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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."
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
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.
Does anyone have invites ? :)
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).
Test 1 2 3 4
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.
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.'.
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.
According to this article, the new interface is optional. You can actually switch between the two interfaces.
in order to read your 14 character "buy viagra now" spam message.
Get in line, folks.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
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/
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
Mirrordot have cached the screenshots: http://mirrordot.org/stories/657bff49a3acdb9421bf2 24780af814f/index.html
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
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.
~The TwoTailedFox posts again....
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
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.
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?
Reminder: Apple owns 1/255th of the internet.
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!
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?
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
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.
99.99% of the time if it's html, it's not worth reading.
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.
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.
.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).
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
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?
creation science book
Where do they come up with these names?
I think I'll call my next project "Big Small"!
...when they offer pop3 or imap + smtp.
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.
"Just the fax, ma'am."
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.
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.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.
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.
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.
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....
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic