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Yahoo announces an email upgrade
INTERNET PORTAL Yahoo has announced an upgrade to its email service that it claims will enable it to better compete with rival Google's Gmail.
A beta of the upgraded email is now available and the millions of Yahoo Mail users will see the live changes over the next few weeks.
The new Yahoo email comes with a redesigned layout and a slew of features, the most important of which will be speed. Yahoo is promising that it will be twice as fast as its current service. We gave it a go and it's definitely faster, loading pages and emails almost instantly.
Another important feature is better spam protection, something that Google did well and Microsoft did very badly with Hotmail. It's too early for us to say if this really works in the beta we tried, but if it can rival Google's spam-catching capabilities that will at least make the service usable.
A feature clearly stolen from Gmail is storage. Many people flocked to Gmail with the promise of several gigabytes of space for emails and files, ending the days of not receiving mail when your inbox was full. Currently Gmail offers just over 7.5GB of space, a very reasonable number, but Yahoo is promising "never-ending" storage. We're not entirely sure if this really does mean unlimited storage, but we couldn't find any mention of a cap, so this could be a major attraction to lure users back to Yahoo, even for use just as a storage account.
Gmail has Google Chat, Google Voice, and more recently it added AIM chat, so Yahoo is adding its own chat service straight into Yahoo Mail. It looks and feels very similar to Google's approach.
Yahoo is also adding Facebook and Twitter integration, so users can view and post updates without ever leaving Yahoo Mail. On the Updates tab users can post their Yahoo updates or add their Facebook and Twitter accounts. This is a feature that Gmail doesn't have and it could be a deciding factor for many people in the short term.
Another thing that we found potentially useful was that when you open an email it opens a new tab for it and stays open until you click the 'X'. This might be annoying to some people, but if you've ever tried to switch between emails and were forced to open a new browser tab and enter your email account a second time this will save some headaches.
Yahoo still has more users of its email service than Google does, but the latter is growing swiftly while Yahoo has been seeing a small decline. In 2010 it had 280 million users, dropping around one per cent to 277 million this year. Google is now at 220 million, up 43 million or 24 per cent on the year prior, and that trend is likely to continue.
It's clear that Yahoo is aware of how well Google is doing, so much so that it is willing to copy most of the features that made Gmail so appealing. This might help it avoid losing substantial numbers of users, but we don't think Google will rest on its laurels now that Yahoo has entered the ring. We expect to see some interesting updates to Gmail over the coming months. µ
Tags: Internet
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Anil kumar
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Yahoo has always had a nasty habit of trashing an email if you do anything unexpected -- annoying if you have spent several minutes composing one and adding recipients and attachments.
The new beta does the same even in Firefox. I merely tried to remove an erroneous recipient name from the
address bar.
And the new Yahoo doesn't work with Opera -- Flash ads appear on the page in the wrong place -- in this case obstructing the Send button (how brilliant is that ?)
I feel forced to complain about Yahoo publicly because they never seem to acknowledge customer complaints, let alone act on them.
The Yahoo beta is useless on a small screen.
The icons are too small to click with a trackpad or a touchscreen.
Doesn't Yahoo realize that the future is portable? We're not all using workstations with tons of resolution and unused CPU cycles.
Have they not learned anything about UI design in the last 15 years?
I don't want to login to Yahoo messenger from my web based yahoo e-mail. That's what I have the yahoo messenger program for. Yahoo mail beta was slow and buggy, so I switched back to the regular Yahoo mail. Much faster. Cleaner interface. I hope they fix the bugs that makes Yahoo beta suck because if not, I can always add my yahoo account to my gmail and receive my yahoo mail there with the speed and features I want and all the yahoo crap that I don't want.
I'm a premium subscriber to get rid of those ads, and using beta for a few months..
it's not that great... i recently told everyone to start using my other emails..because my filtering has not been working for months and all i get is canned messages when i ask for help
plus they've removed some of the features I like from the old yahoo, like the calender display at the bottom to quickly add dates/ reminders..if you're going to make a new one..at least keep the features and benefits of the old one..
i'm not happy w/ yahoo email..my last year after 15 with them :(
i'm already using outlook for work again and gmail for my important stuff.
normal
yahoo is good from other
i've been using their so-called "newly announced" beta for more than a month now and IT STILL SUCKS in comparison to Google.
first of all, IT IS SLOOOOOW. All their marketing PR spin is crap, when i was using yahoo mail with the classic interface it was loading way faster than this.
Second, yahoo still doesn't offer full SSL (https) access to the mail, all server data transfer is made via unencrypted normal http.
The only ssl-protected page you'll ever see with yahoo is the initial login, but after that all the data transfer takes place on normal http and your login cookie can be sniffed over the wire.
In comparison, on Google i have full ssl even on hosted mail for my domains.
third: yahoo still does the same crap with attachments as it did on older versions of webmail: when you try to download attachments, you are prompted to download a file from a numeric-ip http addresses, seemingly unrelated to yahoo. This triggers a lot of warnings from NoScript for untrusted links.
third: currently yahoomail is either refusing to load and i get a generic message telling me to try later or is failing to load the messages list, displaying a message "failed to load message list"
@Although I strongly
What evidence is there that google is spying on you, or rather that Yahoo is not?
On a side note, Yahoo will never be as fast as Gmail unless they get rid of the rediculous amounts of HUGE flash ads that are on the site. I don't personally use it, but my wife does and it is an eyesore, and it sucks all of the processing power from her machine. I finally convinced her to use Gmail about 2 weeks ago.
prefer Yahoo over Gmail due to less spying on users and allowing attachments containing exe files, I will never forget that a fairly active account of mine was deleted by Yahoo without warning because of 4 months of inactivity. GMail is keeping my dormant account for years.
Gmail still has free features (like SMTP and POP3 so you can use an e-mail application like Outlook) that you still need to pay extra to Yahoo for. I think as long as Yahoo continues to attempt to milk its customers for money on these things, they will continue to see their following fall.
I even had a Yahoo account!