Yahoo Beta Mail For All
Yahoo Thursday opened up its beta mail to just about everybody. The ad-supported beta mail brings desktop clients to the web, with calendar, mapping, drag and drop, tabbed navigation, et cetera. This comes out of Yahoo’s 2004 acquisition of early AJAX innovator Oddpost. We had heard gripes about the beta mail (available to a limited group since last summer) running slowly; hopefully everything’s optimized by now.
Yahoo already has the biggest email service out there; its existing free email edges out Microsoft’s Hotmail, with 255 million users worldwide, according to comScore. It doesn’t seem that Yahoo is actively promoting the open beta yet, as we had trouble finding any mention of it through a newly opened Yahoo Mail account…but direct access is available here.
Yahoo has been busy tying up the loose strings from its acquisitions of the last two years, making connections between Flickr, Maps, and Upcoming, and bringing the innovations of Flickr into its new Photos. Is it time to go shopping again?
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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You may like it, but I don’t like how it opens up new windows for each message. It gets confusing easily. Why not provide a preview pane? They’re going for more page views and not thinking about how the end user would want it set up.
One more thing (a big thing!): You can’t select multiple messages by a check box. Only via holding control button. That’s VERY web-tech geeky. They need to move back to checkboxes.
after using their beta for a while i decided to move to gmail.
the new interface is still buggy.
is very slow on firefox.
and they take way too much real-estate for the ad space.
i have been using yahoo! mail for years, and now they just made me abandon it.
Interesting to hear that Yahoo Mail Beta feedback has been that it is slow. IMHO, it is painfully slow and at times I have to revert to the old mail interface to get things done. E-mails take a long time to open. I love the desktop feel and the features are a huge leap forward but until the performance gets better, I cannot recommend it.
I have been using the Yahoo! mail beta for about six months. It is slow to initially load, but other than that it is great. I am not sure what the other users are talking about, I have found that I actually use it in place of Outlook.
For me it runs great in Firefox, I use a nifty little Firefox add-in that automatically checks and notifies me of new mail. Clicking on that automatically logs me in and drops me in my inbox.
The new calendar “ticker” at the bottom is great too. Despite what one user says, there is a preview pane.
There is always room for improvement, so Yahoo!, if you read this my recommendations for improvements would be:
Some AJAX type calendar (in addition to the calendar ticker) with:
Also have a calendar feature that allows the user to “jump to” or display of mail from day (in day mode or week mode)
Full blown Blackberry intergration
Advanced mail search, by date range, by author
Mail tags, with drag and drop support to/from the left navigation bar. Folders are so old-school
It’s a disaster compared to gmail. Everything basically is.
Well … to me it seems that Yahoo must have partnered with rediffmail.com because rediffmail.com changed the presentation of their email at least 3-4 months back and Yahoo mail looks exactly same. I wonder whats going on?
plz send the path to join in yahoo beta mail for me…
and also the web site for yahoo beta mail
I hate the yahoo beta mail! It is all advertisements. You cant read your mail because of the advertisements. Yes it has some fantastic new features, but I am not willing to have it on my computer until they either fix it or get a few less ads in the way of reading my mail.
After reading these posts, I’ll hold off on signing up for beta yahoo until the reviews improve. Yahoo’s log in page is strongly pro beta and its hard to find the tiny line that says “remind me later” to sign up for it.