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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.
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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?
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
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.
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!
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 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?
"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?
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'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.
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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.
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..
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.
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 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.