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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.'"

15 of 262 comments (clear)

  1. Ads by PHAEDRU5 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    668: Neighbour of the Beast
  2. Re:So... by Teddy+Beartuzzi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I find I still prefer the folder mentality, as compared to Gmails "everything in one spot and search" philosophy.

    But I did hate the Yahoo beta when I tried it, and immediately switched back. I'm not looking forward to it become the default.

  3. ads by don'tyellatme · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Been using it for a couple of months now. . . by n2art2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    Self proclaimed wannabe geek. You know how it is. Most of us who read this stuff probably fit in that category.
  5. please define by thedrunkensailor · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

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    i support the right to offend.
  6. Yahoo Fanboy by prothid · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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/

  7. Re:So... by john83 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I hated Yahoo's Beta too. Yahoo mail (not just the beta) is so swamped with ads that I'm considering dropping it altogether.

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    Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
  8. Re:Is it better enough? by dracvl · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I'm sure a lot of people will need some serious convincing in order to get them to change their e-mail addresses.

    What's particularly relevant here is that

    • GMail is one of the few the only web-based mail that you can actually abandon (it has support for forwarding to other addresses)
    • I would bet there are more than 10 times time as many people with a yahoo.com account than with a Gmail account out there

    I prefer Gmail myself, though — for exactly the reason that it doesn't try to be a desktop email client. It's just faster to work with for me (oh, and the lack of banner ads helps too ;)

  9. Re:So... by michrech · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I hated Yahoo's Beta too. Yahoo mail (not just the beta) is so swamped with ads that I'm considering dropping it altogether.

    You are getting what you pay for.

    Looking at their "upgrades" page, you can drop every ad completely for a whopping $20 a year. I think that is quite reasonable, and have done it myself.

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    bork bork bork!
  10. Re:Ads -- vs. gmail adwords by d0hboy · · Score: 2, Interesting
    My God! Those ads really get in your face. Here the difference is evident when you look at Yahoo's ads versus Google's adwords.
    Plus, I remember the reasons I moved towards GMail in the first place:
    • No-nonsense POP access with other email clients (ie. outlook) so I don't even have to use the web-UI if I prefer. Yahoo's alternative could have been YPOPS but it seemed clunkier with an extra layer loaded in the background.
    • No 'Signup for [Hot/Yahoo/*]Mail today!' plug attached to each outgoing message
    • Gmail drive functionality (however long that is going to work)
  11. Re:So... by Captain+Bumpsickle · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I agree with you completely.

    I tried the new interface for a few weeks and just switched back to the old vanilla version a few days ago.

    In general, I liked the interface and the way that it looked and acted like a desktop email client.

    But, I have two big gripes with it:
    1. It was too slow and unresponsive for me.
    2. The third column (the one containing the ad) was proportionally too large for the interface. I understand that Yahoo makes their money from ads, but can't they make the ads a little smaller and less annoying?

    Granted, if they fixed item 1 I could probably live with item 2 - for awhile, at least.

  12. Re:But does it block spam? by cp.tar · · Score: 2, Interesting
    The #1 complaints I've seen about Yahoo! is the ads. Aren't there ads on gmail as well?

    Oh, right... indeed there are ads on GMail.

    Took me a month or so of daily use to even notice them.

    Furthermore don't you feel creepy when you realize its been reading your mail to determine what to display?

    Oh, right... automated text processing, looking for keywords, matching that with their adwords... really creepy.

    Actually, I've found it funny - nay: hilarious - on several occasions. For instance, I got a completely incoherent spam... and when I looked at the ads, I burst out laughing and took a screenshot: three out of four ads were about dyslexia.

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    Ignore this signature. By order.
  13. Re:So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've used Yahoo mail for over 7 years now, and my personal preference is towards the new interface. I have been using it for the last 3-4 months, and I find that it loads my mail faster, and with tabs it allows me to view many things at once - which I guess I could have done through the 'Open New Window' browser functionality but found it a pain in the a##. Just my preference

  14. Re:So... by AvitarX · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I actually leave it all in one box and search, I was simple pointing to a limitation of gmail.

    Also I don't think gmail sorts by sender (the second og my complaints).

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  15. No Unicode support by bertilow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.