo uses traditional one line per mail/response.

Slashdottet

[sn0wflake]

Okay, the term Slashdottet has existed for years now. When is Slashdot going to provide links to mirrors in the story? I hope the new Slashdot design will incorporate this as it's getting annoying to click on the link in the story, wait, wait, wait, abort, browse the comments for a mirror, and then see what the story is all about. For those of you that say I should just use this or this mirror, all I have to say is that if there's already automatic mirrors why not just include it in the story *sigh*.

Re:Slashdottet

[Tim Browse]

Read the FAQ for the answer to this.

If it bothers you so much, you should know about mirrordot

The real question

[TubeSteak]

I think what he's trying to ask is "does it run linux"

Ummm... I mean, "does it run on linux?"

CRAP! Internet stuff.
"will it work with FireFox?"

Re:Compatibility? the big question

[WillAffleckUW]

How come none of you goofballs has asked the important question yet: does this new interface work with standards-compliant browsers, or is this just more crap that will require Internet Explorer?

That's a very good question.

I had problems getting the Yahoo! Radio and Yahoo! Music working on either Opera or Firefox, had to install a plugin for Firefox to almost work with them.

So if this new email means it doesn't work with Firefox, or at least Opera (on non-IE format), then I can't see using the new version.

And that goes for my $400K in investments that I manage with the Yahoo portfolio right now. I'll switch rather than fight - to another provider.

Round Cube requires MySQL

[doorbot.com]

Incidently I found an open source mail client that has a lot of similar functions: Round Cube I have installed that and it is almost as impressive

It looks pretty nice, but I am just surprised it requires MySQL. Is that for storing configs? SquirrelMail works without MySQL and it manages to save my configs just fine.

I'm definitely happy with SquirrelMail; I wish I was a real web developer as I could do something useful towards Async Javascript integration into SM.

I've heard, however, that SM1.5 has a much better templating engine which should make for easier integration of DHTML/AJ goodies.

Re:Round Cube requires MySQL

[nine-times]

It looks pretty nice, but I am just surprised it requires MySQL. Is that for storing configs?

Just a guess, but maybe it pulls from an IMAP account and puts all the data into a database. None of this is my forte, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it would be easier to do clever things with data in MySQL than pulling it live out of a IMAP server. Things like index the text in e-mails, maybe store an address book, caching for quicker access. Or maybe they have something very clever planned for the future, and aren't there yet (it's only the 0.1 release).

Re:Round Cube requires MySQL

[doorbot.com]

I could see the address book being stored in MySQL, so I'll concede that. But with a high performance server like Cyrus (with whatever backend you want) the webmail system should not do its own storage of mail.

IMP/Horde (or whatever it's called) used MySQL as well and I think that's why many turned to SquirrelMail instead.

Re:Round Cube requires MySQL

[Aeiri]

I could see the address book being stored in MySQL, so I'll concede that. But with a high performance server like Cyrus (with whatever backend you want) the webmail system should not do its own storage of mail.

I just installed this and I'm looking at the MySQL tables, it looks like for settings and contacts. I think that using contacts in SQL is a very good idea, because you can back it up easier through phpMyAdmin, rather than trying to figure out which file stores your contacts, and converting it to different formats or whatever. SQL is much easier to convert stuff like that.

Regarding this Web Client, I must say, this is probably the best web client I've ever seen. I've been using GMail most recently because it's a good interface, but I wanted to start reusing my web server as email. This kicks the shit out of GMail, and on top of that is open source, and can be transported to/from different servers easily. This is just amazing. My new email client, thanks great grandparent (or whoever it was) :)

Re:Round Cube requires MySQL

[Anonymous Coward]

RoundCube uses the database (currently MySQL) for storing sessions, identities, user settings, contacts and last but not least the cache for messages. I chose to use a database for performance reasons and it's not very complicated to add support for other than MySQL.

Thanks for the nice comments about it. The project still misses some very important features and you can't compare it with a well-featured and well-tested system such as Squirrel, Horde IMP or Ilohamail yet.

GPG

[kevin_conaway]

Anyone know of any webmail services that allow GPG?

Re:GPG

[Serveert]

this GPL product claims it does:

http://www.roundcube.net/?p=about

Support for GPG/PGP encryption

Re:GPG

[Serveert]

err that's a planned feature, sorry

Re:GPG

[MasterOfMagic]

The Hushmail service uses PGP and allows you to encrypt your messages with PGP and recieve PGP encrypted and signed messages. Be sure to pick a good passphrase!

Re:GPG

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe try this firefox extension: Gmail S/MIME I have not tried yet - was googling for greasemonkey + gpg + gmail. Should be possible to use same trick and get enigMAIL (currently works only on thunderbird or mozilla mail) to encrypt most any web based email.

Re:GPG

[Anonymous Coward]

try www.cryptomail.org
1.0 alpha avail for download, not yet rolled out.

Re:GPG

[madstork2000]

Ilohamail does see http://blog.ilohamail.org/

It is a really fast implementation of webmail, works well on my large accounts.

-MS2K

Re:GPG

[blackhaze]

Checkout @mail - http://atmail.com/ - This webmail app supports GnuPG for mail encryption, via a darn funky interface.

Re:Wow. Tabs for multiple message windows!

[rcs1000]

Try Horde/IMP.

There are probably others but IMP is great.

Screenshot mirror

[alienfluid]

Here

based on technology from oddpost.com

[Dzimas]

Yahoo bought out oddpost in 2004. If you'll remember, they were the first to put together a really slick DHTML-based email application. What you see here is a result of merging the technology Ethan and Ian had developed with Yahoo's infrastructure (plus a great deal more - tabs and other features that aren't part of oddpost). Glad to see a little dotrebound company like Oddpost make a mark!

Re:based on technology from oddpost.com

[activewire]

The Oddpost webmail is available for sale AND it runs on linux. Actually the Scalix backend is a tomcat (java) webapp, the frontend is an AJAX javascript engine.

Having now seen screenshots of Yahoo's new webmail, it looks alot like a re-skinned Oddpost. Oddpost webmail can be purchased here http://www.scalix.com/

Re:based on technology from oddpost.com

[torrentami]

I actually signed up for oddpost's free 30 day trial back in the day and played around with it. I must say that it was by far the best web based email client out there. I can't recall ever using a web based application anywhere near as dynamic as oddpost, to this day. However, at the time, they wanted you to pay for a subscription if you wanted to keep it beyond 30 days, so I stuck with my free yahoo mail which was also integrated with my.yahoo portal. I've weathered every different email trend and have faithfully stuck with my yahoo account through and through. I must say that incorporating oddpost's technology is a great move (if executed properly) and I'm pretty jazzed about the prospect.

Bastards... Why ruin the surprise!

[Browzer]

The cosmetic changes will not convert a lot of non-yahoo mail users, but the new look would have been an unexpected but pleasant surprise to the regular yahoo mail users!

Isn't there some real news for nerds besides skin changes?

No Achievement Erases Disgrace

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite all of Yahoo!'s efforts, they do not erase the disgraceful acts of its management, including Jerry Yang. He and his company acted as an extension of the brutal Chinese secret-police apparatus (according to Reporters Without Borders) in assisting Beijing to arrest and imprison (for 10 years) a reporter.

A dedicated group of computer professionals is now boycotting Yahoo!.

Re:No Achievement Erases Disgrace

[crucini]

Did you read the article you linked to?

Unfortunately, its conduct is not out of the ordinary, either for it or for other American media firms operating in China. They all eagerly kowtow to a despicable police state

I hope you are boycotting Google, Microsoft and Cisco as well. I want you to come out and say explicitly what standard you are holding Yahoo to, and what companies currently meet that standard, and what evidence you have that those companies meet that standard.

You want Yahoo in China to violate Chinese law in order to shield dissidents?

yahoo blahhoo

[FudRucker]

i been using yahoo since the late 1990's and i am starting to become disgusted with them, there has been about three revisions of Yahoo Instant Messenger for Windows but their YIM for Linux has not been updated and left pretty much featureless, and since it has not been updated i somehow wonder if it is a security problem for users of Yahoo's Linux/BSD IM...

and their web based email when accessed with ANY web browser other than Internet Explorer is featureless and plain text only, when even google's gmail using Firefox on Linux offers more as in the ability of changing text font styles, size & color, gmail even has a built in spell checker too, i am just about to abandon yahoo like i abandoned msn back in 1998...

/rant!

Re:yahoo blahhoo

[mikejz84]

Yeah, Featureless Plain text e-mail sucks compared to HTML email with all its tracking and pictures of rolex's and viagra pills.

Re:yahoo blahhoo

[warriorpostman]

Amen.

Re:yahoo blahhoo

[FudRucker]

i understand where your point of view, i just delete all email that is not from friends or family unopened anyway so spam is not much of an issue to me, sometimes i like to make fonts have a different color or make a particular word italic or bold to provide emphasis...

Re:yahoo blahhoo

[mikejz84]

99.99% of the time if it's html, it's not worth reading.

Re:yahoo blahhoo

[Anonymous Coward]

for you perhaps, but not for 99.9% of the non ubergeeks out there.

Re:yahoo blahhoo

[Anonymous Coward]

The Yahoo Messenger for Unix was being developed as a hobby project in Bangalore. I think, the guy who was developing left to US and the project here became a orphan.

DHTML: Why isn't it in that broad use?

[ShyGuy91284]

I am a CS person, and know very little about Web design, so this post may be somewhat unknowlegable. But I remember back 3 years ago doing some stuff w/ DHTML for a class. It seemed quick, simple, useful, yet DHTML was something I hardly ever saw (and still hardly every see) anywhere. Although not as flashy as flash-based interfaces (no pun intended), it seemed to work well on even fairly weak systems. Does this still hold true nowadays with so many web pages going with flash that sometimes maxes out my Athlon-XP 2500+ system?

Re:DHTML: Why isn't it in that broad use?

[Roguelazer]

DHTML (as in using JavaScript to manipulate page elements) is usually much slower than even Flash (and anybody who's read my comment history knows that I hate Flash with a passion). JavaScript is a simplistic language that usually doesn't have a "nice" way of doing things. When you're using DHTML and having to deal with both JavaScript slowness and the browser having to move around styled HTML elements, it can get pretty hairy. Google uses DHTML for, well, almost everything, and even their extremely nice code can often bog down my Athlon XP+ 2800+/1GB. Reconciling the modern demands for real-time interactivity with the stateless, text data of HTML over HTTP and the requirement of backwards compatibility is a demanding challenge with buzzword-laden "solutions" such as AJAX, DHTML, Java, and Flash. Time will tell which, if any, will persevere.

Re:DHTML: Why isn't it in that broad use?

[Anonymous Coward]

JavaScript is a simplistic language that usually doesn't have a "nice" way of doing things.

This isn't really true. Having programmed in a shit-ton of languages, Javascript is definitely one of the most pleasant. It's main drawback is that it doesn't come with a large library.

Re:DHTML: Why isn't it in that broad use?

[WoTG]

IMHO, it's because browser support sucks with all bleeding edge web "standards". It's not so much that modern browsers (e.g. Firefox 1.0+, IE6+) are a problem, but the fact that old web browsers (e.g. NS4, IE4) take years to die off from "common" useage. I still see a few "version 4" browsers show up in my web server logs... but the numbers are small enough now that in most cases, I don't really care if my site works for them or not.

Re:DHTML: Why isn't it in that broad use?

[Anonymous Coward]

"JavaScript is a simplistic language"

Bzzt! Wrong!

Browser Reject...

[Auraiken]

I just visited oddpost.com with Firefox and apparently their old service didn't support anything but Internet Explorer... I'm wondering what browsers are supported by this web-based email client.

Re:Browser Reject...

[biovoid]

I have access to the beta and am happy to say it supports Firefox as well. Haven't been able to test it on other browsers at this stage.

looking, for "privacy friendly" services' portal

[rzr]

oh well, yahoo is a set of usefull tools, to have one login for managing your email, addresses, groups, calendar, rss, news, im and stuff ... with just a single cookie. But is the whole stuff really a service? (Storring uncrypted data, and drop 'em your profile is scary) I am thinking about escaping from yahoo now.. same as google. Is there a page that list alternatives solution to some or all of those services? The only way i've found is to have a private ssh server, webmail etc

SSL not needed for logins

[GCsoftware]

Actually, it's not strictly necessary to enable SSL for secure logins provided the user has javascript enabled (Javascript, yes I know, urgh).

The easiest way to do it securely with Javascript would be to send a challenge to the client over regular HTTP, request the user's password, combine the challenge and password and run it through a hashing algo like MD5 or SHA to produce the respone.

The server then takes the challenge and the stored password, hashes them and if the hash matches that sent by the client, the client is authenticated. Voila', secure authentication without SSL, and the unencrypted password never went over the wire.

Actually, this guy called Paul Johnson did exactly this, and you can get JS implementations of a lot of crypto algorithms from his site.

Could be useful if you don't want to buy an SSL cert for a small personal site or something, but obviously is not a replacement for SSL, which provides other really Good Stuff (tm) such as the authentication of the server to the client.

PS: I'm in no way connected to this Paul Johnson guy, nor have I tested his code. Caveat lector.

Re:SSL not needed for logins

[ScriptedReplay]

In fact, that's how Yahoo has been working since at least a long time: the server sends a challenge that the browser appends to the MD5 hash of the password and sends the MD5 hash of the combination back.

Re:Wow. Tabs for multiple message windows!

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Ugh. Breaks every time a new version of PHP comes out, buggy even before that, slow, unpleasant interface... Hell, SquirrelMail is better than IMP. I once thought Horde was cool, but there's problems all over the damn thing. The calendar's all screwed up, appointments disappear (not out of the DB, just don't show up), no confirmation to delete notes in the notepad... Horde is crap, stay far away.

ttyl, Jon -- Sign up for the NEW YAHOO EMAIL!

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing that irks me about Yahoo and Hotmail is the outgoing appended signature advertising their service. They're ugly and annoying and well, annoying.

Thanks Gmail for not doing that.

About Damn Time - Oddpost

[erikharrison]

Yahoo! acquired Oddpost -ages- ago. Oddpost had THE badass webbased frontend for their mail, and not only that, had built a javascript toolkit like no other of the time to implement it.

I haven't seen anything out of Yahoo! that indicated they were using that toolkit _anywhere_ much less in their mail

Can you change the From: address?

[tetranz]

GMail started allowing that a few weeks ago. AFAIK, its the only free email service that gives you that ability. For me, its a very significant feature. It suddenly allows me to use GMail as a general purpose email client.

Re:Can you change the From: address?

[duffbeer703]

If you send it to an outlook recipient it says "joeschmoe@gmail.com on behalf of you@whereever.com"

Re:Can you change the From: address?

[pe1chl]

GMail is also the free email service that does not handle abuse mail messages.

Briljant. Continue like this and it will be a free email service that everyone blocks at their perimeter.

Since it's Yahoo!, we can be sure of one feature:

[bombadier_beetle]

There's almost certainly a feature that forwards politically incriminating emails to the Chinese authorities.

F*ck Yahoo.

Re:BUSH ADMITS FAULT FOR KATRINA DEATH IMPEACHMENT

[Digital11]

"President Clinton got impeached for somthing as small as lieing about having sex"

Got impeached? What?

Autoconvert "Office" docs

[mgkimsal2]

Something I just blogged about (mostly just to make sure I didn't forget it!) was an idea for autoconverting docs via a mail system.

Yahoo Mail already seems to do a bit of converting some MS Office docs into HTML for viewing in your browser. What I'm talking about is the next step: autoconvert between openoffice and ms office.

I send someone an .SXW or .ODT file via Yahoo Mail. Y! converts the file int a .DOC file, then sends it to the recipient. They edit, send back, and it automatically converts it back to a .SXW or .ODT file (whatever my preference is).

I know there would be a lot of bugs and things that wouldn't work right to start with, but leave it in beta for awhile (perhaps gmail should offer this then?). However, I think the long term good could outweigh the short term drawbacks. Yes, there's a privacy concern, but if you're really that concerned about the docs you shouldn't be using public mail systems in the first place, right?

Re:Autoconvert "Office" docs

[Anonymous Coward]

A better idea, why not convert MS Doc files to SWX files? That would make as much sense and would encourage people to use OpenOffice.org

Or maybe you could try saving in MS Doc format in the first place?

Re:Autoconvert "Office" docs

[Anonymous Coward]

... and then there will be more heckling that GMail now scans through attached material too! Everytime you mail your resume to an employer, imagine having careerbuilder.com telling you how fucked up your resume actually is.

Re:Autoconvert "Office" docs

[beforewisdom]

I wrote to them a long time ago to use the iCal standard for synching their calendars.

I know so many people who would love to use yahoo as their calendar, but really want something that can by synched with a client that is not outlook

Round Cube?

[sd_diamond]

Where do they come up with these names?

I think I'll call my next project "Big Small"!

Re:Wow. Tabs for multiple message windows!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been looking at @mail recently, and the interface it provides is very similar to the new yahoo mail. You can sign up for a demo account here - http://demo.atmail.com/. They support both IE and Firefox. It also integrates with Outlook, allowing you to sync calendar events and contacts between the two.

It's open source but it's not free (but it is very very cheap).

Microsoft Sues Yahoo?

[Dh5]

Xbox 360... Yahoo 360... I think I see a problem here!

Re:Microsoft Sues Yahoo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people enjoy "going in circles".

Re:Wow. Tabs for multiple message windows!

[LnxAddct]

I think the first poster recommended this, and I can also vouch for it: Roundcube
Regards,
Steve

Get back to me

[Spetiam]

...when they offer pop3 or imap + smtp.

Re:Get back to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, they'll never offer that for free. AFAIK you can get pop3 if you throw a bit of money at them.

Whatever they're offering, (or even google), isn't new - IMAP provides you with folders, and full text search. been using that for a while through my ISP Speakeasy, and it beats everything else; as an added benefit, their SMTP & IMAP servers support SSL.

Re:Get back to me

[TomC2]

They'll let you have POP3 in exchange for signing up for "Yahoo Delivers" - ie, you agree for them to spam you occasionally. However, I have discovered that when you get to the bit where you tick the boxes for what kinds of ads interest you, if you don't tick any, you don't get any! I've been using Yahoo in this way via pop3 for years..

Re:Get back to me

[hendridm]

They offer POP3 now with their paid service. I would probably actually consider switching from my current mail provider if they offered IMAP. Although I'm getting a pretty sweet deal right now ($24/year for 5 IMAP accounts with 1GB shared), I really like Yahoo's interface.

POP3 is soooo last century.

One small problem...

[RecycledElectrons]

One small problem...I'm a college professor, and hold my office hours in a computer lab...a student just tried to log into her Yahoo eMail account, and got a confirmation screen saying that her Yahoo Dial would be shipped the next day.

They might want to fix that...

Andy Out!

Where is the notepad feature?!

[CiXeL]

My girlfriend and I use it constantly to make lists and keep notes.

They better not be phasing it out. I'm a paying subscriber and would drop the service for certain.

What would be even better would be if you could have shared notepads. We've wanted that feature for a LONG time.

Re:Where is the notepad feature?!

[Anonymous Coward]

it is a BETA --yes, I use the notepad too when I am on my travels-- Why not suggest the shared notepad idea to Yahoo! providing you can get enough people/users who want the feature.. but it could be a bad thing© although just as easy to copy, paste, email, copy, paste or setup your own personal wiki..

Re:Where is the notepad feature?!

[CiXeL]

who would i email at yahoo? im not sure theres a way to contact them. ive tried in the past.

How are they rolling this out?

[Faxmaster]

Are they just rolling this out to users at random? I'm a paid subscriber (Plus user) and I didn't get the change...I even signed up on their Mail Beta user tester page. You would think paying customers would get all the new toys first.

Re:How are they rolling this out?

[Anonymous Coward]

why paying customers should get the new toys first? they are paying to get the other benefits--new toys are not included.

Screenshots ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Screenchost are soooo 1995...

Try vnc2swf:
http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/

Will they also fix their login??

[tji]

One of the things I dislike the most about Yahoo! Mail is their login process..

1. It defaults to clear http, not https. Nice way to encourage users to expose their passwords... This should obviously default to https, and require users to jump through hoops to send their password in the clear. (GMail uses https for authentication).

2. Authentication only lasts a day, then your session expires and you have to re-authenticate. For me, the expiration usually happened when I was typing a long reply to an e-mail, and clicked "send" only to be greeted with the error message saying I needed to authenticate again (in the clear), and my message was lost.

This combination is particularly briliant... encourage insecure authentication, then require users to do it often.

This is just one of many ways that GMail beats Yahoo! Mail.. I'll check out the improvements, but I doubt I'll ever go back to Yahoo.

Re:Will they also fix their login??

[hattig]

1) On the Y! Mail Login Page (http, not https), in the login form:

action="https://login.yahoo.com/config/login?"

onsubmit="return hash(this,'http://us.rd.yahoo.com/reg/login1/lisu/ login/us/ym/*http://login.yahoo.com/config/login') "

In the URL when you click submit, you get: passwd=b035ed4a8143f22d9874858c079ab002

Which isn't exactly passwd=PetName is it?

2) The chances of this are really tiny unless you leave a reply to an email open in a window overnight or something. In which case you should save as Draft in case your computer crashes or you have a power cut or something.

New features not mentioned

[Dark Coder]

You will probably be wary if Yahoo emulates Google with regard to indexing emails, indefinitely.

Just another level of privacy lost due to information era.

Time to move on to another webmail platform.

roundcube

[PhYrE2k2]

Incidently I found an open source mail client that has a lot of similar functions: Round Cube I haveinstalled that and it is almost as impressive. [roundcube.net]

Unfortunately the 'planned feature' list is a little bit of the essentials, namely:

        * Forwarding messages with attachments
        * Richtext/HTML composing
        * Spell checking

(the other things are all 'optional' bonus features by my watch), but if you were to deploy it in a workable environment, the first and third would bug a lot of people (and probably aren't overly hard to add).

In all fairness, it's an very new project, and they've come a long way- so kudos to them. Also yeah yeah- open source contribute patches... Maybe I just will... ;)

-M

Re:roundcube

[Evil Grinn]

Unfortunately the 'planned feature' list is a little bit of the essentials, namely:

                * Forwarding messages with attachments

The last time I tried to do that in Yahoo! mail, it didn't have that feature either. All attachments are removed from the forwarded messages. Maybe they have changed that, but if so it is either very recently or is only in the new beta version.

yahoo 360?

[Maxhrk]

Yahoo 360? is it idea that they took from Microsoft? :)

y! does not send passphrases unencrypted

[Anonymous Coward]

it sends an md5 hash

once and for all - your pass is NOT exposed

[Anonymous Coward]

view source and you will see that yahoo does NOT send your passphrase in plaintext, its sends an md5.

Re:once and for all - your pass is NOT exposed

[tji]

If the client has Javascript enabled, that is true. If not, the password is sent in the clear.

Of course, the MD5 hash is sent in the clear, allowing a brute force attack on the password.

Hashing the password is better than nothing. But, SSL would be a much better and more secure solution (after all, yahoo does give you two modes to login, "Standard" and "Secure", so obviously they don't see the hash as the secure solution either).

There is no good reason not to do https - they certainly have the compute power, and could even do SSL offload if needed.

They should also allow the user to choose a longer time for the session timeout, even if done securely.

Re:once and for all - your pass is NOT exposed

[Anonymous Coward]

riiiight... and if I want to crack your account, I capture the hash (where I would have captured your password), submit the hash (where I would have submitted the password), and I'm in like Flynn.

What was the advantage again? Or are you like most unfortunates who forget how to think when someone says "looky here, shiny technology..."

Re:once and for all - your pass is NOT exposed

[Anonymous Coward]

well if you can intercept my transmission in order to capture the hash passphrase, you are ALREADY intercepting the plaintext message body in the same stream. so why again do you want to try to crack my passphrase????

Re:once and for all - your pass is NOT exposed

[Anonymous Coward]

???
never heard of standard hash challenges?
server sends random salt, browser appends password, hashes, and sends. server compares to its own hash of the salt + the stored pw.
an attacker would get a different salt, so the intercepted hash would be useless.

Other Ajax/DHTML/XUL WebMail interfaces

[blackhaze]

Ok, so the new Y! looks alright - But is this really anything *new*?

Seems like when Y! bought out Outpost ( a webmail app ) the original dev team must be responsible for part of the new Y! WebMail.

IMHO there is a much better WebMail application called @Mail at http://atmail.com/ - Beats the pants off Y!'s attempt of a desktop WebMail application, it also have a native XUL/Firefox interface that kicks over Gmail's bland GUI.

Alas it's great to see some competition in the Webmail arena - I wonder what is googles next punch.

Re:Other Ajax/DHTML/XUL WebMail interfaces

[blackhaze]

Sorry, the original WebMail app Y! bought out was http://oddpost.com/ - Not outpost ;)

Pop-under ads?

[SlashdotMeNow]

Will it still offer those delightful in-your-face ads that we love so much in the old Yahoo?

it is oddpost

[k2enemy]

i don't know why your cousin was so secretive. yahoo bought oddpost over a year ago and immediately announced they would be offering yahoo mail through a dhtml interface derived from oddpost's code. there was even a slashdot article about it.

Perhaps I'm alone in not seeing the point..

[ThePuceGuardian]

Leaving aside the fact that no non-code based lifeforms use Yahoo's mail service anymore, why not write up an adequate POP/SMTP gateway and let people actually use their desktop email clients? You know, like that other free email service that recently came along and ate Yahoo's lunch...

Re:AGREED!!!

[tofu2go]

One of the things I like about webmail clients such as Yahoo's is the simplicity.

I have to use Outlook Webmail for work and it is absolutely horrid... the interface seems designed to get in your way, rather than let you simply carry out the task you're trying to accomplish. Too much fluff, only gets in the way.

My immediate reaction when I saw this post was disappointment... I actually pay for Yahoo! Mail Plus... so if I had to vote with dollars, I'd vote to keep a simple interface.

POP3

[furrywithwings]

When is Yahoo going to get their head out of their ass and offer POP3 access? Google offers a superior service, more space, and Pop3. And yahoo mail is NOT worth the $19 a year just to get the same features as google. Sorry Yahoo, not news worthy! Thanks for playing though.

Re:POP3

[Yer Mum]

The European Yahoos offer it for free. If you sign up for a .ie or .co.uk address you'll get POP3.

Re:POP3

[gfreeman]

Google doesn't let me collect mail from other POP3 accounts, unlike Yahoo.

Fix that, I may move from Yahoo to Google.

Re:POP3

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe so many people on Slashdot still use POP3. Maybe I'm the one with the problem, but I think POP3 is antiquated and sucks.

I used to work at a help desk and supported > 10,000 POP3 accounts. The "leave mail on server" feature was a nightmare. The client reader would often "forget" which headers it had already viewed and download duplicates of every message. Lame.

IMAP just works, not to mention the speed of server-side search.

Re:POP3

[rthille]

I don't use it anymore (left it when i left my last job), but someone wrote a Java proxy app(let?) which runs on your local machine and gateways local POP3 to Yahoo. Ie, it lets you use a normal POP3 client to access Yahoo mail. I used it to get a bunch of email off Yahoo. It had trouble with my wacky password, so i had to reset it to only alpha-numeric, but other than that the messages came across fine.

i only want one feature

[adrianmonk]

I use my Yahoo! Mail that I've had since about 1998 on a daily basis, and I really only want one new feature: I want to be able to move to the next message in the list in well under a second.

Preferably, now that I am sitting at a computer with a 1.25 MHz PowerPC processor and 1 GB of RAM, I'd like to be able to do this as fast as I used to be able to do on a SPARCstation 2 (which had a 40 MHz processor) equipped with a whopping 64 MB of RAM. Ten years ago, on that computer that was 1.5 orders of magnitude slower than the one I'm using now, I could go to the next message in about 0.1 seconds.

Yes, I realize there are web servers and things (like the open Internet) involved here, but it should still be do-able. If need be, they could easily prefetch and cache messages in the browser's memory, so that when I hit the "next" button, it goes there right away. And I don't mind if unusually large messages don't load that quickly.

It would also be nice to be able to jump from mailbox index to message body and back in a fraction of a second and vice versa, while I'm asking for things.

Re:i only want one feature

[vrai]

1.25 MHz PowerPC processor

Bloody hell - no wonder your webmail experience is lightning slow. Your using a machine with a clock speed that's half as quick as a ZX81!

Re:i only want one feature

[adrianmonk]

Bloody hell - no wonder your webmail experience is lightning slow. Your using a machine with a clock speed that's half as quick as a ZX81!

Well, you see, it runs at 1.2 MHz when it's in new Super Ultra Wacko Greenpeace-Member Environmentalist Power Saving Mode. The computer is three orders of magnitude slower, but that's OK, because the hole in the ozone layer is growing that much more slowly as a result.

OK, no actually I just typed "MHz" when I meant "GHz". Oops.

Spymac !

[Anonymous Coward]

Spymac has been offering an iterface like this for quite some time.

This all sounds nice, but

[beforewisdom]

This all sounds nice, I will enjoy it, but what I really want from everyone...my web mail, google's usenet, mozilla's news client and the people who make web board software is better filtering.

Yahoo ( the paid version ) has good anti-spam features, but I could get so much more out of them if their plain old filters were more flexible/ powerful.

With the exception of slashdot, most web based forums suffer from either too much control or too little control. The site owners do not want to play umpire, hear complaints, etc and I can't blame them. The time has come for 100% ( note the 100% ) user controlled content.

By this I mean giving the user the ability to make it as if a regular objectionable poster never existed in the forum. Making his/her original posts vanish, along with all replys to his/her post and any mention of him/her.

The org that comes out with this first ( proprietary or open source ) will be able to very visibly set their software apart from all other similar software. The forum owner who implements such software will have a hook for drawing in members, his/her board will not just be another board among many boards for that same subject.

People really want this.

Google seems to be hesitant about these kind of filters. The mozilla mail client will take the entire thread/tree of posts out, they know it is a bug, but nobody seems motivated to fix it.

Yahoo can give their email filters much more flexibility and power, but they do not.

I'm guessing filters are a lot of work, that is why these various groups have been slow to do it.

It seems like what people want the most, more control in getting rid of the crap they don't want.

Re:This all sounds nice, but

[Forbman]

By this I mean giving the user the ability to make it as if a regular objectionable poster never existed in the forum. Making his/her original posts vanish, along with all replys to his/her post and any mention of him/her.

You mean...like Usenet kill files?

Re:This all sounds nice, but

[beforewisdom]

Yes. The various web board software out there needs, and does not have this kind of functionality.

Gopher? Wais?

[Kamiza Ikioi]

I'm sure there are still servers out there... and I'm all for compatability... but really, Gopher, Wais? And, even if you do use them, and would actually e-mail a link to one, why would you be using Yahoo Mail? Wouldn't you be the type more comfortable telnetting into a sendmail server?

Pic I'm referring to...

[Kamiza Ikioi]

http://tivac.com/images/ymail/hyperlinkoptions.png

"DHTML technologies"

[typical]

I've pretty consistently found that people sticking the phrase "technologies" in random places are either trying to market something to me or don't know what they're talking about or both.

Are they using DHTML or not? Yes? Then why stick "technologies" at the end?

Are all the features enabled on OS X

[Ewann]

The current Yahoo mail interface is bare-bones (no font tools, etc) when running Firefox, Safari, or IE5.5 on OS X. I suppose this has something to do with requiring ActiveX (I'm a hardware guy; forgive me if that's wrong.) Anyway, is DHTML cross-platform compatible, so that all of these pretty features will work on OS X?

Re:Are all the features enabled on OS X

[tonyquan]

From my usage, the application works identically on Firefox for OS X.

FTFA

[guitaristx]

Yahoo's test audience also will use a computer mouse to "drag and drop" ....

No wonder it's been so tricky! I've been using live rodents to drag-and-drop for a decade now.... If only I'd used a "computer" mouse....

DHTML and semantics

[Fatalis]

Yahoo! is beginning beta testing of a completely reworked UI for Yahoo! Mail that incorporates DHTML technologies.

DHTML is not a technology, it's a development technique like Ajax, for instance. A technology is something like JavaScript or DOM.

Re:DHTML and semantics

[(1 -sqrt(5))*(2**-1)]

DHTML is not a technology [...].

Ah, the fatal acronym-techne equivocation; a classic example of why middle-management's literature is strewn therewith: the shine of techne.

Gmail is best!

[Anonymous Coward]

The screenshots looks pretty cool, but in the end I think a normal slim Gmail interface is probably easier and faster in the long run.

Also I dont trust Yahoo, like I trust Google.

And Gmail is still in beta, and it will come new features all the times, and hopefully encryption. :)

Re:Wow. Tabs for multiple message windows!

[Anonymous Coward]

no confirmation to delete notes in the notepad

So basically what you're saying here is that when tell it, "Delete this thing," you want it to ask you if you want it to delete that thing?

Re:Wow. Tabs for multiple message windows!

[Anonymous Coward]

Try using one of the distro packages to keep your PHP free of security holes while staying with a compatible feature set(i.e if you're on the bleeding edge, you bleed). I've been using IMP on centos 3 for over a year and the only thing I've noticed is opening a Mailbox with 20,000 messages takes a while, maybe cause my mailserver is a celeron 400 with 5400rpm disks. (IMP doesn't have a calendar, thats kronolith)