Next release…up!

A new release of Yahoo! Mail beta is now here, filled with upgrades pulled straight from *your* feedback. Here’s what’s new:

• We’re betting you won’t see the “Loading Message…” text in the Reading Pane much more, because messages load much faster now.

• Spell check, enhanced for this release, now also works on Firefox. Phinally!

• Yahoo! Mail beta now works with the IE7 beta.

• You made noise for peace and quiet in the Inbox. So, we lifted the animation from ads running along the right side of your Mail window. Ads still tell you their story, it’s just more balanced now with your task at hand. Does this make your Mail experience a little more central library, a little less Grand Central? Perhaps.

• Since quality’s all about attention to detail, we zeroed in on some small advances:

1) Clicking “Subject” or “From” now sorts by A-Z first, instead of starting with Z-A. Makes sense!
2) “Select All” now appears in the “More Actions” and right-click menus.
3) You can now see the size of attachments in the Reading Pane and message window headers.
4) And you can now print RSS posts.

• Try this: collapse and expand the “My Folders” list by clicking the blue triangle next to it. See your folders? Hide your folders. See them. Hide them.

• Ever get hung up waiting for a Compose tab to open? Starting a new message is now faster in Internet Explorer, and will get even faster across browsers in our next release.

• Check out the new Contacts layout in this version, and the new way of creating distribution lists. Our very next release will see further polish in Contacts.

• User feedback informed us that you didn’t know you could use Ctrl and Shift to select multiple messages. You can! Here’s how:

- To select any number of different messages, press Ctrl and click each message. To select messages in a sequence, press Shift and click on the first and last message. We mention this right up front now, when you first delete or move a message.

We roll out new releases over the course of a few weeks, so if you’re not seeing these changes just yet, sit tight – they’ll make it to your farm soon! And as always, there’s more to come. Keep talking to us about what’s working and not, and about what you’d like to see! We’re listening.

With open ears,
The Yahoo! Mail Beta team