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The Troubles With the Yahool Mail Beta
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo Mail recently launched their new webmail service, dubbed Beta (yes just like gmail) no doubt hoping to win back market share in the world of webmail. Their prime competition is gmail, which they've modeled some of the new features on, but Yahoo Mail Beta falls very short of offering a similar experience. The ad infested new Yahoo Mail is patchwork of ideas halfway implemented and glaring usability problems."
Well, I dont know if this is the norm and I am just an exception but my gmail account says "You are currently using 1301 MB (47%) of your 2769 MB."
Well it's certainly not as smooth or polished as Gmail, but I definitely prefer it to Windows Live Mail. I feel it falls into a different kettle of fish to Gmail though. Yahoo Mail attempts to emulate the desktop type feel, while Gmail is just doin' it's own thing. :D
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Stop having anonymous users promote their own blogs. It makes you look like a bunch of idiots.
> "Yahoo Mail recently launched their new webmail service, dubbed Beta (yes just like gmail)
I don't think that word means what you think it means....
I've taken a look at it and think it's WAY better than MSN Mail for a feature-to-feature comparrison. It's faster, and just flows a lot better without any annoying banner ads.
Gmail is for plain mail. Yahoo seems to be for those who want the outlook emulation via web-browser. Gmail never captured my interest in the look/feel of an outlook replacement.
Yahoo has a way to go to get me to switch, but for a yahoo-hater in the past like me, I have to give them a thumbs up for the effort.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Yahoo Mail Beta is complete and utter bloatware as they went too far. I LOVE the old yahoomail, and if they force me to use the new interface, they might very well lose a customer.
Needs free POP3.
To make one of his point, the guy points out that 828x588 are allocated to Firefox on his desktop. So either he's running on an old CRT monitor at a weird resolution or he's on a 1024x768 screen and he's some kind of a masochist. I don't see the point, in this day and age, to run Firefox in 828x588 when you can go "fullscreen". Note that I don't say you should always run Firefox in full screen (I sure wouldn't a 30" display, for example) and I'm not "defending" webdesigner pooping website that only looks OK at 1024x768 or more. But here, the guy needs to learn to use virtual desktops... Or simply alt+tab. I mean, frankly, what's the fscking point of running Firefox not maximized *on a small 1024x768 monitor* !? Maybe to see the "ooooh shiny desktop icons" (because of course the mouse is essential to navigate/launch proggys)? This post brought to you on a 1600x1168 Firefox window, located on one out of 12 virtual desktops, on a Metacity window manager that has no icon (no Nautilus, thank you very much). I really mean: WTF?
Thank you Adblock & Adblock G.Filterset updater...
Funny how this "news" just shows up when another news talks about yahoo mail opening up their registration process, if i remember correctly it's already been several months since yahoo mail provided a beta as alternative.
The main problem with yahoo mail beta is the time it takes to load the interface in the web browser. It takes much longer to load yahoo beta than it takes gmail to load its mail interface.
On top of that, when you compare the sheer number of features that come with gmail, yahoo mail falls too short.
But I do like the new interface of yahoo mail beta - maybe they need to make further refinements and add new features which provide value.
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It doesn't keep your messages forever and doesn't analyse your private mails to display "relevant" ads which includes Spyware, phishing, pirate site "harmless" text.
Also Gmail userbase is a joke compared to Yahoo userbase, every statistic on web will tell you.
Google fanboys especially anonymous ones really started to be irritating.
If only companies who advertise on sites like Yahoo Mail realized that less is more, we wouldn't have this kind of problem.
Why not pay five times more to get ten times the attention? It's common sense: put your cheap ad on page 23 of a news paper, filled with tons of other ads and you end up paying for very little attention.
I personally notice the ads on Slashdot every time I visit this page, but if it was filled up, it would just blur into the rest of the page and become less valuable.
Full Tilt
Yahoo has had mail around for a long time, so I've long since ignored Google. I have also ignored yahoo's attempts to add features. I use a weblink on my page to open "regular mail" and it seems to continue working, despite reports of problems other people are contributing.
I use the Trilogy of Yahoo Mail, Messenger, and Yahoo Advanced Search, so I'm a customer for life unless they make the mistake of trying to charge.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
First my background: I was a big Yahoo email guy for a number of years. I started using gmail a couple years ago. I still keep my yahoo email address but don't use it much.
I find the yahoo approach somewhat old compared to the clean lines of gmail. In particular, after tagging emails in gmail, it's a little hard to go back to the folder paradigm. Another issue is the home page within the email client that doesn't show you your email. If I want yahoo as my home page, I will set it up that way. It also seems somewhat slow (I'm using a 3GHz P4 w/ 2GB ram running firefox on WinXP on a T1 connection) compared to gmail.
This is totally separate from the gross number of adds on the email site. Thankfully, adblock seems to be able to block out the vast majority of them.
While I had high hopes for the new yahoo email client (I actually like the yahoo.com site redesign), I think it's too little, too late.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
"Yahoo Mail recently launched their new webmail service, dubbed Beta (yes just like gmail)"
Does he realize that by beta it simply means it is not final? It seems like the author thinks that beta is part of the name...
Is the answer I received from one of my Myspace-generation female friends. Yahoo needed to pull off something extraordinary to get back on top of the market, as in my eyes at least Yahoo is almost as old as the cowboy exclamation its name descends from.
Ninjas use italics.
I'll always prefer Yahoo mail over Gmail because Yahoo mail doesn't scramble the message inbox so I can't find anything, and Yahoo doesn't have annoyances like having to click a link just to edit the subject when replying.
Where were you when the voynix came?
When I click on a message title, I get about 5 lines of message text displayed in the display area, which is about as convenient as reading the same message off the screen of a cell phone. And this is it, there is no "open message in a new tab/window" or anything like that, this is the only way to view messages.
I guess genius here never tried to double click any of the messages. It opens it in a new minitab within the Y!mail main window/tab.
This guy's the limit!
(this post is intentionally left blank to avoid being a troll)
"On top of that, when you compare the sheer number of features that come with gmail, yahoo mail falls too short."
I'd consider Gmail if not for an important feature it lacks that Yahoo has: organization of the inbox. The useless scrambling of messages in Gmail is basically a black hole where I have to rely on "Search" to find anything at all (unlike Yahoo where I can page down through the inbox). All they need to add is an option switch. There's a reason that few if any other email services have copied the "scramble mailbox contents into an useless pile" approach that Gmail has.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Yahoo! Mail rating: 5.5/10 (graphical ads, inconvient settings area, bad UI)
Hotmail rating: 3/10 (graphical ads, not easy to access others profile if you don't have MSFT MSN Messenger, spam spam spam, hard to block people, small space limit)
GMail rating: 8/10 (no IMAP access, having a bot look at all my emails)
Maybe this article will sway the opinion of people who are deciding on a new free email service to join. Hopefully folks will decide on more than this piece of writing.
The title of the article, "gmail beta vs yahoo mail beta", implies some sort of comparison between the services. What it seems to actually be is a 1,723 word (with associated screen-shots) criticism of Yahoo!'s product.
I had my Yahoo! email address before PigeonRank was a twinkle in a Google geek's eye. There are things I like and dislike about both Yahoo!'s and Google's interfaces. I consider Yahoo!'s new interface an improvement over the old one -- it's a considerable facelift, and works with IE and Firefox. Bottom line for me is that the real value of their services lies not in their interface, but the ability to exchange information. Yahoo! is more valuable to me, because folks know they can contact me at that address. It all makes me wonder if the author even bothered to give Yahoo! feedback on their product, or just wanted to show off their l33t ranting ability.
This is not a news article! This is someone's blog post! I could get into why the post itself is stupid, but the point of that would be based on the premise that it is *supposed* to be informative/insightful in the first place. It's not! It's just a blog post.
/. seriously needs is moderation for the articles.
What
Don't put advice in your sig.
I don't use firefox full-screen except when I need to. My screen resolution is 1280x1024. I have a couple of other windows peeking out from behind the browser window that I also like to keep an eye on. I find it vastly quicker to slide my mouse sideways and click on the window to switch to it rather than use keyboard shortcuts of the taskbar. And unlike alt-tab, I never have to cycle through a few windows - including minimised ones - to get to the one I want.
"Gmail has real innovation in an email client. Discussion topics are grouped,..."
They are grouped poorly by some sort of random criteria that basically renders looking at the inbox uselsss. I had two email exchanges with someone named Rob. Now I have these inscrutable "me, Rob" groups for them. One single conversation has been broken up by Gmail's inbox-scrambler into 5 or 6 of their "conversation" groupings. The "group by conversation" idea is bad one and is poorly implimented. It's senseless, annoying, and I sure with there was a configuration option to go back to useful, standard inbox/etc organization with complete email addresses and names showing. Not only that, there is the serious design flaw that Gmail has that no others have where they hid "change subject" behind a link. I guess they want to encourage users not to have accurate subjects! Even Hotmail makes it easy to edit the eubject.
I've used Gmail for well over a year, side by side with Yahoo, and with Gmail it's like everything falls into a black hole, and I have to "search" every single time I want to find something. At least with Yahoo, the organization makes a lot more sense, and I have to do "search" a lot less.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I agree the adds blow, but it doesn't mean that the new Yahoo mail sucks. I like the drop and drag feature. I like the fact that you can see all your mail instead of only 100 at a time. The calander feature at the bottom of the page is cool as well. Does this mean I will give up my Gmail account? No. I'll just keep both.
Can I bum a sig?
Like most Google web products, GMail uses just the right amount of AJAX. It's used where necessary, and where the benefit clearly outweight the drawbacks.
Yahoo! Mail, on the other hand, does not make such a distinction. AJAX is used all over the place, even for tasks where it is not needed, if not outright detrimental. It's this excessive use of AJAX that makes it so slow. Whereas GMail often uses the most sensible technological choice, Yahoo! Mail just uses AJAX. And as with most typical AJAX applications, the number of asynchronous requests are massive, and consume much bandwidth and client-side processing time. On a broadband connection it is barely tolerable, and on dialup it is virtually useless.
AJAX in moderation can be beneficial. AJAX used for complete web application development is a recipe for disaster.
"Gmail is superior in every way to any mail platform except some corp/gov custom environments."
It's better when it comes to how the UI looks (colors, characters) and the lack of add clutter. It's much worse the way it jumbles inbox/etc emails into "groups" that have nothing to do with anything and make it hard to find past received emails. This idea isn't that hot: notice the lack of other companies immitating the useless scrambling of Gmail's folders. (I understand how it is MEANT to be used, and how it is SUPPOSED to work. However, I prefer my email properly organized for ease of use, and don't like how Gmail is not good at what it is supposed to do and ends up breaking a single "conversation" into several different groups).
Where were you when the voynix came?
"I use the Trilogy of Yahoo Mail, Messenger, and Yahoo Advanced Search, so I'm a customer for life unless they make the mistake of trying to charge."
Stay away from gmail. After using Yahoo's clean organization of what comes into your inbox, you will be sorely disappointed at Gmail's scrambling of incoming messages. Some like it, but most say "no way". They don't even give an option to switch to standard organization.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Well, the question I guess is: "Do you know what you are missing?". Yes, it can be a PITA to move your email address and make sure all your contacts know it. Don't try that at first! Instead, just play around with a gmail (or whatever) account for a while. Most email clients will let you change your sender email address to make people think you are using another domain (ie: send mail from you@gmail, but have the recipient think you are sending it from you@yahoo), so there is no harm in trying these things out.
:-)
You don't know what you don't have unless you look around.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
And if I am not mistaken, just like GMail, YMail offers no IMAP support.
I do not really understand why they do not offer this service which is really handy when you use several computers or operating systems. GMail chose to stick to a strange implementation of POP3 where the mail you sent comes back to you through POP.
I guess not everybody has the use of an IMAP server, but until then I will continue to use other freemail services.
I tried out the yahoo mail beta last week, and I promptly dumped it in favor of the regular yahoo mail. I tried to attach some files to the email while using firefox, but the popup window to select the attachments was so small that I couldn't click on the browse button to find the attachment, I had to use the tab key to get to it. And there wasn't an 'ok' or 'attach' button in sight anywhere. Screw that.
is that you can't block those annyoning text ads
At least in yahoo mail you can use adblock or another such firefox extension to block them permanently.
What use is a fancy Ajax web interface when it is so slow?
It's slow on a dual-2.3GHz G5 machine, and it's positively sloth-like on a 1.33GHz G4 (Firefox). It's slow on Windows too (2GHz Athlon).
It has lots of nice features, and it looks like a stand-alone mail client with added tabs, so it is innovative too. But it is sooooo sllloooowwwww. I can't bear to use it to be honest, I switched back to classic view. There's no excuse for the multiple second delayed reactions when clicking on things in the interface.
GMail is nippy and featureful, and the labelling function does away with that pesky management of email folders issue.
Firstly, Yahoo! Mail Beta is a (slightly) reworked version of Oddpost, which was doing its AJAXy goodness years before Gmail existed. Yahoo! bought Oddpost about three months after Gmail appeared (April 1 vs. July 9, 2004), which may have been a competitive response to gmail, but probably was already in the works. Very early Gmail really only had a few "killer" features, the big one being lots of space (1 gig), which all the major webmail providers matched within a few months (Yahoo! initially went to 100M from 10M, and then quickly moved to 1G). Considering that most people couldn't get a gmail account for months or years, this wasn't exactly an existential threat.
Even the original Yahoo! Mail was a purchased product (Rocketmail by Four11), but it really was an innovation for the day (March 1997). The purchased Oddpost product was also a true innovation (it pretty much was the first major AJAX application that was widely deployed - and isn't AJAX the Slashdot Subject of the Year?).
Getting to the substance of the "review" - yes, the ads are a bit obnoxious on free Yahoo! accounts. But in order to get his vaunted 20% ratio, the reviewer had to come up with a very specific and somewhat narrow screen resolution (828x588 pixels). The Yahoo! Mail Folder Pane is a fixed size (200 pixels) and has four, two-line ads. The ad pane (which only exists on the free accounts) is 160 pixels. The center pane (tabs, mail folder, preview page) automatically resizes to take up the rest of the page. At my normal viewing size (1200x800), the ads take up about 14% of the space - and considering I use Adblock Plus, it's really just some blank space over on the right.
The Contact list stuff is even more silly. Yahoo! Mail will automatically add anyone you've ever sent mail to to your Contact list if you want, or ask for confirmation before doing so. Every email you read that came from someone you've never sent an email to has an "add to contacts" button next to the "From:" address (it's a little folder icon with a plus sign). What more exactly do you want? I, for one, don't want anyone who has ever sent an email to me to be a "contact" - that would clutter up my contacts. The GUI for handling contacts, adding them to lists, adding more information about them and the like is much slicker and better integrated than the equivalent Gmail version.
The "ad" for Yahoo! Calendar on the bottom isn't an ad at all - it's a single line that lists your next 3-4 calendar items. It's rather new (it only appeared about a week ago or so) and gives you a nice GUI for scanning upcoming calendar items and quickly adding a new one. Yahoo! was (rightly) being hammered for not upgrading its Calendar to the same AJAXy-goodness of the beta email, so again, what's the harm? Apparently, they need to add a "turn this off" button or right-click menu option to satisfy the reviewer. Sure, that'd be nice but it's not something I'm worrying about one week into the new functionality.
And that's the "review of the review". What the reviewer leaves out is all the really great features of Yahoo! Mail. It does just about everything the way a standalone mail client does - slick GUI, drag-and-drop, a multi-tabbed interface integrated into the client, message searching (results go into their own tab) and a whole bunch more. In my experience, the spam filter has been a lot better than gmail's.
I like both mail systems, but for average users, Yahoo!'s is a whole lot more natural and useful. I'd love to see message threading in Yahoo! and a slicker GUI in gmail.
Except this is not in any way news, fast or not. It's one person's blog, which, if you look at any of the other blog entries, are nothing more than a series of opinions of many different, unrelated things.
If I had a 10 acre plot of land, I wouldn't build a house to cover the entire area. I would use part of the land for a house, part of the land for a garage, part of the land for a yard, and part of the land for a pool. It's called multitasking.
One of the benefits of a larger monitor (larger than, say, the 14 inch monitor I first started computing on) is that I can have more than one window open at a time, and see information in both windows at the same time.
And yes, I actually do this. I keep trying the beta, but they give so much of their real estate over to ads, that there's little left for my actual mail. Sure, I could open my Yahoo mail up in a new window instead of a tab, and maximise that one window, but why should I have to change my browsing habit for one program. For me, Yahoo Mail Beta's worst sin is that it is absolutely unforgiving to anybody who doesn't wish to turn over the whole monitor to an email program. KI'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
Did you ever try clicking on the "switch back" link? It takes you back to the Y!M classic interface.
All one has to do to see the difference between what gmail and yahoo are trying to accomplish is go to each companies respective search page. Google.com, simple search bar, customize as needed. Yahoo.com, cluttered page, unwanted content, advertising, a total mess. I've used yahoo mail longer than any other service, that is, until they started to charge for their pop3 service. Then I switched over to gmail for my primary mail through thunderbird, but I still pop into yahoo mail for those "legacy" e-mails, or for services I sign up for so I won't get spam on my "normal" e-mail account. The yahoo mail interface is just more of the same bloated garbage that business people have in mind when cash is their bottom line.
I use virtual desktops heavily (I use twenty-six of them, to be precise), but you really have to accept that some people actually dislike that method of working.
Windows and Mac (IIRC) have never been very big on the vitual desktop thing, and while I find it second nature, it's important to realise that some people prefer to use a taskbar.
This kind of debate comes out in user interface design. Some people want to have unique windows for every instance of a program, and others prefer to use tabs. At the moment there are only really these two ways for handling multiple windows, but I'm sure people will think of more as time goes on. Multiple screens for example, might bring up some new ideas.
Either way, virtual desktops are a very unixy thing, so don't be surprised when windows or mac users keep many, small windows. People have been thinking in terms of many, small windows for many years - people probably won't be switching around their method of work so soon.
still hates yahoo mail! News at 11. Yahoo Mail Beta isn't that bad. Sure, it's a little annoying (I liked the old yahoo mail). Sure, they are trying to draw users back to boost their advertising rates (that's what you get with a free webmail client, people!). But the interface is more outlook like than gmail like (that will give them some fans, and some haters). Honestly, it is no worse than it was before, and it's not really much better. If you liked the old yahoo interface, you can function in this one, and it's no more intrusive that the last one was. If you didn't this one isn't going to win you over.
Yahoo mail doesn't 'force' you to accept the beta version. You have to have made the initial request to get access to the beta and the first time you load it there's an animation showing you how to get back to the old interface if you don't like the beta.
Re: Bots reading your email on gmail - hate to tell ya, but there are bots reading your email on every one of these services.
Double click isn't a "normal" browser interaction. I've been using browsers since "1.0", and it would never occur to me to double click something on a web page. This is the worst temptation of Ajax, btw: duplicating or poorly imitating desktop interactions such as windows, drag & drop, or double-clicking in a page-based medium where they make no sense. Using Ajax to speed screen updates makes sense, but introducing new behaviors that can't be emulated with a page reload does not.
I'm using it and mostly satisfied with it, especially, with outlook likfe user interface. And when it comes to ads, ya it's annoying but nothing is free in this world.
Lastly, for gmail, come on, it's just a plain web mail. Comparing it with Yahoo mail beta is a non-sense to me.
Your ego is Matrix!
The author of this article criticizes viewing Yahoo email in its default email-list-at-top-preview-pane-at-bottom layout, using a small browser window size that was not up to the task of displaying all the information that he wanted to display. He gripes about not being able to open multiple tabs with several email messages like he used to be able to do with Firefox under the old email system.
Less than a minute after reading the so-called article, I had restored his favorite email-reading workflow in my Yahoo Mail Beta window. I was viewing a larger list of emails (by turning off the preview pane), and double-clicking several messages opened up several tabs within the Yahoo Mail window environment. In fact, I'd say that this is an improvement over the old feature set, as it provides his email-reading workflow for non-tabbed IE browsers. I think the author of the article was more in love with complaining than he was with exploring the features of Yahoo Mail.
He also criticises the ads displayed on the page. While it's definately more than before, it's not the 20% of screen real estate that he claims when using a reasonable browser window size. And anyway, most people's eyes have been trained to naturally flow away from advertizing.
To sum it all up... if Slashdot was Digg, this story would be buried under "OK, This is Lame".
I think Yahoo mail is one of the best ajax applications out there. It has all the functionality of outlook express and feels like a real application. The only problem is that the yahoo brand name is now so boring, noone is going to think its cool.
Odd to see a SlashDot article written by someone who does not know what a Beta is. In every sense this article completely misses the point. Yahoo mail has been around for over 10 years. They created an upgrade to their interface which is currently in BETA. The service is not named BETA (Either is Gmail) the NEW INTERFACE is in beta. Had the person done any research at all they would have noticed that yahoo mail and gmail are different services. I suppose any standard for an article being mildly are officially in the crapper.
I tried it on firefox at high resolution (2028x1536). My system DPI is set correctly to 144dpi. Firefox is set to render fonts at no less than 20pt.
Firstly the text is all scrunched up in the menus so that some things can't be read and some things are hard to click on. Obviously some idiot designed the page to be viewed at one resolution.
But more importantly, there is an empty frame that pokes out of the top left corner and covers the menu and the button to switch back to regular Yahoo mail. You have to slide the menu frame to the right to make it go away. I can even see the frame in the code and it doesn't seem to do anything.
All this sloppiness and I couldn't find anywhere to submit bug reports. If this is what Yahoo mail is switching to in the future, I will have to find another webemail provider.
Is there some reason that pages should be broken at 1024x768, even if you run your web browser in a window and not fullscreen? Is it so hard? Gmail can do, why not yahoo mail? Oh yeah, because yahoo sucks.
check out http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/power toys/xppowertoys.mspx the taskswitch powertoy at this link.
It gives you a small graphic of the window inside the alt-tab interface, so you can see what your switching to, if for example, you have a handful of firefox windows open, or any other "several of the same" windows. It really changed the way I felt about alt-tab.
It's about Outlook. Yahoo is not trying to imitate GMail. They are trying make Yahoo Mail just like using Outlook or Thunderbird or Evolution or Eudora or whatever. That's why they have a preview pane. That's why you double-click to open the message in its own "window." This is how desktop clients do it. Yahoo simply used AJAX to produce the same kind of behavior. Probably the only webmail that would be similar would be Exchange/Outlook webmail (you know the product that introduced XmlHttpRequest before anybody had ever heard of AJAX...)
I've been using the Alpha/Beta/Gamma symbols behind the major.minor version since I've been programming (and thats now over 13 years). Like v0.1a was very early stage, 0.9b was almost a version. At a certain time I even went from A till R ; just because the updates were too minor but too important to be left out of my products at that time; since lots of programs were doors written for Remote Access and Proboard.
Yahoo is to my opinion using the beta tag with all respect ; just as you should respect the beta-tag which means all bugs and glitches will be ironed out in later versions.
Too bad they don't keep version files around so you can see the around-the-clock work of programming such new application towards their millions of subscribers. I don't use Yahoo mail; I don't know what even changed since their last interface; but Beta still means "Beta - in test - to be fixed - with trial and error".
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
1 click on the window which is underlying your mail window and pressing alt and 6 times tab ...
The 1 click is faster; do that many times and you will see the outcome of that one click is saving you hours on a year...
with alt-tab; which I sometimes use too; I sometimes miss my window ; which will pop-up another window; even with powertoys installed...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
The new Yahoo mail is based upon Oddpost, which was among the first "rich client" web applications developed. It's a rags to riches story, because the pair of guys who developed (Ethan Diamond now product director for Yahoo! Mail at Yahoo! and Iain Lamb) worked through the night at SF coffeeshops because they didn't have an office. Their early program was IE-centric and refused to run on any other browser, but this wasn't a severe limitation for many home users (although it caused me frustration at work). The software generated quite a bit of interest in the press, although at the time (early 2000s) they advertised it as offering only 50MB of storage (amusingly enough, there was nothing built into the program to check -- you could pack your mailbox insanely full).
The company stood out because their app looked like a "real" desktop app at a time when Hotmail was the ultimate web-based mail experience for most people. In the end, they leased a funky little office and managed to get funding to help the company grow. Their business model was simple (and probably not that effective) -- they sold low-cost annual subscriptions to individual users and offered a more expensive corporate package for companies that wanted to deploy the software on their own servers.
Many early users were saddened when their development seemed to go "dark" -- no more site updates, no more quirky news announcements. Many were certain that they were on the verge of closing down when a press release came out late on a Friday afternoon announcing that they'd been purchased by Yahoo! for a rumored $28m. It took a couple of years of hard work, but "Oddpost 2.0" has morphed into a much better email system than Yahoo! formerly had. It's definitely slanted at the casual user who's familiar with MS Outlook, but that's not such a bad thing. My biggest gripe is the non-standard shortcuts. Still, this is a fantastic rags to riches success story.
It still doesn't work with opera. I'll stick to the old, 90's looking yahoo mail for now.
Yahoo! has also relesased the User Interface Library (dubbed YUI Library) it has used to create at least some of the YMail interface under the BSD License. http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/
I've not spent much time playing with it, but it looks like an interesting collection of code.
"I almost forgot to ask about this. What exactly are you referring to here? Are you saying you had to click a link to be able to edit the subject of an email you're composing?"
When I click reply, I always check the subject line of the email and quite often edit it to make it more accurate. In Gmail, not only do I have to click edit to edit the subject, I have to click it to even see it without scrolling way up. For some dumb reason, it is not where it is most useful: near the Add BCC, etc options.
" I haven't ever once seen a gmail compose mail window without a plain editable text field for the subject. If you're talking about anything, you'll have to clarify."
Just now I went to Gmail, grabbed the first incoming mail I could find, and clicked on "Reply". I get an edit box, with options to add CC, BCC. etc. Right there is "edit subject". There is NO plain editable text box that comes up without having to click on this annoying little link. If yours works differently, let me know what setting you found to make it work.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I signed up for Yahoo mail beta along time ago, and then switched back. The interface was slow and clunky. I had no problems other than that, but I could not find out WHERE to submit any feedback.
So far, I have not seen any Web/Java apps that are worth anything. People keep making them, so, maybe it's ME???....
Spoken like a true PC user. Why do you Linux and Windows people all seem to have one-track minds? We Mac users don't maximize; we zoom.
I can't stand seeing any advertising in essential services. The article seems to miss that GMail puts advertising IN the message, just as Yahoo does (in addition to the banners).
But one critical difference is that you can opt to pay Yahoo to remove the advertising. It's $20 a year.. which is peanuts for a service like email, and critical (for me) to avoid dependence on my terrible ISP. It also gives Yahoo some responsibility for my email account - once they're charging for it, there is a level-of-service expectation (and the account won't be deleted in the event I stop using it).
It's also ironic that for the amount of $/time he spent writing this article repeatedly bitching about ads in Yahoo Mail, he could have just ponied up the $20 it takes to get rid of them.
I'm a perfectly content Yahoo Mail Plus user. GMail is okay, but the UI (+ advertising) is annoyingly immature in a work environment in comparison.
"Why do you want to change the subject within an existing thread?"
Why change the subject? To make it accurate! It is an old ingrained behavior from using email for years: to make sure the subject is accurate, and if the topic within the email during a "conversation" has changed, change the subject to reflect what is going on inside the email. Now, for some reason, this is a bad habit??? I'm glad I don't use Gmail for eBay. It would be hell to watch it turn the emails for a single tranaction into 4 or more Gmail groups just because I like to be considerate to others and put "payment sent" or "box mailed" or "have you paid yet?" etc in the email subjects. I just think it is nice to have accurate, succinct subjects so you can tell what is in an email (in many cases) without having to open it first.
" Instead of ranting on slashdot you could go here and suggest they give preference to the "In-Reply-To" header instead of the subject header"
Where is "here"? If I can trick it into think every single email is part of the same conversation "group", that would accomplish something close to that I want. I'd like to bypass the grouping thing entirely, then I can enjoy gmail's clean looking UI and superior spam blocking without as much drawback.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I want something simple. Gmail is the most simple (and yet having all the things that I want) webmail I have found, but there are those privacy concerns. I value Yahoo as a better overall service that Gmail (Hotmail is really ugly (Windows Live Mail is less ugly) and slow). I like the previous Yahoo web interface better (the "classic" one). What I would really want from Yahoo is an allow-list, and a bigger block list.
"How many times have you edited the subject of a reply you are sending??? I make a practice never to do it. th subject links the reply reliably to the original"
More than half the time! Why? Because I want the subject line to ACCURATELY REFLECT THE EMAIL CONTENT, and the content topic often changes within a "conversation". That's a pretty big weakness of Gmail's automatic system if it breaks by doing something as positive as making sure the subject reflects the content of the email. Yahoo and even Hotmail do not punish you for practicing this basic part of email ettiquette.
"Also, Quit trolling. you have posted basically the same thing ~4 to 5 times in just this story. enough is enough"
You must not be a mod then, or pay much attention. The negative moderation that applies is "redundant"
Where were you when the voynix came?
I like to store my stuff at http://www.verysimpledrive.com/
It gives 2GB space for free.
I access my yahoo mail on my mobile phone, and today it suddenly became absolutely useless. Now it redirects to a WAP version with significantly reduced functionality, where it previously had the usual interface that I am used to on my computer. I am currently running Opera on my Nokia 9300, which is pretty much as capable as version 8.5 that I have on my laptop (yes, I must upgrade that sometime).
Now, I can no longer access any attachments! Just because I am on a phone does not mean that I can't read documents, spreadsheets and PDFs. Also, when entering a message you only get an edit control that is 8 characters across by 4 lines down. This is complete rubbish! I have a screen width of 640 pixels, and I would rather use more than a tenth of it to see more than four words at once! I can no longer delete (or mark as spam) bulk messages. I have to open each one up to delete them. On a slow connection, this is pitiful.
I really don't mind having the option of a cut down interface because the old one did take a long time to download each page, but it should be optional if it means a reduction of features and forces us to learn a different interface to access my mail. The old version worked.
At the time I set up my yahoo email account, getting a google email account was like getting accepted into some exclusive snotty club.
Google may have changed, but now it's not worth changing accounts. Yahoo is adequate, there is not *that* big a difference.
One important difference is the ability to nest folders.
I can have a "project" folder, and can have a dozen subfolders inside of it.
OR, I can have a "work" folder that contains a project folder, and a "consulting" folder that contains a "Project" folder.
Since when? Gmail has low single-digit market share. Yahoo! and Hotmail have 30% or better share each.
Yeah, talk about a moron. Seems people like him should realise that everyone uses their computer exactly the same. I mean honestly, what in the world is this imbecile thinking. Actually trying to think outside the box, dear God.
Thankfully in the near future programs will be 0% configurable and this will reduce the need to run a window at your desired size, everything will be fullscreen and have it's on virtual desktop. Because who knows what's better for you, you or someone else?
I've used it, but I didn't find it much better. I rarely have multiple windows of the same time open except for explorer windows (which all look pretty similar anyway) - I use tabs where I can instead.
I often like to compare Gmail to a web-based mouse-enabled version of Pine (especially if you turn on the keyboard shortcuts!). Yahoo! Mail is obviously an attempt to emulate Netscape Mail, Outlook Express, etc.
:P Yahoo! Mail is very slow (esp. on my 800 MHz Celeron laptop). Ultimately, I think that the fundamental problem with Yahoo! mail is that it uses AJAX to replicate a desktop paradigm on the web. Google, on the other hand, recognizes that the web is a fundamentally different medium and thus uses AJAX to create a web app with an interface paradigm that is appropriate for the web. The web is not the desktop, and I think that it needs a different approach that does not involve blindly porting over a desktop interface. But that's just my personal opinion...
It's two different paradigms and they're really not strictly comparable. For people who are more tech-savvy who are used to dealing with Pine on a Unix terminal or for those who are highly utilitarian, Gmail is great. For those who have been brought up on years of Outlook Express and are used to drag and drop, Yahoo! is great. More than anything, what someone thinks about the new Yahoo! mail really depends on that person's preferences and set of experiences.
On that note, here is my personal opinion: I love Pine and I love Gmail.
I have an ancient Yahoo (originally Geocities) email box that I check every few days. I like the new interface. It's nice to be able to highlight multiple messages with the shift-down arrow and have tabs for each message window, and other things that make it much more like a full email client than anything I've seen elsewhere.
I wouldn't personally switch, mostly since I don't use "free" email anymore. But I have recommended other people to at least try it before opening yet another gmail account.
Where's the beef with this commentary on Y! Mail?
Flame on!
There was a time when my machine could only do one thing at once. Then a feature called "windows" was introduced by various companies and now I could do multiple things at once.
Gmail is firmly stuck in the 1980s.
With Yahoo I can actually compose multiple emails while referencing multiple emails. I do this on my desktop, why shouldn't I be able to do it on the net? I'm glad Oddpost and Yahoo brought web email out of the dark ages and I'm sad that gmail is still firmly stuck in the past.
I'm running Opera 10 on Ubuntu Dapper Drake on my Dell Laptop. I tried the beta, but it would not load completely, as it appears it uses an ActiveX control. I switched back after a couple of tries. Am I missing something? I haven't seen any other comments indicating a problem in Linux
We're through being cool! Eliminate the ninnies and the twits! -Devo
This beta is new? I've been using the German-language Yahoo Mail (mail.yahoo.de) and it's had the "beta" for the better part of a year. I like it myself and to me, it doesn't take long to load at all. I'm using a PowerMac G5 that's about 2 years old... just fine :)
I can't even see what the new Yahoo Mail looks like. I can't seem to open it in any browser, either in Linux or Windows. And I have problems with the old Yahoo Mail in Firefox, too. I was seriously considering dumping my Yahoo account, now they put me a little bit closer to that.
I think that the pro's and cons of the beta both are related in how it tries to emulate Outlook.
It's nice that it has a familiar interface compared to desktop apps. However, it also lost a nice feature which allowed me to select messages that I know are spam and report them. Now, I actually have to select the message (downloading the images that might contain trojans, etc) before I can report them.
i succeeded in blocking the ugly addframe at the right side of the screen by adding:
*yahoo*mail*candygram*
To my adblock.
Anyone else have some adblocking tips?