Slashdot Mirror
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."
Once my users understand how it's meant to be used, it's a universal winner.
What seals the deal is being implemented with SSL POP access... so the dinosaurs who refuse to budge don't have to.
Better mousetrap
Relax... You're soaking in it." -Madge
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.
I have no idea what you're referring to. For me, a single conversation thread (both sent and received) is displayed all in one page, and I can apply multiple labels to the thread to have the whole thread appear in all relevant categorizations I want without having multiple copies of any of the emails within that thread. Can you clarify what you are seeing?
The only differences between labels and folders are that you can label something as work+project A+Reference and not be stuck choosing between your work->project A folder or your Reference folder, and it is a bit more difficult to select work+Project A than it is to click on work->Project A.
For me, it is better; I figured that out when I noticed myself looking for the archive button in other email systems.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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...)
That's very optimistic of you. Far more accurate, I suspect, is "Gmail is largely based on the idea that if a user keeps almost every message they ever get, then Google Inc., has a far far larger base of data in which they can mine." That this is a "better use for your time than managing your email", that's all well and good, but it isn't much more than a side effect.