Yahoo's new CEO is certainly making things happen at the company that's often looked upon as passé, even though it just recently leapfrogged Google in total unique users, according to comScore. A major overhaul of the company's leading photo site, Flickr, came this past spring, and now the venerable and market-leading Yahoo Mail gets the Marissa Mayer touch. Many news stories have described this redesign as Yahoo trying to "catch up" with Google Gmail, but Yahoo actually remains the webmail market leader, with just under 90 million users in the U.S. compared with Gmail's 75 million. And Gmail's interface has long had usability issues, with its latest redesign only adding to its troubles, making the phrase "catching up" even less apropos.

As with the Flickr update, along with the design tune-up comes a new pricing schedule: Ad-free Yahoo Mail will now cost you $49.99 a year, a stiff increase over the $19.99 of previous Yahoo Plus accounts (though existing Plus users can continue at the $19.99 rate). Another similarity with the Flickr changes is that free users get more: POP access, up to 200 mail filters, and mail forwarding.

Free storage has been "reduced" from "unlimited" to 1 terabyte, which is pretty much identical to being unlimited—the account I've been using for a dozen years only has used 0.21% of a terabyte, leaving room for 54 million more emails, according to my account Settings page. In any case, the previous allowance was subject to abuse rules, so it wasn't truly unlimited.

What's New in Yahoo Mail? Interface changes.

Funnily enough, just after Gmail introduced tabs, Yahoo Mail has now dispensed with them, and the erstwhile Yahoo tabs were actually more useful and less distracting than Gmail's Social and advertisement tabs—subjects of many a user complaint. The new page design, as with all Yahoo sites, now has a permanent dark purple top bar linking to all of Yahoo's various Web properties, including News, Sports, Finance, Weather, Games, Groups, Answers, and a More dropdown that offers sites you've probably forgotten existed—omg!, Shine, and  among them.

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The new Yahoo Mail design is clean, intuitive, and pleasing. The left rail has been simplified, with just 11 buttons, compared with the dozens of folders and "apps" that used to appear. It's also cleaner than Gmail's, which is a bit of a mess of folders and chat contacts that unexpectedly appear when you hover the mouse at certain spots. When you tap the folder icon in Yahoo, your subfolders slide out in a logical, expected way.

One aspect of the design is that ads are still more obtrusive than in competing webmail services: An often animated graphical ad appears in a bar down the right side, and there's also a text ad above the inbox button control bar. Clicking the arrow to hide the ad bar pops up a box offering a $5-a-month ad-free option. The excellent Outlook.com, by contrast doesn't show any ads while you have a message from a contact open, but Yahoo and Gmail do.

Thankfully, Yahoo has not followed Gmail in one inbox design choice: Like Outlook.com, it still offers mail previews that can take up the bottom or right side of the inbox.  Of course, you can switch to no-preview mode, if you prefer the Gmail way.

The new Yahoo Mail does indeed borrow from Gmail, most notably by introducing conversation view (see below), but also in a new clean box composing window. I initially preferred Yahoo's more front-and-center compose box to Gmail's off-to-the-side design, but then realized that the side box lets you glance at your inbox for reference, while Yahoo's completely covers it—a point for Gmail here!