Yahoo Mail beta is amazing
February 2, 2006I finally got invited into the Yahoo Mail beta last night, and it’s amazing. If you get the invite absolutely accept it. If you hate it you’re not stuck–there’s a link to let you switch back. Of course I don’t know if they plan on keeping that option once this rolls out live.
This bad boy is what the Outlook Web interface should have been. There’s a vertical pane on the left that lets you navigate between folders, and the right side is split horizontally into two panes. The upper right pane has the list of emails from the current folder, and the bottom pane lets you preview selected emails. I especially loved the fact that the list of emails was the whole list of emails–the old version only shows 25 at a time which makes scrolling thru them tedious. The new interface is a vast improvement.
Hate to jump on that buzzword bandwagon but it’s a very AJAX UI. Clicks and drag-and-drops and menus and all the other desktop UI conventions work the way you’d expect them to work. But it’s all done across the Web instead of requiring an installed app on your PC. I especially like the fact that you can drag-and-drop messages between folders. Makes organizing emails intuitive and fast.
And the ads are fairly unobtrusive. In fact that is the part that impresses me the most–they clearly took a risk and decided that to make this UI work they would reduce the ad clutter. There’s some text ads at the bottom of the left-hand pane, and on the far right there’s a single slim vertical skyscraper type of ad. That skyscraper does rotate occasionally, which is meant to compensate for the fact that you aren’t actually turning additional pages anymore as you click to each email. But the ad is far less intrusive than the ones in the old UI so I’m not sure the compensation is one-to-one.
Is it better than GMail? Depends on what you are looking for. In terms of organizing and reading your emails I think Yahoo Mail beta is the clear winner. But I do really like GMail’s threaded message view, and GMail is a much less cluttered UI. Overall, I think Yahoo Mail is better for folks used to running Outlook at work. GMail is probably still better for people who want to store and retrieve a lot of email.
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