UPDATED 3/06: For a later review of additional features click here.
As I write this, Yahoo! is starting to push out the beta upgrade of Yahoo! Mail, a sweeping redesign of the service's look, feel, and function. Many thanks to the Mail team for getting me in the door. Testers have the ability to toggle back and forth between the old and beta versions. Beta Mail will propogate outward through the membership over a period of months.
Here we go:
Gmail is suddenly looking a little clunky. The new Yahoo! Mail is a sleek, finely wrought piece of interface design. The overall look is an Outlook-styled, three-pane window with folders in the left vertical pane, headers top right, and a message preview pane below the headers. Thus, Yahoo! becomes the first major e-mail provider to keep the Inbox in view while reading a message. That alone is news, but it's not, in my opinion, the biggest news.
The new Yahoo! Mail features a tabbed interface whereby you can line up several messages for later perusal, very much like Firefox's tabbed browsing. Double-click any message header to open that message in a new tab. The Compose window now opens in its own tab, keeping the Inbox available. Retaining access to the Inbox while reading and writing mail is the key to this upgrade in my mind, though Yahoo! is not emphasizing it in its marketing.
Right-click context menus are also new, and very welcome. Open, Print, Reply, Forward, Mark read/unread, Flag, Clear flag, Delete, Add sender to Address Book, and View full header (in a popup) are in the right-click menu. single-key keyboard commands are in there now, handily, and a right-click on a message header reminds you what they are. Also, a snazzy drag-and-drop feature lets you move messages among folders; it is startlingly pretty.
(High-resolution screen shots at Zilla Smash.)
This isn't exactly a complaint, but tab functionality could be slicker. I'd like to open a message in a new tab from the right-click menu. I'd also like to see Yahoo! keeping the click trail in the tab, rather than defaulting to a new window when you click an e-mail link. (Selecting a new tab in the Firefox context menu naturally opens a new Firefox tab, not a new Yahoo! Mail tab.) Right-clicking a tab offers Back and Forward, yet it seems impossible to create any clickstream to use those functions. It would be intensely cool to give the Mail tabs more integrity as browsing containers.
The new Yahoo! Mail is obviously a successful beta launch. It hints so strongly at a revolution in Webmail interfacing that one can't help leaping ahead to imagined additions. Yahoo! is already slick in three areas that I'd love to see woven into Mail:
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Popup previewing as in Yahoo! News.
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RSS.
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Tagging.
I have no idea whether such features are on the radar, and I recognize that with the usage footprint of Yahoo! Mail the company cannot be too experimental. Stakes are high and inertia makes users sluggish. That is precisely why this beta launch is so impressive: it hits a sweet spot of combined newness and familiarity. This is an exciting start to a new chapter in Webmail.
1. Two questions:
1) Does it have full functionality in Firefox?
2) How can I get in on this beta (please)?
Posted at 5:45AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Scott-O-Rama