After surfing across Lifehacker’s post about how to easily get a Yahoo! Mail Beta account, I decided to take it for a spin. Following those directions was easy enough and I found myself with a new Y! Mail Beta account within 5 minutes. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I had seen screenshots of the fancy interface, which was purported to mimic a desktop email client, floating around the internet months before. Hopefully Yahoo has their eyes set on the future with mail beta and plan on setting themselves apart from Google and their popular Gmail.
The first time around YMB, as I will be calling it from now on, takes a few seconds longer to load as it caches the required files to power the AJAX backend used. Now onto the good stuff…
First Impressions
Despite the large ad on the right and the smaller text ads on the bottom left burning my retina, the interface is rather attractive. On the left there is a pane with all of the folders your traditional email client has, with the added benefit of a search box to scour through your emails. If you take a closer look, you’ll spot that YMB has tabs, allowing users to compose an email in one tab while reading another email in the inbox as an example.
After about 15 minutes of playing with YMB, it became apparent that the speed was not too hot. Things take a while to load and if you load YMB for the first time, even if the stuff it needs has been cached, it takes longer than say Gmail does. But this is why it’s still in beta, so I can’t argue about that. Speaking of beta, when I loaded it on my mac I was greeted with a banner stating Caution: rough seas ahead. Your operating system is not officially supported.
These few cons aside, YMB has some new features I’ve fallen in love with. Contacts are incredibly easy to manage and adding them is even easier. Unlike Gmail which happens to add just about anyone to your contacts even if you’ve only emailed them once, YMB puts the keys in your hand and lets you decide what to do. After sending an email, you are promptly shown a page asking if you would like to add that person’s email and provide a name. The contacts tab provides a fast way to scroll through many contacts, even affording the ability to setup distribution lists, Yahoo’s term for mailing list. This is essentially the same thing as Gmail’s underused groups feature.
Interesting Features
The big feature that sets YMB apart from Gmail and other current generation webmail clients is drag and drop. Just like Outlook, Thunderbird or Mail, you can drag emails to different folders. It bears a close resemblance to Roundcube’s next-gen interface. You are also allowed to drag multiple email messages at a time. There is a hover notification to let you know where you can and where you can’t drop items.
RSS Reader
YMB expands upon Gmail’s web clips concept by adding a simple RSS reader. I say simple because the user has very little control over how feeds are displayed. I was hoping I would be able to configure it so that only headlines were displayed, not full posts, but I wasn’t able to do so. You do, however, have the ability to alter text size and font with the option of saving to Yahoo! My Web or posting to a Yahoo! 360 blog. This is a major improvement over web clips, but I can’t foresee it replacing my FeedLounge account anytime soon.
Verdict
Yahoo! Mail Beta is a great work in progress when compared to the current, bland version of Yahoo! mail. However, there are several things that will prevent YMB from replacing your preferred email client or even your Gmail account. As I mentioned before, there are ads and plenty of them. Big ones, small ones, tall ones – they’re all there. Logging in to the YMB homepage shows you a random advertisement for various Yahoo services. Yahoo can learn a thing or two about design from Google, whose Gmail advertisements are at least tasteful and unobtrusive. Even if you throw down an Andrew Jackson (that’s a $20 bill for those of us in the states) every year to upgrade to the plus account, you only get rid of graphical ads leaving the text ads to annoy you. The free account can’t even compete with Gmail in terms of storage… actually, the plus account is still some 700MB (at the time of this writing) less than Gmail’s allotted storage.
As with all of Yahoo’s ventures, they have found a way to clutter up the interface. There are superflous links to other Yahoo services in addition to a Yahoo search box. That makes two search boxes on one page – one too many. If absolutely necessary, why not have just one search box with a drop-down option to set the search scope? For the extent that I have tested the email search, it works pretty well. Your email search history is saved and can be easily cleared at any time. Each folder or action has an associated icon, which does wonders for usability and helps super users quickly locate things visually and click away.
I await a more worked-out version of YMB in the near future. The whole interface is far too slow to become my Gmail or Apple Mail replacement. To the best of my experience with YMB, it is not yet possible to setup the equivalent of a filter in Gmail. I have at least 20 filters in Gmail that help me sort out things everyday. Currently in YMB, you cannot have one email listed in two folders as you can sort emails with Gmail labels. Using YMB in its current state would become a nightmare when email starts flooding in. I encourage you to get your own YMB account by following these quick directions and letting me know what you think.
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I received access to YMB before the little loophole was discovered and spent about 5 minutes toying with the interface before deciding that in general, the service had not changed much from the current YM brew. Immediately after logging in, I found the 2-3 second delay as the service loaded quite annoying. The interface seemed all to cramped for my own tastes… and the minute curiosity got the best of me to disable adblock, all hell broke loose and the interface transformed into an ad riddled battle field.
I’ll stick with Gmail + GM Gmail Macros userscript. I’ll take keyboard shortcuts over drag n’ drop any day. (YMB does offer basic keyboard shortcuts).
You know, having RSS subscriptions in your webmail client would be extremely useful. I like how yahoo did this with this beta webmail client.
hey did that beta come out for the yahoo.com also…I thought that for the moment it was just for the sub ones like yahoo.co.uk and yahoo.fr….I’ve also checked it weeks back but you see the word ‘beta’ really had its importance here because some bits just do crash away : i could’nt even get the 9Rules Rss feed into its RSS incorporated reader….
but yeah the interface is too rocky…..and what I find specially great is that it goes collect info about contacts too greata well…..I even thought I would switch to yahoo for my primary mail because that would not even require offline reader like thunderbird…you would be too hasty to see this playground but because of the ‘beta’ i would maintain gmail as my primary one…
hey I also thought writing an article on this…because as I told you it was months back that I had already tasted this…..I was relooking a bit the post as it was still in my drafts and what do I see today Stammy has already got it…..hey it’s unfair ;-( (just kidding…)
I actually just logged on to Yahoo! Mail and it asked me right away if I wanted to partake in the YMB. Odd?
You know, after playing with YMB for a few minutes, it’s clearly evident that they need to upgrade their Calendar application to be in sync with this new mail system.
I much prefer the beta interface to the one they have had for years. It looks and preforms leaps and bounds better that Microsoft’s efforts IMO. Glad your done with cfinals, mine are next week. :/
I wanted to try using this as my primary account but was unable to get it to configure to send mails from an address I was POPing into it. It kept returning errors when I tried to confirm the address, and I got basically zero help from Yahoo on it. The process worked flawlessly with Gmail, so that’s where I stayed. Now that we have Gcal, the whole reason I tried Yahoo (having an online calendar) is moot. I was also never very good at sorting my mail into folders and have found that I much prefer Gmail’s discussion format. I download all my mail to my computer with Apple’s Mail.app to keep a backup, but I basically do all my reading and mailing online with Gmail.
I’ve been using the beta yahoo mail for about 5 months now – since I pay 14 bucks a year for the “premium” no ads stuff.
The interface looks much better with no ads – and I have completely fallen in love with it.
I stopped using gmail – it is just too ugly for me – and since I use thunderbird for work email – the new yahoo interface helps me to keep the same sort of “email” system between work and personal email.
Honestly, I don’t care what yahoo does, any email with @yahoo.com isn’t a good idea, it just always reminds me of 14 year olds and crappy yahoo chat rooms that were getting “booted” by “hax0rs” every other second, plus it’s first on my list of “unprofessional” sounding email addresses right in front of hotmail.
Now if they named their email service something else and got away from the yahoo name, I would be more than willing to use it.
Who knows, knowing me I’ll be using it in 3-4 months just like I ended up having all my email accounts forwarded to my gmail account…
:/
Miguel, just like Gmail offers hosted email, so does Yahoo… for a price. That means you can receive your website email via the Yahoo webmail interface.
Sorry if I was harsh on yahoo, I apreciate the review Paul, just not the “yahoo **insert service name here**” platform, google does it too, but at least they made it a different URL for their email services. I do like what I can see of the yahoo interface compared to gmail though.
I feel that the loading time is extremely too long, my GMail account loads very fast. Yahoo! Mail I see the ‘loading’ screen for at least 5 seconds before the page is actually loaded.
That may be a problem they need to work out.
ive never really liked the whole, “web mail” feel, i use gmail but download all my mail to thunderbird
I havent tried YMB yet, but I am ready go give up Gmail for my Hotmail Live account. The new HM Live Beta is really slick, I suggest everyone who can get in should try it.
thanks for the link BTW, I’ve tried it out and it is a sure fact that it’s a world away from the basic yahoo mail. I forwarded the Lifehacker article to a couple of buddies but they claim that after following the instructions they still couldn’t get invited. perhaps yahoo did something to stop everyone switching to Yahoo Mail Beta since they mist have either noticed the sudden flood of invites going to their users or a member of their staff must have noticed the article on lifehacker or here.
I still love Gmail though, but it won’t hurt to give Gmail’s interface a facelift.
it’s realy good thing.
very user frindly
SLOW. I switched back to the old Y! mail after a few days. GMail revolutionized the webmail interface … now others try to cache in on AJAX … it’s just sad that both Y! and Live are found lacking in innovation. And I agree, those ADs just take us back to the 90s.
how to change to yahoo! mail beta
can i get this new yahoo mail beta
glad to see an improvement, but one items needs to sorted out. I should be able to select to sort the contact names by Names or first name. Could not find a solution to this challenge. Any thoughts on this?
Another point is when emptying the Trash or Spam, you should be able to select the settings, rather than every time requiring to confirm the operations.
Best regards
notify me if there is a update
it is very good
como faço pr obter o yahoo mail beta
thank you !
thank you
notify me if there is a update
thanks for the link BTW, I’ve tried it out and it is a sure fact that it’s a world away from the basic yahoo mail. I forwarded the Lifehacker article to a couple of buddies but they claim that after following the instructions they still couldn’t get invited. perhaps yahoo did something to stop everyone switching to Yahoo Mail Beta since they mist have either noticed the sudden flood of invites going to their users or a member of their staff must have noticed the article on lifehacker or here.
I still love Gmail though, but it won’t hurt to give Gmail’s interface a facelift.
The main problem with Yahoo Mail Beta is that the unwanted new and Yahoo ad section takes up 70% of the screen space. I could not find a way to remove this junk and had to go back to the old Yahoo mail.
Does anyone know a way to get rid of the Yahoo ad and News section in Yahoo Mail beta?
I am using Yahoo Mail because Time Warner’s takeover of Comcast in So. California took away my Outlook Express capability. I would prefer OE or Thunderbird to Yahoo for ease of access and unlimited space. I need to know how to transfer my e-mails and addresses from Yahoo to Thunderbird. I also need to know what e-mail address to use for my Thunderbird account. I can’t seem to ask Mozilla because no matter what I do, I can’t get into their chat forum. Does anyone have a phone number or e-mail to these people? Everything was great until TW came along. Who asked them anyway?
i have two accounts and one has beta but how do you get it for the other one cause it is the best
I want to set Mail Beta on my yahoo email
If Yahoo cannot make Beta perform at least as fast as the old version then I doubt it will succeed, except for those who enjoy a 500% increase in lag time. The slowness of their beta is a killer! (and the writing space is also small and feels cramped). After a couple days I returned to the old version, plunked down 20 dollars to get rid of their very irritating flash ads and breathed a great sigh of relief as click-thru speeds resumed to what I was used to.