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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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
I second the statement of preference for the Yahoo! vanilla interface. The poor UI responsiveness was really dramatic... to the point that my parental units called me up one evening, after having accidentally enabled the Beta mode for their account, asking what they did to slow down "the internet" so badly.
At least, this was the case a couple months back. I haven't checked since... they've stayed away from any buttons labeled 'Beta', and as the new version isn't compatible with half my machines at home, switching over myself seems a tad counter-productive. (Oh, the joys of much-lambasted-but-runs-perfectly-fine-for-what-I- need-thank-you-very-much Win98SE. ^_^)
Folder one person, folder 2 project.
I can go Inbox->Bob->Wedgie
can tags to that visually?
The things I dislike about gmail:
1) Does not show the email in the from. I have 2 threads that say diane,me (different people)
2) cannot sort on subject or from only date.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Just looking at my newly created Yahoo Mail (BETA!) inbox, I've got ads for a new mortgage, credit cards, university degrees, my credit score, internet stalking tools (find that e-mail!), and new telephone service. It's fricking spam before I even get any e-mail to get pissed off about. My Google inbox view has ads for ... none, nada, zip, zero, zilch. I wonder what happens when I actually get an e-mail - which they havn't delivered yet (sending or receiving).
The (Bayasian filter) score thus far:
MikeGoogle = Ham, Yahoo = Spam
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.
But really, who LIKES using outlook express?
Gmail is far more useful for anyone who wants more than basic mail functionality.
Actually, no, its equivalent to as single level of folders, not heirarchical levels. That is a real shortcoming, I would agree. I can see a couple ways of providing similar functionality while basically following the gmail idiom (such as adopting an optional heirarchical view that would treat a message with multiple tags as being in a kind of 'subfolder' that could be accessed by different paths: if you clicked one tag you get anything with just that tag, and a list of tags that any messages with that also had, if you clicked on one of them, you'd get the messages with both tags.) And I agree, the excessively "friendly" from display and the lack of sorting flexibility are disappointing. Also, given the tagging idiom, I'd like the ability to create smarter pattern-matching rules, so that you could automatically create tags for every sender in a set form (say "From foo" where foo is the actual sender identification), and automatically tag every incoming message with the appropriate automatically created tag.
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.
Same. Waaaaaayyyy too slow, not just on loads but the whole experience. It took several seconds to do anything with the newfangled mail (not counting server timeouts, which were not uncommon), so I switched back to regular Yahoo mail. I dread using the new mail if they can't improve the speed.