Slashdot Mirror
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."
Yahoo doesn't need an answer to Gmail. They have an order of magnitude more users (63.3 mln vs 5.4 mln).
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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.'.
yes, the new interface is optional and you can switch back and forth between old and new.
According to this article, the new interface is optional. You can actually switch between the two interfaces.
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/
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.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The server is beginning to be sluggish...
i l-beta-impressions/
Try the snappy Coral link:
http://patcavit.com.nyud.net:8090/2005/09/14/y-ma
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.
/.'ed. Try mirrordot or coral cache
PS. Screenshots are
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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!
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!
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.
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.
My Systems
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
There's almost certainly a feature that forwards politically incriminating emails to the Chinese authorities.
F*ck Yahoo.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
try www.cryptomail.org
1.0 alpha avail for download, not yet rolled out.
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.