The powerful new Yahoo! Mail beta will open up for general use starting today. Richard MacManus has a great post and podcast interview about the product that will roll out to all users in 18 countries over the next two weeks. There’s a lot of cool new features, but GMail still stands apart in some important ways. Update: You can now try out the beta at new.mail.yahoo.com.
Mike Arrington posted an early review of the beta when RSS was first rolled into the email client in November. He called the new Yahoo! Mail “an incredibly awesome product.”
In addition to adding RSS subscription functionality inside your email inbox, which as MacManus points out will probably make Yahoo! Mail the most widely used RSS reader on the planet, there are many more new features to watch for.
The big picture is that Yahoo! is aiming to use ajax to make it’s mail client function like a desktop client. Email messages can be dragged from one folder to another, multiple emails can be open at one time in tabs inside Yahoo! Mail and there’s calendar integration tied to Yahoo! Maps. Blog posting, possibly to a Yahoo! domain that will run more of the company’s ads, and IM both appear to be available through the webmail client as well. These sound like powerful new features.
What’s Gmail got to offer that could top that? A number of things, actually. Yahoo! Mail doesn’t offer the tabbed conversations Gmail does, doesn’t appear to allow emails to be tagged and will still have to prove itself in spam protection and mail search. I don’t know whether Yahoo! Mail allows attachments like PDF and Excel files to be viewed as HTML, but that’s a very nice GMail feature as well. There’s no word yet whether Yahoo! will increase the storage of free accounts from 1GB to something closer to GMail’s 2.5+GB or increase the 10mb limit on attachments.
In other words, I think there’s still plenty of reasons to stay with GMail for now, but those for whom Yahoo! Mail is well suited are likely to be quite happy with it. Several of the new features, like RSS, drag and drop organization and calendar/maps could become a new standard in future offerings from other companies. It’s a good product that will change how hundreds of millions of people experience webmail and RSS.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Gmail’s POP3 access. It’s the only Web-based email client I know of that offers it for free; Yahoo! and Microsoft want you to pay extra for it.
Does the Yahoo mail extract addresses like Gmail does? I love when I get an Email with a clients address and Gmail offers to give me directions
If you a ratio chart of GOOG:YHOO you will see that there is a long term consistent uptrend in stock price for Google. This shows their superiority and preference over Yahoo.
Here’s the link to that chart:
http://gotfrank.com/stockpicks/?p=564
I`ll be sticking with gMail even though it’s slow sometimes or doesn’t load. Yahoo’s been around FOREVER it seems you would have thought they could have done something better… oh well still playing catchup I guess.
-Todd
I find Yahoo to be very slow. When you utilize gmail’s keyboard shortcuts, there is no comparison. Gmail is much faster.
Yeah, I’ll be sticking with GMail as well. Nothing comes close, especially considering the amount of space they give you.
Another thing I like about Gmail is that I get way less spam, at least right now, than I do on my Yahoo account. I pretty much only get spam in my Yahoo! account and keep it only because I use my.yahoo.com.
In my opinion any web mail that does not offer IMAP is worthless. My money go to fastmail.fm, thank you very much.
I have to agree with Artem that fastmail is a really good client. I use both fastmail and Gmail.
I agree with you nothing beats Gmail. I have a yahoo account and tried the Beta version with great expectations. They have used Ajax but it is so slow. RSS Feeds is good but the whole viewing window is so small you want to give up. So I switched back to the earlier version
Artem suggested fastmail, I used it but not enough space as Gmail and their spam filter is caught napping.
I think the guys at Yahoo and Microsoft (Windows Live)will have to go through multiple iterations to get even close to Gmail.
What good is the new Yahoo Mail beta when it can’t filter the most obvious spam? I keep getting 419 scams, lottery notifications and green card offers. I have a hunch why this might be so..
Let me add my name to the long list of “Gmail not Yahoo! Mail” advocates.
I was going to write out a list of objective whys (e.g., POP3 access, more storage, etc…) and subjective whys (e.g. better interface, better spam filtering, etc…) but why bother? Clearly, virtually everyone else is of the same opinion.
My mom will probably keep her 10-year old Yahoo email account to email 50k GIF files of cats wearing boxing gloves to her friends in the bridge club, for everyone else who knows that AJAX is not a close competitor to Mr. Clean, this battle, and in fact war, is over.
Yahoo sucks. (Wow, that even caught ME by surprise.) Captchas to send one-line emails. Busy/crowded homepage (since the re-design). Getting into bed with big entertainment (thanks, Mr. Hollywood, Terry Semel.) 2nd-tier search engine.
I’m not going to waste my time listing more things wrong with Yahoo. The company has lost its direction, the fire in its belly, and its reason for living. Expect it to die a slow death.
Over & out.
P.S. Not a GOOG fanboy but I call ‘em the way I see ‘em.
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How do I get the new Yahoo mail (beta)?
I logged into my yahoo account, which I have had for many years and it’s still the same old version.
Is there a page where I can elect to start using the new beta?
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I recently signed up for Gmail’s Hosted mail service. It’s amazing. I’ve been using gmail for almost two years now so I have my old Gmail address pointing to my new hosted service, Gmail is by far the fastest and most intuitive email client I’ve ever used.
What Yahoo and Microsoft keep missing is that what makes Gmail so great is its simplicity.
And like someone else already said, everything that Yahoo and Hotmail try to charge you for, Gmail has a generally better version of it for free.
I’ll be sticking with gmail for quite a while.
If the rss reader part opened the site in a frame, much like Thunderbird does, I would be right there using it as an rss reader.
while gmail does have some good features, lots of storage etc it is very dificult to navigate unlike yahoo, sometimes in your quest to make something better you can over simplify it and i think thats what google has done with gmail, while it might be easy for most techies, it goes over the head of the average user. Which brings me to the conclusion that the shortest distance between two points is still a straight line.
I took a look at the new Yahoo! Mail a few months back and concluded I still prefer Gmail. Let me know what you think. I’ll revisit my review and see if Yahoo! has updated anything since the Beta I previewed a while back.
I’ve had access to Yahoo Mail Beta for awhile, but everytime I tried to use it, I get the following error message: ‘Can’t open mailbox’.
I say screw it. I’ll just wait for the official releases.
I don’t see why everyone is being so hard on Yahoo. They are trying to be a portal as much as a search engine. Their new maps is superior to google maps and their email client will be much appreciated by many people. I’ve been waiting to see this client since they bought OddPost for the technology a couple years back (maybe a 1.5 years now!).
And the worst thing to read in these posts is the subtle assertion that Google is warm and fuzzy and Yahoo is all corporate. Google has really won you over huh? They can do no wrong. It’s not like the endorse censorship in China or anything. They are still a corporation and they’d sell you out in a heartbeat. As for email clients, I too use FastMail for a good reason…IMAP.
I have been on Yahoo since ‘97 - love the portal but have pretty much stopped using the email. As a ATT/DSL subscriber, I get Yahoo premium services also - whoopee. I had the chance to beta this a few months ago and found it to be much slower in all respects to, say, GMail. I POP everything anyway, but still use Yahoo through the web some. I really like the older version better. No dig…uh, sorry, wrong site….
I agree with C.G., the new Yahoo Mail is way slow. I had used it during the beta period and switched back. Right now I’m just using Gmail. So easy just to keep using it along with the other tools, such as analytics and spreadsheets.
Having used Gmail, Yahoo Mail (beta and old), and Hotmail (Live and old), I can with full honesty say that Gmail is consistently the worst free mail account out there.
Problems:
- Weekly crashes
- Lost email
- Lost accounts
- Lost contacts
- POP access only work 25-33% of the time
Who gives a flying rat’s ass if you get 2.5 GB? Most people won’t use that much unless they’re using a work account, and in that case, they’re going to be receiving stuff that isn’t safe to store on an external server. And it doesn’t matter how much space you get if you can’t access it.
I tried Gmail…and now I just use it for storing useless tidbits that aren’t privacy-sensitive but which I know won’t ever be deleted.
I still use Yahoo and Hotmail on a consistent basis, because they’re well, superior in almost every way. And the best part is, despite all the advertising, NONE OF IT IS BASED ON THE CONTENTS OF MY MESSAGE. Adsense is acceptable on a webpage, but for a private communication, context-sensitive ads are a big NO.
Gmail seems like an attempt to create a really good email client and user experience. Yahoo seems like they’re trying to clone Microsoft Outlook and show you ads. Why when I login to my Yahoo mail account am I still not shown my inbox straightaway? If I were improving Yahoo mail, that would be at the top of my list.
Apologies if there’s a preference somewhere that allows this. I couldn’t find it.
To #13 Doug
You can try it out via http://mrd.mail.yahoo.com/try_beta
I’ve found Yahoo Mail beta to be extremely slow, compared to the current/old version. And this is very annoying.
@Wal
Thanks !!!
I’ve been using Yahoo Mail for a number of years and was anxious to play around with the new features today. To start, the new yahoo mail client felt incredibly cramped. Granted it’s supposed to function similarly to popular desktop mail clients, but it was almost paralyzing trying to mimic the same actions you would with a desktop app, but getting a much slower response time along with the lack of features. I’m sticking with the old for now. They’re making some strides and definitely blurring the line between desktop and web app, but this feels like one of those instances where the crutch known as ajax is just a bit too much.
I would have rather had them simply launch a desktop version of Yahoo mail.
The amount of advertising and cramped UI totally kills the idea… Guys at Yahoo - people aren’t looking for an Outlook replacement..
Is it just me or is anyone else feeling extremely claustrophobic reading his email now?
It locks out Safari users? Are you totally kidding me? Between it being slower than molasses and its ridiculous exclusion of Safari users, I’m not so sure this is going to compete with anything seriously…
I had switched over to the new Yahoo Mail beta a few weeks ago.
It’s astonishingly slow. First you have to watch this boy bopping up and down on the green ball while it loads up. Then you have to deal with that tiny font sized lettering.
Then if you scroll down too fast to look at older mails… you get “loading..loading…loading….loading”.
I got fed up, switched back to the old yahoo mail a couple of days back, and I’m ok now.
What I have to say to yahoo is, if you’re gonna do it, do it right. Speed it up big time, and make it easier to read.
The new Yahoo! Mail actually does allow you to tag messages… pull down the More Action after selected a message.
Yahoo! are a bunch of fools for not having this product for business users and the audience who cares about their products. What a slap in the face to have a business account with them and no ability to use this product with my email.
I just moved my Entourage/POP email to Yahoo! over Gmail because lawyers I know - who specialize in spam and internet law - all have Yahoo! email addresses. I tried to like gMail but I’d rather pay $10USD a year and NOT get text ads in my face, thanks.
I also do not lose emails in Yahoo! and it is very reliable. Gmail is flakey and unreliable for business use. As for the new AJAX Yahoo! mail client… well, I’d rather use Foldera.
I use Y! Mail daily, but the app is not 100% ready. It crashes my Firefox (on Linux) pretty regularly. It’s also a lot slower on Linux and OSX than on Winblows, but that could just be a JavaScript performance difference on different platforms.
I can’t believe anyone would prefer a slow loading banner ad to a text ad, even if it apparently context sensitive.
19. Stephen, Yahoo complies to the same laws in China that Google does. That doesn’t disprove your point, but in a Yahoo vs Google discussion, on China they push. The intelligent privacy rights groups usually point this out.
And the other thing I don’t get: Isn’t your email on Yahoo and Hotmail on an external server also. Why is everybody more worried about Google’s? Is the privacy policy really that different?
The new Yahoo does look good, but it was slow for me also. And I agree, why doesn’t my inbox open after login. Like there’s some other reason I’m logging into my email other than to read my email.
Gmail loads quick, the ads are easy to ignore, and my email history is easy to sort and manage. They should be adding a lot more feature and that Google hasn’t is one more indication that Google search was THE killer app of the Web 1.0, but Web 2.0 seems to be leaving the station without them.
Yeah, Y! Mail Beta is very, very slow–sometimes it won’t even load for me!
The good news is, though, if you’re willing to switch to the Beta, your emails will not end in a Yahoo! ad tagline. But Gmail already does that.
Google is just too scary for my likings in storing everything about you, along with targeted ads based on your email contents.
The new Y! Mail interface runs perfectly fast over here in .nl, no problems at all and the ads? Pfft, easy to filter
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/4619
I trust Y! over Google any day…
I’ve been using Yahoo Mail Beta for several months, for an old yahoo address that I have since 1998. I didn’t even know that the beta wasn’t public.
I disliked it, I disliked it deeply. Ads are very distracting, and anti-spam is laughably, but that wasn’t anything near to the awful speed of the thing, specially in Firefox.
I don’t know what they have tried to do, I guess that a clone to Outlook… but they haven’t succeeded IMHO…
I have been using this yahoo mail beta for last 2 months. Its Suck$!!!. Its really very very slow. GMail is very fast compared to yahoo.
Even Windows Live Mail Beta is Faster than yahoo.
Do you know if Yahoo Mail can be read using a RSS interface.
I found a good product hat can do that.
Have a check at freshmeat http://freshmeat.net/projects/conceptrm/ whereby a pop3 mail box is tranformed in a RSS feed…
I’m not sure what planet y’all live on… but I’ve been using the Yahoo Mail Beta since January, and it runs circles around Gmail, which I also use.
As an earlier poster said, the poweruser types (like Techcrunch readers) might like Gmail’s unorthodox keyword/archive interface, but 98% of the world is going to be much happier with the Yahoo/Oddpost folder paradigm.
PS: I pay the extra $20 a year for the Yahoo Mail premium service, and do so happily. No ads of any kind, POP access, 2GB storage, etc.
I’m with Mark. I’ve been using Yahoo Mail Beta since it was announced (I was a former Oddpost customer) and I like it, don’t find it particularly slow on Firefox — I actually find it slower on IE, have had very few issues with spam, but like Mark, I get the premium service.
I’ve also had a gmail account since early on, and I’ve never been that impressed. The yahoo beta, by the way, does have keyboard shortcuts like gmail.
IMAP would be nice, if I used a desktop email client. But since I’ve been using the Beta, I’ve pretty much lost any desire to use something like t-bird. And I could have an IMAP mailbox through my web hosting. I just don’t feel like I need to bother.
I have tried yahoo mail beta and its just so odd. It tried to match the outlook appearance and I didn’t like it. I gave it a try for few minutes and gave up. You don’t fancy stuff for checking emails, plain and simple as it is right now is good enough. Adding new features to existing will be a good thing to do. Yahoo! try to match Gmail first.
The Yahoo Beta is far superior to Gmail IMO, except for the speed. Who cares about tagging when you can have folders (the email feature most of us expect). Tagging for the sake of tagging isn’t that helpful. Also, I personally find Gmail tabbing very annoying.
It’s also no more or less cluttered with ads than Gmail, and I trust Yahoo as a company far for than I trust Google.
As a five year paying ($20/year) customer of FastMail.fm, I would be wary of the people above who recommend it. I just suffered a 3 1/2 day outage of my email on FastMail, meaning no access whatsoever to any of my email either going in or out. I had freinds calling me asking why I hadn’t told them that I changed my email address when they were getting multiple bounces. They have promised to put replication services in place to prevent this from happening again but they also promised us this summer to do so when they had another outage. I have since been slowly moving my email to GMail as it has most of what I need and shouldn’t be a hundredth as unreliable as FastMail.fm is.
Like John, I’m a former Oddpost customer who has never been overly impressed w/ gmail. Also, fwiw I’ve got the Yahoo Plus upgrade so results may vary. I’m having the opposite experience as some of the Gmail users, I’ve found Gmail to be cluttered, full of spam, and not all that usable.
While the Yahoo beta has been good and bad through its development, this last push has great in reestablishing the features which won me over to Oddpost. They’ve integrated the homepage, rss, calendar, and upcoming event into a clean, usable interface.
Check your AT$T/Yahoo connection:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/.....e=business
Boycott Yahoo.
Boycott AT$T.
Boycott SBC.
I use Yahoo disposable email addresses extensively and I like the way they show up in color in the old Yahoo email. They do not show up in color in the new client. This is reason enough for me not to switch!
Seems their just adding features GMail already had… *reads list again* blog posting… wow… who wants to do a ‘blog this’ from their email client?
hi,
i tried using the new version today.
but without an intention i switched back to the old version.
can any one tell me how to get back teh new Yahoo? mail beta
thanks in advance
My ENTIRE Yahoo Inbox contents disappeared this afternoon, with over 1200 e-mails!! What a horror! Still no idea whether I will see them again!
I also find Yahoo Mail Beta INCREDIBLY slow & frustrating! Classic mail was faster, but even harder to get an overview!
What are we to do?
PS: I am on top of this all, a Premier Subscriber to Yahoo Mail… I didn’t pay for this crisis!
Mine too! I had some very important stuff in those folders. What the hell were they thinking to not at least warn someone we’d loose all of that stuff. I’m so pissed. In addition I lost all of my contacts-now I have to reenter them and not sure I have all of them written down somewhere. That was an ignorant thing to do and not forewarn.