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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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> "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
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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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.
Is the story interesting?
Yes.
Does the blog provide good information and sufficient media (i.e. pictures)?
Yes.
Should Slashdot wait/hope for another source like an official news paper to bring up this story instead of delivering the news as fast as possible?
Possibly, but not in this case.
Full Tilt
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!
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.
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.
Ok yahoo seem to think mac os, and windows xp are the only platforms that exist for there 'webmail beta', any /. doter who thinks that covers all web browsers is deluded
For the record I stated this in /. ages ago.
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?
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.
I've read your other comments (which are bascially minor variations on a theme) and have come to the conclusion that you really don't know how to use Gmail.
I have yet to experience this scambling of incoming messages and "blackhole" you keep referencing. I have two accounts. One for personal mail and the other for all the security mailing lists I subscribe to.
The organizational level is light years beyond Yahoo. I have rulesets set up to automatically label messages and get them out of the inbox (I *hate* cluttered inboxes). But the threaded nature of how it presents email is where it really shines. For example in my mailing lists I don't have to deal with a seperate message for the original topic and seperate messages for every RE: scattered willy-nilly all over the list (based on time received). Gmail groups them all into one nice little threaded message. It automatically collapses the previously read messages, but I can easily expand if I need to reference an earlier one.
If you don't like it, that's your perogative. But you keep claiming that everyone should stay away because you, personally, have had a bad experience (which I suspect is related to not learning the interface). Seriously, one or maybe two comments to that effect is fine. But you keep cluttering up threads here to counter anyone who may have had a decent experience with Gmail. Your opinion is not that important.
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
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.
This illisurates why you do not like GMail. You sound like an old man clamoring on and on about how "cars were more reliable in his day", totally ignoring the statistical facts.
The whole point of GMail is the exact reason you say you hate it. You shouldn't have to organize your email, it's 2006. Let the computer (aka GMail) do it for you. If you added up all the time wasted in Outlook/Yahoo selecting email and moving it into folders, then later having to hunt through the folder for that email later, I think you'd be surprised at how much time Gmails archive+search saves you over a year.
All other things being equal, I would wager a good sum of money GMail would return a list of search results faster than Yahoo or Outlook would even fully load a decent size folder over the network!
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.
I'd consider Gmail if not for an important feature it lacks that Yahoo has: organization of the inbox.
Gmail has great organizational features for the inbox. Instead of moving things to different "boxes", it uses a much more sensible approach, IMHO. You can label a conversation (manually or through an automatic filter you've set up). You can then view all messages with a particular label by clicking the name of that label on the left hand side of your screen.
The search feature is there, but I've never used it. Labels provide the same function as folders, and they are simpler and easier than folders in my opinion.
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.
Yeah, can live without a drag-n-drop way to move messages to folders.
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 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.
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...)
You seem to be having some confusion here between "opinion" and "fact". You say "design flaws" when you really mean things that you personally do not like; this is not a flaw, it is a personal preference. You say you "prefer the superior standard" - well, everyone prefers the superior thing, because it's superior. In this case, you call it superior because you prefer it, not the other way around. That's opinion, not fact.
I've noticed the problem you're describing, however, it only ever happens when the subject of the emails is blank (or a reply to no subject, e.g., "Re: ") and thus Gmail has no basis to use to determine what is a reply to what.
This is my favorite part, right here: this little blast of stunning logic is so good I'm thinking about putting it in my sig. What a succinct way of saying "even though this is just my personal opinion, it's more important that any opinion any of you sorry sods can come up with, because my opinion is the right one!" That's the kind of logic I can really appreciate. My favorite part here, and this is classic, is where you validate your opinion that your opinion matters the most by backing it up with your opinion that "most users" agree with you. Unless you've performed a study of email users to determine if that's the case, you just made that up. No one has an opinion any more important than anyone else's, especially here on /. - that's the whole point. And if you really want to rate one opinion against another, given that all opinions are equally valid (nomatter how idiotic), they can only be rated on the basis of how well they are argued - and by that yardstick, my dear friend, your opinion is not very important at all.
[Z?]
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..
How can you have 'single email "conversation' (a conversation with only one email in it), and how is it being broken up?
I think I understand what you're complaining about, but you really suck at explaining it. I think you're complaining that for a given thread of email (for example, 16 emails sent/received with the subject "I'm having a party on saturday"), gmail groups them all together into one link when viewing your inbox. This link represents the entire conversation. You click this link and are presented with the whole thread on one page, with the ability to expand/collapse each individual email within the thread to either show the whole email or just a summary line (who sent it, the first line of the email (you can turn this off), and when they sent it). What you would prefer to see is the whole list of every single individual email in your inbox.
The way you describe it, it sounds like you're saying gmail is taking those 16 emails, and breaking them up in multiple conversations. So instead of a single link for the whole thread (or your preferred 16 links for all the individual emails in the thread) you are seeing 3 links (one to a grouping of 3 emails in the thread, one to a grouping of 8 emails in the thred, and one to a grouping of 5 emails in the thread). Judging from the other responses to your post, I'm not the only one who thought this is what you're saying.
Please do respond to clarify if my assumptions about what you're really trying to convey are correct.
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? 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.
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..
Now I have these inscrutable "me, Rob" groups for them.
Do you mean to say your inbox doesn't display the subject of the conversation thread next to the list of people who sent an email in the conversation thread?
One single conversation has been broken up by Gmail's inbox-scrambler into 5 or 6 of their "conversation" groupings.
Guess that answers question from my previous post. Can you post a screenshot of this? I've never seen this happen. The only thing I can think of is that you and your friends indiscriminately send emails without subjects, or random change the topic mid-thread.
I actually agree with that, but did you have to post it a dozen times all over the discussion?
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.
There's a little magnifying glass underneath the "check mail" button on the article's screen shot. That's the search function. The results open up in a convienient new tab. Doesn't take a genius.
Doesn't do that for me.
Actually its a view of todays events - it's actual useful functionality. Calling it an "endorsement" makes it sound like an ad. Also the Yahoo web search (which takes up a tiny space) is also labelled an advertisement by the article - not really is it?
You can scroll using the scrollbar next to the list. You can remove the message preview by clicking "hide message preview" so you'll list more messages on a small screen. There are options to open messages in new tabs and windows. This section is just all lies.
Ahh, you've found the search box you previously claimed didn't exist...
You can easily add addresses of people who email you from the read email view. You can add addresses when you send emails to new people (you're given tick boxes to add the addresses after you send the message) and the address book is integrated into the composition system. What more do you want?
Ok i'm done
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???....
When you're composing a new email, that field is there; but if you're replying to an existing email you have to click a link to make it appear. I agree with the guy you're replying to: this just seems like pointlessly obstructive design. I also share some of his reservations about conversation threading. I too have problems with Gmail splitting conversations into lots of little pairs of 'Seamus, me' exchanges - I think it's caused by having a blank subject line, but if someone sends me an email with a blank subject I don't want to be forced by my software to make one up for my reply.
Gmail's threading also causes me trouble when I send an email to a group of people, because the first reply shows up as coming from the right person, but then it starts appending other respondents to the end of the list - so if more than one person has replied since I last checked my mail, I often can't see (from the inbox view) who they all are. Sometimes this has even caused me to miss emails: if two people reply to something I've sent out, Gmail says Inbox (1) (because there's only one thread with new messages) and I can only see one new name in the 'From:' column. So I click on the thread and read 'my new message', and often don't realise there's another one off the bottom of the screen (as the right-hand scroll-bar is my only clue). I click back to the inbox, Gmail marks the whole thread as read, and I go about my business in blissful ignorance.
Beside that, however, I should say that Gmail is definitely the best email service I've ever used, free or otherwise: I use it in preference to my ISP's own mail service, and having all my mail accessible from anywhere - even if I sent it via Thunderbird at home - is unbelievably useful. I just really wish they'd give you the option of a non-threaded inbox view.
I've finally figured out that you're talking about editing the subject when replying. This explains a great deal about your problems with thread grouping. Why do you want to change the subject within an existing thread? I don't notice it as either a good or bad design choice because if I want a new subject, I just compose a new email rather than replying. It's no wonder you can't figure out gmail. Gmail groups conversation threads by subject. If you randomly changes the subject header mid-thread, you've basically just created a new thread. 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. Problem is, I've seen other email clients use different headers to indicate what 'thread' a particular email belongs to.
Somebody please mod this guy for the troll he is.
I hit submit to fast. The feature suggestion link is https://services.google.com/inquiry/gmail_suggest/
You might get a kick out of the fact that "Switch Conversation View on or off" is a pre-configured choice of features to suggest from.
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.
Also, Quit trolling. you have posted basically the same thing ~4 to 5 times in just this story. enough is enough.
mail says Inbox (1) (because there's only one thread with new messages) and I can only see one new name in the 'From:' column. So I click on the thread and read 'my new message', and often don't realise there's another one off the bottom of the screen (as the right-hand scroll-bar is my only clue).
The Inbox label on the left shows (1) new conversation, but the display of conversations in Inbox should show (2) next to the conversation if there are 2 new emails present (it does for me).
"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.
Doesn't that just indicate the total number of emails in the conversation (including ones you've sent yourself)? It doesn't seem to give you any clues as to how many of them are unread. I might just be stupid, but it looks like that to me.
Also, I forgot to mention in my earlier post: another niggle I have with threading arises if I send an email to (say) three people who each respond to me privately. I end up having three quite separate conversations, but Gmail combines them all into a single thread. It's not a disaster, but it doesn't exactly make for easy reference.
I'm not sure what you mean by "useless pile".
Gmail automatically groups all your e-mails by thread, without you having to do anything, and without taking up the space involved with the organizational tree approach. In addition, Gmail allows you to filter your e-mail and label it, which has the benefit of letting you organize e-mail in more than one way (as opposed to folders, where you either have to pick where you put the e-mail, or copy it into multiple folders).
One of the benefits of Web mail is that it's *not* a stand-alone app. Why would you want to use a Web app that looks and acts like Outlook (but, arguably, without Outlook's good points)? I use Gmail precisely because it's *not* a carbon copy of other non-Web e-mail clients, and actually brings some ideas to the table. Recreating Outlook in a Web app seems pointless.
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?