Pros & Cons
Yahoo! Mail Specs
| Free: | Yes |
| Type: | Personal |
Yahoo! Mail just celebrated its tenth birthday, and it's grown into a healthy Web 2.0 application, complete with drag-and-drop functionality, right-clickable menus, tabbed message windows, RSS integration, and a reading pane à la Outlook. The finally released, out-of-beta version is almost identical to
If the new interface isn't to your liking—some habits die hard—you do have the option to revert to the "classic" version. But to me that would be like going from 3D back to 2D, or from Windows XP back to Windows 95. The first difference you'll notice in this release (besides the disappearance of the "beta" tag) is a pop-up box telling you that you can chat with your Windows Live contacts directly through the mail client. And at the top of every e-mail you compose, there are now three icons, one each for mail, chat, and text (a mobile phone icon).
Tabs in Yahoo! Mail are quite handy once you get used to them: Pretty much every action you take opens a new tab. The good thing is that you don't lose your previous activity unless you close its tab. For example, if you do a search in your mailbox, then start a new text-message session, your search will still be there on another tab for reference. You get a new tab for each message or chat, as well as for searches and the home page of news sites.
One little annoyance that remains in this version is that it doesn't open right to your mail inbox, but instead displays top news headlines on your mail homepage. If you're navigating to your webmail site, shouldn't your mail be the first thing you see when you get there?
Communication, Yahoo! Style
The integrated chat doesn't offer advanced IM capabilities such as voice, video, or group chat, and it doesn't work with AIM, the biggest IM network. Still, there's a certain convenience in being able to chat right from your mailbox and convert the same message from e-mail to chat to text and back again.
As mentioned in our review of Yahoo! Mail beta 3, with this version you might receive an instant message without ever signing up for an IM service—every Yahoo! Mail account automatically includes the ability to IM. Yahoo! Mail will also find your Microsoft Passport–associated contacts and offer to add them to your online list, but be aware that this entails sending your contacts an automated permission e-mail. Some correspondents may find this annoying, so you might want to add them to your online list manually, instead. Also, when you add a new contact, there are fields for chat ID (with a choice for
What was formerly the Compose button next to the Check Mail button is now called New, and a Text Message (SMS) option has been added to its drop-down choices. To use the SMS function, you first have to select your country. Right now there are only four choices: U.S., India, Canada, and the Philippines. The window for entering your message is a bit strange, because it shows a huge blank space in the middle of the page—but that's not where you enter the message. You have to scroll way down to the bottom of the page, to your avatar. On the topic of this avatar, strangely lacking here is the ability to upload your own picture. I can only guess that Yahoo! wants to drive people to Yahoo! Avatars to protect its investment in that site.
One small complaint: After I'd already added a mobile number to a contact's entry, the only choice I had when right-clicking the contact's name in the Contacts list was Send Email. When I chose this option, and then clicked on the cell phone icon to send an SMS, Yahoo! asked me for the mobile number. Why not just use the one already entered in the contact info? It's only after you enter the number again and send a text message that the number is remembered. This seems needlessly byzantine.
Yahoo! Mail: Shortcuts, Calendars, and More
Yahoo! Shortcuts is a new feature that checks your e-mails for addresses, URLs, phone numbers, calendar events and places, and "Interesting picks," and underlines them with dotted lines. When you mouse over one of these, a box pops up with relevant actions: If it's a phone number or an e-mail address, you can add to contacts; for a place you can jump to a map, see travel info, or do a Web search; and dates get the option to be added to your calendar. You can also specify which of these items you'd like underlined, or disable the feature altogether if it's not your thing.
I found these shortcuts useful for adding contacts and appointments, though I was puzzled by the suggestion that I do a Web search for the phrase "backpack" in a traveling friend's e-mail. In another e-mail containing the word Manhattan, the bubble offered me a choice of View Travel Guide, View Map, and Search the Web. I could certainly see at least the first two being useful. Two less-momentous but helpful enhancements include an advanced mail search that lets you narrow results by sender, date, and more; and a choice of six new background colors to give it a more personalized look.
Before this release I'd encountered inbox entries flashing and a couple of other bugs, but I haven't seen any of that in this non-beta version. Load time has also improved; it's no slower than starting up the less-powerful Hotmail or AIM Mail interfaces. Alas, there's still no official support for Opera or Mac browsers.
As mentioned in our review of Yahoo! Mail beta 3, this is by far the richest webmail experience out there. None of the other major players has tabs, preview panes (actually, Hotmail does have preview panes, but they're not nearly as easy to access), or the ability to switch among e-mail, IM, and text in the same interface. Add to this the integration of your Yahoo! calendar, a notepad, and a fine RSS reader, and the result is the Swiss Army knife of communications. And though it sounds as if it might resemble the control panel of a Boeing 777, it's actually quite intuitive: I find Yahoo! Mail much easier to navigate than Gmail. Windows Live Mail and AIM Mail are equally intuitive and usable but decidedly less advanced. The new Yahoo! Mail is the one to beat. Oh, and if you're a current Yahoo! Mail user who doesn't have it yet, be patient—the company needs to migrate over 250 million accounts, but you should be enjoying this category-leading Web communication tool soon.
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Final Thoughts
Yahoo! Mail
Yahoo! Mail wins on its comprehensive security, excellent SpamGuard filter, and global language support. Its PhotoMail service shows promise, but we'd wait for the full version.