Yahoo Mail Beta
I’ve only just finished my migration from Yahoo! Mail to GMail, and within mere hours, I find out that Yahoo! finally released their long-held closed Beta to the public. Having been a satisfied Yahoo! user for a long time, I decided to give the Beta a spin, to see if it’s worth giving up what Gmail has to offer.
First off, the interface is nothing short of beautiful. It’s virtually indistinguishable from a desktop mail application, which will make switching to web-based mail much easier for those who have yet to sever the ties to their desktop. I can honestly say that it is a marvel of DHTML that deserves the highest praise. That said, however, I must say that I’m disappointed that there weren’t more functionality improvements. Noticeably absent was any means for hierarchical folders (something I’ve wanted for a long time) or the even more flexible and useful tags/labels, which were the primary instigators of my eventual exodus to Gmail. While tags definitely have their limitations, they are so far beyond folders that it boggles my mind that the Yahoo! folks didn’t take the time to squeeze them in. Even with only a half-dozen or so tags, it’s so much easier to find things, sort things, and generally keep track of my scattered existence with Gmail.
Since I’ve just barely scratched the surface with Gmail’s conversation view, I can’t really say whether I’m sold on it yet. It does seem nice, and I can envision it being incredibly handy for those situations where I have a long-running conversation spanning months/years and I want to go back through it. It’s possible I may find some frustrating facet of it, but given the large number of rabid Gmail fans, I somehow doubt it.
In short, Yahoo!’s Mail Beta is somewhat akin to the Dancing Bear. It’s marvelous that they’ve managed to get a fully-functional desktop mail application working on a webpage. However, the beauty of the upgrade is only skin deep, as the actual functionality of the client hasn’t changed since I first started using Yahoo! mail years ago.
September 16th, 2006 at 9:24 am
I’ve been using Yahoo! Mail Beta for over a year, and I agree that there could be some improvements. However, drag-and-drop sorting allows me to create any sort of conversation chain I may want, such as in my Eberron folder, where I simply drop my sent messages along with my received ones. For my purposes, it works just peachy.