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Yahoo! Mail Beta Goes Public
prostoalex writes "After months of being tested via limited beta, Yahoo! Mail Beta, developed after Oddpost acquisition, is now available to the world. From the review: 'The new Yahoo Mail Beta is touted as being as functional as a desktop email client (such as Outlook). Other new features include an integrated calendar timeline (including mashups with Yahoo Maps), drag and drop e-mail organization, message preview, tabs for messages, plus an integrated RSS reader.' Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg was using Yahoo! Mail Beta back in September of last year and wrote the following: 'I've been comparing the new version of Yahoo Mail, which claims to be the leader in Web mail, with Gmail, the challenger Yahoo most fears. My verdict: The new Yahoo Mail is far superior to Gmail. Yahoo more closely matches the desktop experience most serious email users have come to expect. Gmail, by contrast, is quirky and limited. Its only advantage is its massive free storage, which exceeds what most people will ever need.'"
Anyone try it to form their own compairisons to Gmail?
Just it... very slow!
My God! Those ads really get in your face.
I can only see so many half-page ads about going back to school to get a nursing degree.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/mailbeta/
I'm not bitter, I'm just unsweetened.
If Yahoo Mail is anywhere as good as My Yahoo, it's gotta be great. My Yahoo lets me throw a ton of media RSS (RSS w/Images inline) and text RSS feeds on one page that are easy to view. Now I only wish it let me combined a bunch of feeds into one box and I'd be perfectly happy. Yahoo creates great simple UIs, so I imagine yahoo mail beta is fantastic.
To be honest, I'm not looking for a desktop-style web-based e-mail client with loads of features. I use Gmail because I never need to worry about deleting anything and I can run a search through all my mail in seconds. For me, I just need a permanent e-mail address for personal correspondence, and my work e-mail (Exchange-based) does everything I need as far as scheduling, etc. It may be the best web-based e-mail client in the world, but it has nothing I need that I don't get from Gmail, and I'm sure a lot of people will need some serious convincing in order to get them to change their e-mail addresses.
And Gmail's address book, unlike Yahoo's, doesn't allow you to collect contacts into group addresses.
-from the article.
It's important to note that this statement is no longer true, despite the fact that it was back in 2005. Gmail may no longer be as "quirky and limited" as Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg once thought.
i think i'll keep my text ads (and my sanity) thank you very much. that alone is enough that i'll never try it out.
I have used Yahoo Mail Beta for a long time, and I do like the interface however there is alot of "lag" associated with it. Moving from folder to folder takes a good amount of time, and if you are accessing it from a slower PC this is very noticable.
I have not compared to Gmail however, but the lag gets to me.
And I love it.
Well I love it when I'm at work. because it works at work on my Windoz box. But it does not work on my Mac at home. I use firefox both at work and home (sometimes safari at home as well) and doesn't matter what browser I use at home cause it doesn't work. Now I did get an error message back when I first started using the beta, and it said something to the effect that Yahoo does not currently support Mail Beta on OS X, and that it would revert to standard mail, until further notice.
So the biggest question is. . . Why Firefox on XP but not Firefox on OS X??? AND. . . With it being now publicly available, does it now work with OS X as well?
Guess I'll find out when I get home.
Self proclaimed wannabe geek. You know how it is. Most of us who read this stuff probably fit in that category.
GMail is still far better. Good job to Yahoo, though, for the competition.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
Yahoo more closely matches the desktop experience most serious email users have come to expect.
What does this mean? "Serious email users"...isn't this just a kind way of saying "people without myspace, aim, or irc".... i write tons of emails but most of them are far from serious
i support the right to offend.
This guy that submitted this appears to be a tad biased, even a Yahoo fanboy. There is a Yahoo category on his blog with over 40 entries, and no Google category. So, there's not a wonderfully balanced point of view here. I'd take his "verdict" with a grain of salt, flamebait at best.
http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/category/yahoo/
Where is the foot icon when you need it...
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Was very slow compared to google here in Germany. So slow that I've switched back to the classic Yahoo! Mail.
But doesnt' google have a lot of these - you can even add events directly from Gmail to your calender. The beauty of Gmail is that all of its services are tied to your one username, and you can access it anywhere! (And often, the services are interwoven, like Calender and Gmail)
I use a Small Business account with Yahoo with my own domain name. Anyone see how to get the Mail Beta working with a small business account?
- Dregs?
The reason I switched from Yahoo mail to GMail was the fact that within minutes of creating a Y!Mail account, I had all sorts of spam coming in. Eventually the noise to signal ratio was so bad that I gave up. Have they fixed that with the latest version? If not, I'll pass.
Gmail provides POP3 access, while Yahoo only provides it if you subscribe to the pay service. With Gmail I can use any email client... to me, and I'm sure to other people, that is huge.
I've tried Yahoo's beta mail a few times over the last few months, always with Firefox on Win2k/xp, and I always end up switching back to the classic interface.
For me, replying to messages just hangs when I press send.
And I didn't care enough about the new features to engage in a bug-hunt.
Been using it for a while now. I find the interface way superior to Gmail. Some of it's drawbacks include the length of time it takes to download the page for the first time. It's probably unuasable for dial ups. Also if you have a massive inbox and try to scroll down too quick the connection typically can't keep up with retrieving the titles. My biggest bone of contention is that it does not work in Opera. It pisses me off somewhat as it is my first choice browser and almost non of the Yahoo! Ajax stuff works, including Yahoo music and even the personal home page. Can't figure out why a multi gazillion dollar company can't knock enough heads together to work something out.
I just tried it out. It's really not that bad. Actually, really not bad at all. I, for one, actually like it. I'll probally never use most of the extra stuff but I do like the new layout. It helps me view the emails quickly to skim of them. When people say its slow, they are just stupid. It does take a second to load but after its loaded there's no need to open multiple links to view the messages and keep pressing the back button to read the rest. As for the ads, yeah they're there. Thats cause you didn't pay for it. If you notice, the other version had adds two. This just has the ads down the side instead of accross the top.
Freedom is a state of mind. A mind is a state of being. Stay the fuck out of my mind and my being. - Corporate Avenger
Seriously, what advantage does a desktop-style mail client -- especially one that's just simulated in a browser -- have over Gmail's simple, intuitive, fast interface with great integrated search capabilities? Maybe it's easier for an Outlook user to make the transition, but Gmail is so simple I don't see that being much of a factor.
Gmail got me to give up mutt. It's pretty damn good.
Game... blouses.
Plus, I remember the reasons I moved towards GMail in the first place:
The Mail client may look pretty and do a good job at organizing, but it carries a lot of baggage (ads, slow to load, doesn't work on all browsers). I wonder if it has mobile support (like Gmail).
I think I'll be sticking to Gmail. Unobtrusive text ads, lots of space, organizes my mail the way I want it to be organized (by labels and filters, not by folders), and it loads quickly on most browsers. The mobile support is just icing on the cake.
Remember, Google means search. The reason why Google mail is "quirky" is that it is a completely different approach to organizing your saved mail. That means learning a whole different way to deal with looking back through old messages to find things.
Frankly, I haven't used gmail enough to really get comfortable with it, but I can see how some people wouldn't like it. However, comparing it with Outlook is counterproductive. Gmail doesn't even try to look like Outlook, because it has whole different vision of the world.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
...now that they're beta they can compete with GMail.
For those who've been watching livehttpehaders while looking at Yahoo! Mail Beta would have noticed something cool and awesome. Here's a snip from my dump.
The client to server protocol is SOAP and pretty much should be accessible with a standard soap library (I think). For those who all love GMail's once-quirky and now familiar features, this could mean modding opportunities to make it behave like gmail (think gmailui for it). And for those who want an outlook in a browser, there'll always be the current layout. The system's a bit slow still, but I think that is more due to the number of individual requests skyrocketing rather than something inherent to it. It would be really painful to use on say, something like a high latency VSAT trickle (like I ran into during my Himalayan trek), but for most people on broadband with a decent box, this should be a leap above the classic interface.
I'm just waiting for YDN to post the WSDL for the mail api so that I can start publishing my own clients (like one with *threading*) for Yahoo!. Though most probably, I'd rather write a Mozilla yahoo:// protocol for mail, mainly because the current API almost maps into IMAP. (I do work for Yahoo! and have done enough funky things with the new api)
And lastly, nobody seems to have noticed the anti-phishing seal on the new Beta login pages. I wouldn't have known it had been released if it weren't for the ycoolthing article.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Why would I care that it reads my email to figure out what ads to show? Isn't that actually pretty clever..? My view is that the web should be as simple as possible. I don't use yahoo anything because I want things simple and want everyone out of my way the entire time. I despise when sites resize my browser. I hate when I click any random spot in a news article and find an ad pops up. I don't want anything other than email on my screen when I'm reading email and this is basically true with gmail since the ads are tiny and off to the side. I also don't need to live in a folder-based world. It's not the 90's anymore. Let's try new things instead of clinging on to old methods. As we get more and more data the folder approach simply won't suffice. I imagine it won't be long until the lines between the Internet and Desktop are so blurred that to find any file you always search and there will be a checkbox to search for files you authored. I also like using Google services because Google does what they can to ensure my privacy. Yahoo, on the other hand, is happy to sell it for a buck or to comply with anything anyone wants from them if it makes life easier or more profitable. Not really my cup o' tea, so to speak. I especially can't stand all the places yahoo tries to get me to install their toolbar. Please leave me alone, Yahoo. Maybe we need a do-not-call list for software companies so they'll leave us alone during installs?!
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
With all those ads, you'd think they could have have splurged on a prettier, more slick interface.
It makes sense to have the option of removing your email from online storage.
Yahoo has that option but it costs money. Possibly that has changed.
Another of Gmail's "only advantage" [sic] is that you can change the "From:" header to other email addresses after authentication. Yahoo only offers "Reply-to:" modification. (Unfortunately, Microsoft Outlook uses the "Sender:" header in email display.)
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
Heck, this is my first post, but can't remember the password!
Y!Mail updates blog http://ymailupdates.com/blog/ mentions nothing about it. And I still see "Beta" in my mail box.
I've been using Y!Mail Beta for months now. I must say, I'm less impressed. Reason? Slow!(this is Slashdot, so I must add, I got 4Mbps connection.)
Other than that all those "desktop like" features are good. "Tab" style reading is something I'm still adjusting to.
The new yahoo mail may be loaded down with useful features, but without POP support it won't be a a good alternative to gmail for many users. I know a lot of people, myself included, that started using gmail strictly so they could have a permenant POP email account that can also be checked via web while not in front of their computer.
The Yahoo! library for perl which has some really nice desktop-looking java (folder views, containers, tables, and so on). They definitely have put time and effort into the experience. Making the libraries available, was very nice too.
The only real issue i have with Yahoo! is privacy. They seem to have no backbone when served with a request for information.
Have you read my journal today?
one should also look at AOL's web-based mail. It offers drag & drop, and uses Ajax to reduce the number of page loads. Combined with FF + Adblock, it's not that bad. A little slow perhaps to load your mail, but I definitely wouldn't call Yahoo Mail Beta's drag & drop a "new" feature. /*Ducks*
Comparing to outlook, man, that's like comparing your product to a painful rectal itch.
1GB of storage vs 2.5+GB that Gmail offers is far better for Gmail.
I am extremely pleased with the upgrade. They have eliminated almost all of the complaints I have had over the years about the interface. There are still things to be ironed out but I have been using the new interface since they made it available and have never thought about switching back. I have a GMail account but have not really used it since I have had my Yahoo account for years. When the ISP field was awash with independents and switching providers happened regularly I got tired of letting my friends & colleagues know every 3 months what my new email address was so I got the bright idea to get a free Hotmail account. 2 months later Microsoft bought Hotmail and I couldn't switch fast enough. I decided to go with Yahoo because it seemed to be the most stable at the time and that was what I was looking for. It had it quirks but worked and did everything I "needed" it to. After a couple of years I too tired of the ads and decided to take the plunge ($19.95 a year) to get the POP access and the ads removed. So now my friends & colleagues don't get new email address spam every 3 months and I don't have to remember which accounts I have tied to what email addresses. I have noticed the lag between clicks but it doesn't bother me as much as it seems to others. With the Yahoo Plus package I really don't see any difference between Yahoo or GMail except I don't get any ads. As far as the SPAM goes Yahoo correctly tosses about 98% in the bulk folder so I never really have to deal with it. Haven't noticed too many false positives either.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
The POP access is the main thing for me, and it is part of a trend. They also provide a Jabber compliant chat account, rather than some proprietary protocol that can only talk to Yahoo chat subscribers. Now the install base for Jabber is not huge right now, but for those who use it internally for their company or who just want a choice of clients it is a big bonus. Go open standards! Boo proprietary lock-in.
are we still on slashdot? I'm missing discussion about privacy issues.
I've been using squirrelmail webmail interface on my own server for my own mail and I feel so good about it. Because I still have the exclusive power over my data. After all, this dataset contains correspondance dating back to 1993. Some of this correspondence I might not like to be seen by, say, someone who is considering hiring me for some job or say, some girl considering engaging in a relationship with me, or the girl I'm currently in a relationship with or some government that gets to decide wether or not I may immigrate into the country it governs.
Why would I want all my mail (and the mail of all people I correspond with) stored, cross-referenced, indexed, evaluated,... by some corporation that even says out loud it will do these things, plus maybe sell it to some 3rd party.
The interface might be a little "Web 1.0ish" and a search might take a couple of seconds, but I will rather remain the owner and controller of my mail, thank you... go map someone else's personality.
Oh, these poor little lemmings... when will they wake up?
As a longtime Gmail user, and to be quite honest, devotee of Google, I have to say that (except for a couple of serious flaws, including Yahoo's advertising methods) the new Yahoo mail is superior to Google. I considered switching for about....5 seconds, though mainly on the strengths of having "Tasks" functionality as well as the Calendar, etc. stuff that Google has. However, the switch would be too painful, I don't use the web interface that much anyway, and most of all, I'm hoping that Google sees this as a serious threat and upgrades some of the capabilities of Gmail. Windows Live is also a worthy competitor, and ease of drag-and-drop using AJAX is something that's very hard to pass up.
for any UK based ppl - thankfully if you use yahoo mail beta as a 'bt total broadband' option 3 customer, there are no ads
I've been in the Yahoo Mail beta for some time now, and it is a solid web-based email, with a lot of nifty features. The pros are not strong enough for me to switch permanently from GMail, however. But that's personal preference.
Yahoo Mail has an overall look/feel very similar to a desktop email client. *cough*Outlook*cough* The integration with RSS, maps and calendars is very nice, search is fast and relevant, being able to drag-drop everything is fun, and the tabbed email interface is a great way to quickly switch between different emails that you have open.
That said, there are some cons, and they're doozies. The first is the ads. Tons of 'em, each pretty flashy, and they're all over the place... and strategically placed near locations you're likely to click. The other is just an annoyance factor, and may in fact be limited to IE, since I haven't used Yahoo Mail in anything other than IE. Yes, I use IE. Anyway, whenever I do *anything* in Yahoo Mail, such as load an email for reading, or even click over to my inbox, I'm presented with at least a dozen "link-click" sounds. This is just annoying if you use the default XP theme, and if you use a Star Wars theme -- as I sometime do -- a single click action becomse a minute-long lightsaber battle.
Other than those two complaints, though, Yahoo Mail is a very solid mail client.
In comparison to GMail, however, I have to stick to GMail. I'd love to see some of the features available in the Yahoo Beta put into GMail, but I can live without 'em. I can't live without GMail's "Conversation" email grouping feature, and I'd rather have Tags than folders any day of the week. And GMail's Archive feature... I had to go searching for something I had archived as unnecessary a few months ago on my GMail account, part of an old somewhat silly conversation now dead. Had I had the conversation through my Yahoo account, I'd have deleted the emails outright.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
What I'd like to see is an email client with the functionality of Opera's M2. The implementation is not really good, but that is the best way to handle emails. Labels and autogenerated views. That's where some clients are slowly going like Gmail and Thunderird. I hate to waste my time dragin emails from one folder to another. Folders are a nice metaphore but they're just an aid for those who have trouble thinking in abstractions beyond the phisical world.
La vida no es una pastafrola.
My official email is @yahoo.ca, but I just forward to a gmail account. I need both POP3 access and forwarding (so I can download to a mobile phone). Yahoo gives you only one or the other and won't let you forward Yahoo to Yahoo. GMail allows me to do both. So I forward all email from Yahoo to GMail where I have more options.
In the end, their goofy policy leads to me reading email using someone else's site -- probably not what they intended.
When I click "Options", "Switch Back" or "Sign Out", nothing happens. The Firefox JavaScript Console says: "uncaught exception: Permission denied to get property Function.__parent__
Anybody else see this, or is my browser foobarred?
and I really love it, however there are two annoyances I can't figure out how to get rid of
1) It's not possible anymore when replying to have the original text indented with > and write your reply inline, gmail is better since if you scroll in the original text and press enter it allows you to separate the vertical bar and write
2) There is a right-click menu with a lot of functionality and shortcuts, but this is unusable in firefox as firefox's right click menu comes up on top (I assume they have a workaround for IE)
in any case I have to say it's a very well done and slick piece of programming and I'm glad that everybody can now use it.
-- the cake is a lie
I used to use Yahoo before I switched to Gmail, and I have tried to use the Yahoo Beta. But after using Gmail, how could anyone go to Yahoo? Gmail is not cluttered. It has no flashing, obtrusive picture ads. It is organized and simple. It organizes things into conversations.
Yahoo mail is ugly, annoying, slow and cluttered. It takes forever to log in. It is hard to organize your emails. It takes forever to switch between emails and open folders. Not to mention that I get a significant amount of spam in yahoo that I don't get in gmail.
Personally, what I want is simplicity, speed and organization. Gmail gives me that.
Ok, I know I'm being an idiot, but how does one see/use the new Yahoo Mail? I go to mail.yahoo.com, and I still see the same old interface that's been there forever. What do I need to do to activate the new GUI? I checked under options, and didn't see anything.
If you're looking for a good webmail app to run on your own server, and want the desktop-like functionality and responsiveness that these Yahoo and Google things are trying to offer, please have a look at Decimail Webmail (http://decimail.org/webmail/). It's currently only Alpha quality and doesn't support IE6, though I expect to add support for IE7 once it becomes widespread. The app is written almost entirely in Javascript and talks IMAP and SMTP to the server, wrapping those protocols in HTTP. There is a demo on the website (which wll probably break if lots of slashdotters try it). My intention is to make it the most responsive and featurefull open-source webmail application, and I would value input.
I just logged in to my account right before this posting and it still tells me that it is Beta. Now does this mean that I am part of some extra Beta or that this really did not go live for everyone. If it did, are other people showing that it still says Beta and if so is Yahoo adapting the idea that everything now stays in Beta for like 1 to 2 years like other companies (Google). Don't get me wrong I don't mind things staying in Beta if they work right but when you have to go to a new mail system that is slower, flash ads all over the place, and system intensive you just have to ask yourself one thing. WHY????
I want email to be fast. Pine fast. And so after getting an invite to switch to Yahoo mail beta in May (or so), I used it for 5 days, then switched back to regular yahoo mail. The bouncing ball, the adverts...does Yahoo not recognise that we might have only 3-4 minutes to check our email at work?
Is Gmail primitive in appearance by comparison? Sure, but it works, and it is significantly faster. Usefully faster. I won't be switching back.
Using plain ol' text since 1968
I can't save multiple attachments at once. Lame.
But really, who LIKES using outlook express?
Gmail is far more useful for anyone who wants more than basic mail functionality.
'The new Yahoo Mail Beta is touted as being as functional as a desktop email client (such as Outlook).
Outlook is functional?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
If I really, really wanted the desktop mail experience, I would use thunderbird. I tried the Yahoo! Mail beta for a bit. It was ugly. Possibly because it was such a big departure from the traditional image, but I hated it. I like my old yahoo! webmail.
search 'label:Bob label:Wedgie'
There you go.
paintball
Its only advantage is its [gmail's] massive free storage, which exceeds what most people will ever need
I guess they're right...my Outlook PSTs are only 1.15GB. The size I've got isn't that uncommon from the five people polled in my office. Yes, that's four years worth of email; but when I've got to pull up something from two years ago, I need it.
Yes, of course you can search that way. The question was about the visual interface.
seeks mail with 'the desktop experience' and uses webmail instead of the tons of free or cheap POP3/IMAP mail out there?
My IMAP mail provides 100% 'the desktop experience' and has a web interface. By that account it beats Yahoo(!) hands down.
Unlimited space? Mine has that too.
have you learned nothing from google?
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Does this mean its been in alpha this whole time? imagine if they had a real release version!
They're calling it Yahoo! Mail Beta? That's the name they came up with? Man, Google should sue them for trademark infringement. They've been calling their web apps that for years. ;)
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
! YahooMailbeta .vs. Gmail
.vs. AOL/NetscapeMail
YahooMailbeta
Clicking on "calenadar" or "notepad" throws me back into old-Yahoo-ness.
I might give it another look if they bring those features up to the same interface standards.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
As a long-time user of Yahoo! Mail, I signed up immediately for a new beta account. I got one, and used it ... for about 10 minutes. Then I reverted to the old Yahoo mail interface, which is much more useful.
Yahoo user, irate at the pointless use of AJAX
Pros:
* Does appear and function more like a desktop application.
Cons:
* Slow load times. This could be the result of a good slashdotting, but I doubt it.
* Slow, bloated javascript. (any minor action results in 30 seconds of 100% cpu usage)
* High amounts of CSS errors (IE-specific tags)
* No apparent way to disable the rendering of HTML email (only external images, which is *ON* by default!)
* No apparent way to view the raw source of emails.
* The virus scanner -- its cute, but its extremely annoying.
> Files are not scanned until you try to download them.
> Files are *repeatedly* scanned. If you download the same attachment 10 times, it will scan it 10 times.
Verdict:
Its an improvement on the old Yahoo mail, but its no where near as polished (or responsive) as Gmail.
- Speed - Accessing web email can be slow enough as is--Add in the 'fancy' interface and it's a crawl. It seems even slower when viewing HTML emails. I email myself notes, directions, to do lists, etc. I want to be able to just log in quick, view, and go. With the new interface, it's butting heads with my ADD nature. Login.. wait.. Click.. wait.. Click.. wait.. Grumble.. Wait..
- Scrolling - Scrolling any list--mail, RSS feeds, folders, etc.--jump and refresh badly. Scrolling up and down on a long list (Like a full Inbox) stutters, blanks, stumbles, forgets it's place, and otherwise acts like a
/.'er asking a girl out.
- Useless Features - Too much glitz, not enough function. Do I really need an RSS reader in my email when I already have that in my 'My Yahoo!'?
- RSS Reader - Speaking of which, the RSS reader is TIED to the feeds on the 'My Yahoo!' pages. If you add a feed in the mail, it adds the feed to the 'My Y!' pages; deletion works the same. There is no way to have a feed on one and not on the other. A.K.A. wasted resources through duplication.
- Use Of Real Estate - I'd prefer to have more control of the layout. Having 1/5th of the screen always dedicated to ad space is rather annoying. Why can't they be happy with the text ads on the left and the big space on the "Home" tab? I have the AdBlock extension so there is just a big blank space on the right. Also, I don't see a need for tabbed email browsing but there is no way to turn it off, so I'm always losing that space too. Minor, but it's there.
- Misc - I'm curious about this one. In the preview article it looked like the calendar was also updated, yet when I click on the calendar link (and the Notepad link for that matter) it opens a new browser window with the old style calendar. Is this a Firefox vs IE issue? A setting I missed? Or they just don't like me any more?
I'll give it a few more days to see if it can change my mind, but I think this weekend I'll be switching back to the tried-and-true mail interface.I really appreciate having Yahoo! decide for me what kind of quoting style I must use. Now, instead of full body quoting with a ">" character where I can decide where I want to put my reply, I get the "--- Original Message ---" Outlook/Outlook Express style break with my reply automatically on top.
Yahoo has the worst customer support I've ever seen and their services are utter shit. Yahoo Messenger was the buggiest piece of shit software I've ever used until they finally tossed OS X users the 3.0 beta after three fucking years of stagnation. Their games have some glaring bugs and oversights that are staggering to behold. Did they ever test them? Oh yeah, and I got locked out of my goddamned Yahoo email. One day, my password stopped working. My "secret question" didn't work either. After finally getting through to a human being after several canned emails, they basically said that they couldn't let me in. Great. Over two years of emails gone right down the drain, forever locked away. Thanks a lot, you bunch of fucking incompetent assholes. I guess there's no procedure in place for when their servers corrupt user information. I utterly loathe Yahoo and their braindead, flunkie codemonkeys.
Will this mean that I can no longer use tools such as http://fetchyahoo.sourceforge.net/ to get my email and view it in an email program (I like Evolution)? I suppose it is only a matter of time before someone makes a script which can understand the new interface and download the messages though.
Personally I don't think it's a good idea to charge for forwarding/POP3 access, force users into an interface based around a web browser, then say it's good because it's like an email program (the thing they stop you using).
Oh, and I am not just whining here, because I literally do need Epiphany. Apparently my OS isn't supported by Yahoo!Mail (GNU/Linux with Epiphany), so Yahoo! pays no attention to my bug reports that the entire interface is unusable for me since no text appears (white on white != easy to use interface). I am thinking of switching to Gmail so I can access it without resorting to CRON jobs, but all of my friends/contacts know my Yahoo! addresses.
Interesting WSJ article... but isn't touting the fact yahoo "more closely matches the desktop experience" a bit irrelevant? It is kind of like saying, "the abacus more closely matches the way people do math, so of course people will prefer it over a calculator." Gmail's innovations in conversations, hotkeys, tags, chat integration, and fast clean interface out classes yahoo's "normal desktop experience" any day of the week.
It's a great argument Walt, loads of people still use the abacus.
I can't believe people still use POP. :P
Those are all great points. Some have also complained about the ads. They don't bother me so much. I don't usually see them (no, I don't use Ad Block, I have just become blind to anything outside my content box, except for those horrid hovering ads of course). I don't use Gmail drive - but it sounds like a feature Google could implement (perhaps for a small fee??)
I like Yahoo Mail better because I think it's a more natural, client-like interface, and I can't stand that Gmail doesn't support folders. Tags are a good start, but I don't want all my messages stored in one folder. I know, I prolly sound like a dinosaur. Give me folders, and IMAP (I'll even pay for it if the rate is reasonable), and I'll be yours.
I know that Yahoo is still popular with lots of folks, but I gave up on then after they repeatedly reset my 'marketing preferences'.
I set them to "please don't email me ever", and from time to time they then reset them to their default "we will spam you as much as we can".
No thanks.
I wonder what time saving features they've included for the Chinese Secret Police?
I haven't used Gmail a whole lot, but I have a question: Invariably, overtime, my Inbox growd to have a lot of messages in it. How do I efficiently go through my inbox and delete unwanted messages without having to sort through those I know I want to keep?
With folders, I can move my messages out of my Inbox. When my inbox grows to an insane number of messages, I can go through it once in awhile and delete the crap. On gmail, I might have the "messages I knew I wanted to keep" labelled, but they still appear in my Inbox. So to delete the crap out of my inbox, I have to scroll past all the already "labeled" messages to address the unlabeled ones. Why?
With folders, at least when I'm cleaning out my Inbox, the ones I already filed in folders do not appear. Am I the only e-slob that has this problem???
Real simple Konqueror doesn't work at Yahoo Mail Beta and only limited functions at GMail, so simple.... I don't use them.
Make them work in Konqueror!
rm firefox
rm mozilla
1311393600 - Back to Black
I tried it out for a while about a month ago. My first experience with it was that it was slow and clunky but I forced myself to use it for a while with the hope that it would grow on me. One thing I noticed is that when I connected to it from a mobile device, it all fell apart and forced me to go back to the pre-beta yahoo web client. I have to wonder what happens if/when the beta becomes the only option. Gmail, in contrast, detects and works nicely with mobile (handheld) devices. All in all, it was really the culmination of a lot of little things that changed that I didn't like combined with the terrible slowness that caused me to finally give up on it and switch back to the pre-beta version. I use yahoo mail A LOT, but I've been playing with gmail some lately and though it seemed a little weird at first, it's starting to make sense to me and I'm starting to like it better. I've thought of switching over completely but am heavily invested in yahoo mail. If yahoo makes what's in beta now the only option, then it'll certainly encourage me to go ahead and switch. I'd much rather see yahoo go with a simpler, lightweight, faster webmail client than this horribly slow new piece of bloatware they came up with.
Yahoo Mail is worthless. It can only handle mail in Latin 1 encoding.
If a message uses Unicode (UTF-8), all non-ASCII characters are
displayed completely wrong.
They forgot about Unicode in a new e-mail application in 2006?
Are they out of their minds?!
Gmail on the other hand handles Unicode (writing and reading)
as should every single application developed today.
I know it does because I've tried it myself but I think you get some sort of warning right? Yahoo "grade" which browsers they support based upon browser version and platform (there are four categories: A, C, X and unsupported). I was going to say that Firefox on the Mac is a little bit unusual and thus would be a lower grade but according to this Yahoo browser grades table Firefox on OSX is a grade A platform. Hard to know what's up there...
I know, it's already been said, but...
I've been using it basically since it went live. It's OK...as long as you enjoy the folder paradigm, lifted straight from Outlook. It works OK, better than the old stock Yahoo mail, which majorly sucked.
It's biggest problem? Overall, it's slow, regardless of connection. I've had to use it on dial-up, on DSL, on cable and at work where I basically have unlimited bandwidth, so it's got nothing to do with that. It's just slow. Slow to load folders, slow to check mail. As in, slow enough to be annoying.
Other than that, it's pretty good. Is it better than gmail? I dunno. I've only seen gmail a couple of times, and it didn't seem to impressive to me. Is it better than Hotmail? I think so.
To be honest, if you're going to use Yahoo mail as your primary private email, you're much better off using Outlook Express or Thunderbird and getting it via Pop3. But, if you stuck somewhere with only web access, it's better than nothing.
...not that I'm a pirate.. Hell I've never even fired a cannon. - oldwolf13
So I click the link to try it out. I log in, then right away get this message:
Couldn't open mailbox!
eTrade SUCKS
So what about a decent Gmail/Yahoo alternative for your own server that you can download/install and control?
Personally I don't feel easy storing any private messages on Gmail, aka we own your email, cough cough, owned and controlled by other interests ;-) Sure we do not evil, ahuh ....
So what's out there you can download/install and own on your server? @Mail is a good alternative, Zimbra is pretty bloated and more focused to the bigger corps/exchange clone, Roundcube is pretty simple, and for IMP/Squirrelmail, you have got to be joking.
We want to create an open-source alternative to Gmail that is done right, without the bloat, and something you can control on your own Linux boxen. Anyone interested to assist?
No-nonsense POP access with other email clients (ie. outlook) so I don't even have to use the web-UI if I prefer.
Well, not really. Gmail's POP support is very buggy. It goes down randomly. And there have been plenty of cases reported (happened to me twice) of Gmail's POP not working when you've got mail that it doesn't like (like some DOC's.) It just fails then. You have to go in with the web interface, find the culprit among thousands of messages and delete it. Then POP works again.
Until Google fixes POP in Gmail I use the web interface exclusively.
Gmail drive functionality (however long that is going to work)
You have to be very poor to need a drive of 2 GB, even if it's orders of magnitude slower than the rest of your drives.
Improve at backgammon rapidly through addictive quickfire position quizzes: www.bgtrain.com
If i wanted a desktop experience i wouldn't be using webmail. Duh!
This guy has no clue what he's talking about. I *also* tried yahoo! mail abotu a year ago.. what it lacks that GMail does right:
Filtering - Yahoo! mail's filtering continues to be crappy to non-existant. GMail on the other hand has excellent filtering. I can easily assign labels to emails based on lots of different rules.
Speed - GMail is much faster than Yahoo! mail. Yahoo! mail is trying to use AJAX to load message headers as yous croll, rather than paging like Gmail. The problem is, because of the unreliability of AJAX, the headers often *fail to load) if you're too quick or jerky in your scrolling. So you have to re-load the whole interfac eto fix it!
Ads - Yahoo! mail is still littered with ads. GMail's ads ar every unobtrusive
Extras - Gmail is full of extras. Send someone a word document? Hey - they can view it ats HTML. Send someone an date? Hey - it can be automatically be added to your Google calender. Location? Link to google maps appears. This is just the beginnning - GMail has tons of little "extra" features like this. Yahoo! mail has none.
This is just the tip of the iceburg. There's lot of other things too, like free POP access (though I wish GMail has IMAP), threading, ability to label a message mor ethan once, etc - that Yahoo! just does *not* have.
They didn't fix the one thing I really hate about Yahoo mail - the fact that when I log in, I first have a screen of "My Yahoo" kind of content (news headlines), and THEN I have to click Inbox to view my messages. When I go to mail and log in, I expect to be presented with my messages. Gmail gets this right. Similarly, Outlook; it doesn't first show me RSS feeds or other such stuff, it shows me my MAIL. Why won't Yahoo?
I will never trust them after they wiped over 7 years worth of e-mail. Do they honestly think a revamped interface will make me change back?
I remember as most of you, when Yahoo basically copied Microsoft and banner filled their e-mail client to the teeth. I've tried it, but you know? G-mail still has my loyalty because for:
1. I've been using it completely for the last year and now have thousands of e-mails archived and sorted.
2. My computer is still an old Athlon with 128 Megs of RAM - running any sort of e-mail program (yes -- including Outlook Express) on my computer basically drags it down to a crawl - web browsing on the other hand - no problem at all, hence why I stick to online e-mail programs.
3. And no, I have no intention of "upgrading" either. I don't play any games (well, okay just one - Shattered Galaxy), so this works perfectly for what me and my wife use it for - surfing and e-mail.
I use Yahoo! Mail Argentina and have the same old interface, I didn't found anyware to change it. Is it really available for everyone?
Yes! Thats it, give me POP3 and then I can use whatever mail thing I most prefer, for free. And don't forget you can use Gmail as a outgoing SMP server too, also for free as well.
Thats why Yahoo is not what I would prefer to use, and of course it is now my "disposable" mail account if I want some degree of anonymous personal mail or just a trap for the inevitable flow of crap spam from some site registration. The nice thing is Gmail can be accessed from the web too. Gmail is still not my "primary mail" I use work mail and such, but as time goes by and jobs change or you move etc, its nice to have that "other" personal mail account to keep. Whatever mail I use it better work with my favorite mail manager or i just wont check them. Gmail dose this so I use it often, yahoo will not not so it gets the spam is and is checked may be once a month.
What is there to not get? If you send a message about a subject, and someone replies, it shows up below your original message. That's EASIER. How exactly is this harder?
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
And what would you want shift to do in gmail, exactly?
Actually, shift is already used. If you enable keyboard shortucts, "C" composes a new message. "Shift-C" does it in a new window, in case you need to compose one message while looking at a few others. "Shift-F" and "Shift-R" to forward/reply in a new window as well.
What functionality are you missing, pray tell? [Email user for 14 years.]
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Now, the 20-messages-per-page thing really annoys me. But what you described as not existing -- exists. You can also select all read or unread messages.
And it doesn't load web-bug images without your permission, so spammers can't verify that you're actually receiving their mail (which is bad).
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Yahoo fanboy, I don't even believe you. I have amassed 600+ megs of email in my over 2 years of using gmail -- since early beta -- and have never seen this behavior. I send 400-600 emails a month and receive over 500 a day. I call bullshit. Post a screenshot please and I'll see what I can do in ways of an apology. :)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I didn't want to like yahoo beta as I have transitioned to gmail but it IS beter IMHO just needs a litle more speed thats all! also theres a calendar thats more integrated than gmails. Ads are shitty annoyance but acceptable for the time being..
options->mail options->filters (in mail beta by the way)
and this is my first ever yahoo mail experience!
Do I hear dolphins? Locusts? A typewriter?