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.'"

Comments

Link to Yahoo! Mail Beta sign-up page

[Amalas]

http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/mailbeta/

GMail

[certel]

GMail is still far better. Good job to Yahoo, though, for the competition.

Re:So...

[glwtta]

Google's tags are functionally no different than traditional folders

Not true. This is the one aspect of GMail I hate. Say you are subscribed to a lot of techie mailing lists; they are all easily sorted into folders for future perusing and the 'Inbox' is left with just the stuff that actually needs attention.

GMail on the other hand just tells me that I have 238 new messages, and I have to substract the totals of 9 different tags to find out how much "real" mail I have.

Simple solution - why not have both? Labels are a categorization thing, and folders are an organization thing, they are complimentary in many ways. Of course folders are just too mundane for Google, they have to have something "new" - it's just typical "ideology over function" mentality.