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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.'"
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
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.
I used the new interface of yahoo-mail for a while but decided to switch back to their vanilla interface. The main reason why I went back was speed. It was extremely slow (at least when I used it which is couple of months back). Also it would take a lot more time to log-in. Your main screen is split into three columns, one for the folders, one for the list of messages (with message preview at the bottom frame) and a third irritating column with flash ads. I didnt like the wastage of real-estate in my browser.
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.
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/
Google is a classic case of a company with one tool in their box albeit more of a power hammer than a common or garden hammer
It's a... Swiss Army Hammer.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
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
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.
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
Comparing to outlook, man, that's like comparing your product to a painful rectal itch.
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.
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.
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.
I've been pretty happy with Gmail because its very convenient but if Yahoo are going to trump it then go on, someone tell us what its got.
I've been using both Yahoo Mail and Gmail since their respective launches and I just switched over to the Yahoo beta and immediately switched back.
I'm not sure where the idea is coming from that people who use web mail want a desktop style interface. Outlook isn't exactly known for its speed or intuitiveness, and that's what the new Yahoo Mail is emulating. I couldn't tell you if it has more features than Gmail or not, because the only features I need are compose, send, reply and forward. The ability to attach files is nice, but that's pretty basic (though a lot more useful if you have a lot of storage space, i.e. Gmail).
The new Yahoo Mail may appeal to a certain type of user, but it is outright bloatware for those of us who use email in traditional ways, which I would argue is probably the majority of users out there. It's pretty ironic, but Gmail actually works more like a traditional, old-school email application - no folders, no clutter, not a lot of options. What options do you really need?
I have a relatively fast computer - a Turion 64 with 1GB of RAM. Both Gmail and the old Yahoo Mail load in less than 1 second for me. The New Yahoo Mail took 5 seconds to load. That may not seem like a lot, but everything I did also took 5 seconds. That adds up when you consider that in any given email session, I might make 30 clicks. It gets frustrating fast when your email doesn't respond immediately, or takes noticeable amounts of time to redraw pages. I also didn't like the obtrusive ads in the new interface.
So I switched back. I don't use Yahoo Mail as my primary account anymore anyway, but if they switch to the new interface exclusively, I may just give it up altogether.
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.