First off, thanks to everyone who took the time to post a comment on my “intro” post from last week. It is exciting to know that there is a passionate audience out there, and that if there is one thing I won’t have to worry about it is getting readers to express their feelings about a subject. :)
I’m still researching some of the questions that were raised over the weekend, but in the meantime I wanted to share one of the fun things that you may have missed over the past few months. This Bix contest that was featured on our sister blog in the UK recently.
You’ve probably seen different versions of Liam all around Yahoo! Mail Beta. It looks like someone decided it was time to vote on which Liam is everyone’s “favourite” (note the Queen’s English). You won’t be able to add any new entries to the contest, but it is is going until September 7th, so be sure to cast ye votes soon!
Go to this contest on BixRyan Knight
Community Manager
Yahoo! Mail
i love ostrich liam!! go egg roll!
Yahoo mail beta has a great features, but with my slow connections, I’ll choose Yahoo mail standard..
Hope Yahoo! will found a new way to get a fully features mail with small bandwidth..
On the UK blog, I saw a different post that shows an unknown, incredible feature! What is it? You can import emails from most common email providers to your Yahoo! Mail account. And the best part is, it looks like it’s free! I think this feature really needs to be advertised!!!
http://ymailuk.com/blog1/2007/06/27/pack-your-bags/
some times when change from my yahoo.com to chech my mail, it wont go through.I must go back to the start and try again. Is there anything i can do to change this? Barbara.
Hey everyone! I really love Yahoo! Mail Beta, it’s very useful to me but lately I’ve been having problems with it since I got the new Internet Explorer 7. Now everytime that I load Y!MB I get the error message “Oops! Yahoo Mail can’t load” and I have to “click here to try again” in order to access my inbox. So now I get no Liams when my mail is loading. I hope you guys improve and fix the compatibility issues with IE7 and, if is there something wrong with my software in particular, let me know.
Keep up the good work!
Andreina
Calendar calendar calendar! Please update the Calendar module. It’s woefully out of date and pales compared with Google Calendar. I want to continue using Yahoo, but it needs a thorough overhaul. Make it more modern looking but more importantly, make it easy to add and modify appointments. Thank you.
I wanted to know if we could get the Liams for like Outlook signatures. All of them are great and there was some that I have not even seen… superhero and in the hamster cage….
Allowing users to get Liams would be cool.
Thanks
i thought the cute Liam is the eye-candy for the girls… sorry no offence but why would a “masculine male” want to look at “a cute boy”?????
i dont mind having a “girl” icon for mail, (well maybe for messenger) but please not liam’s girlfriend
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is there any ad blocker for IE?
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AFAIK there is a drag-n-drop function for organizing things in beta
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could i suggest the mail team to allow free users to choose to disable ADs for like, 1 mth, use this 1 mth to fix the Ad issue, + see how much money was lost due to ads/ gain due to usability.
Dear Lee,
The reason people are complaining here is because the program *is* in beta. That’s the purpose of a beta–to get feedback from the users.
My biggest annoyance with the beta version is that it draws the list of e-mails, and then a few seconds later it clears the screen and creates the list again. If I had clicked on a message, my selection is lost and I have to click on it again. What’s with that? I’m using Firefox 2.0.0.6 if that matters.
Marshall
I’m a big fan of yahoo mail, I’ve been using it for my personal e-mail for years. While I like the new version, it’s way to busy with flash and other advertising. I work with large graphics files all day long, I don’t need your advertisers to be competing for my processor use. Tone down the ads, or allow some of them to be turned off in some way.
I would like Yahoo mail to add spellcheck as you type, msn explorer has this feature and it’s great not having to do spell check when finished with typing.
Bobby
Ryan,did you grow up in Abilene TX?If so you and my son Justin were good friends.Let me know.I like your new ideas on yahoo. Doug Tucker
good morning from far away Europe. I have been using Yahoo for many years now and found the beta-version to be … ummm, let’s say noisy. After all the clicking noises had been successfully eliminated by yahoo, I still had problems. When the mail site was open and I used the “Inbox” link in the middle of the page (not the one on the left-hand side from the folders list), my browser collapsed altogether. Has that been fixed already ? I temporarily switched back to the old version which is good enough for me. And yes, the simplest is still the best (old wisdom). As for the messenger … is there a place oin yahoo where I can post my problems with it ? Just to make sure, I’ll tell it here and maybe someone from Yahoo will be kind enough to get back to me about it. I downloaded messenger version 8.1.0.413 a few days ago. This version does not allow to minimize the messenger window nor to move it (left mouse click on the blue bar at the top and drag it across the screen). Otherwise, thumbs uup for yahoo … you’re still the best.
The new yahoo mail beta hasto improve a lot.The text size and speed ARE OBVIOUS INITIAL minus points.Further evaluation may reveal more.
hey everybody was up now im going to try getting
a background so u guys and friends can talk to me
ok
Yahoo is all right. At least it has everything that a websites need. It is very helpful. It also has a lot of information that is valuble to people everywhere!
I hope not a lot of development time is going into “Liam,” because it could be used in making Y!MB more productive.
Like how about a whitelist that sends all messages from people NOT in Contacts to the Spam folder?
The Firefox flash blocker is called Flashblock and it can be installed from here:
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
y dont u guys make a gurl one it would be cute :)
i like yahoo messenger
I would like to give my comments on the beta mail…i ended up switching back to my regular mail. I was tired of the beta freezing up on me. I loved the look and the features of it. I loved being able to chat on messenger in my mail box..but I didn’t like that you couldn’t use smile faces or change your font on there. I don’t mind the advertisements being on the page..but I hate that huge one on the side that you feel like it’s taking up half your mail box. I would love to use the beta again if some of these kinks can be worked out. Thanks so much I love Yahoo!
A Firefox plugin that does what is requested above is Adblock Plus. It offers both blacklisting and whitelisting with automatically updated subscription lists.
Another feature missing from the beta the last time I checked is the capability to create sub-folders for storing the messages you want to keep. For example it would be much cleaner to have a folder called “Family” with an individual sub-folder for each family member. Another example is that there are a number of places that I shop online on a regular basis and having a main folder called “Shopping” with sub-folders for each one would be much cleaner and allow it to be much more organized.
BTW, the webmail I almost never use on Cox Cable offers that feature so I know it can be done. :-)
wtf are you people complaining about, its beta that means its got problems, duh. switch back until it works right. PS. how come common sense isn’t so common anymore????
Here are a pair of beefs I have with Y! mail:
1. The new mail indicator on my yahoo page used to always be current, but over the last 6 months (approx) I have found it to routinely be *hours* out of date, telling me I have new mail when I have none.
2. I sure with the “Check Email” link on my yahoo would go straight to my inbox. Instead it does to a higher level page. To add insult to injury, I often have to click twice on the inbox link to make it go there (for why, I do not know).
3. Agreed on the flash ads – ditch em.
i want the colour of my mail box, to be change
I switched over to the new Yahoo mail a few weeks ago to give it a test run. I keep most of the e-mails sent to me and have a folder for each person. Doing this requires a lot of organizing, so I really liked the ability to drag and drop the e-mails to the corresponding folders. What I did not like was that by default the e-mail was viewable in the lower frame only. There seemed to be a bit of a lag sometimes, too, even though I already have Firefox and the adBlock Plus plugin.
So, I finally switched back to the old Yahoo. Sometimes simple is better.
Rob, what is the name of that firefox flash-killer add on?
I’ve been noticing really low speed the last few weeks at home and work. Ran all sorts of things to fix it. It never occurred to me that it was yahoo. I’ll keep it closed now unless I am really using it.
Thanks.
I agree with the above comments on dialog boxes. Also the tabs at the top of the mail screen can have the same piece of mail innumerable times. Once is plenty.
When are some of the REMAINING major bugs going to be fixed with the BETA, plus some of the high priority usability issues? RSS feeds “new items” indicator is still broken. Having to “confirm” certain diaglogs over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over… is monotonous. YES I WANT TO DELETE ALL MESSAGES IN MY SPAM FOLDER! That’s why I poked the EMPTY button. And I don’t care that the contact was added. I know, I poked the button to add it. I don’t need to confirm that its DONE! Sheesh.
Hi Ryan,
I love my yahoo mail and many of its features and overall security. I also belong to a couple of yahoo book groups and enjoy them tremendously. However recently, I have been extremely frustrated by the ads taking up so much speed. I refer you back to the comment posted by Rob. I cannot say it as “eloquentechnical” as I am not an expert but a user. Since I work from home, with my computer, I cannot afford these slow downs (and my computer is no slouch either). I am not competent enough to find that plug-in to stop the flash ads but on the other hand I do not think I need to fix it. YOU DO ! Please take QUICK action or I will also after many years consider changing away from Yahoo.
thanks for reading my comment Ryan
Moira
I have been using Yahoo for several years and I choose to continue for my own reasons (for example, I don’t like Google’s policy of gathering info on everyone) however, I have two negative comments to make:
1) your orientation in general is too masculine I can’t be bothered with Liam, he leaves me cold. (I’m fed up with male mail and “malenet” in general.) 2) The blog and news comments in the past were vulgar and violent – once again, too masculine. Why don’t you try to “up” the tone?
Think about this the next time you wonder how to gain more subscribers and compete with Google.
Ryan;
I’ve had my.Yahoo.com as my “home” in my browser for many years now, maybe since 1999 or so. I typically leave it open all day in a tab or a separate window. I am a software developer by trade.
I like the new version overall, but I will follow on a complaint in your last entry’s comments by complaining about the advertising. I think Yahoo is being very foolish in not setting higher standards for ads they accept. I have a 2.5 year old laptop, top of the line at the time. Not a speed demon anymore, but it’s no slouch either. But those processor intensive Flash ads have gotta go. There were times when my PC would slow to a crawl for no obvious reason, and finally, thinking I had some spyware, I ran performance monitor to see what was up. It was my browser. But “nothing ” was loading… except a animated Flash ad. It was taking up 55% of my CPU! An ad!. Closing the Yahoo tab dropped performance down to 4%.
I looked for setting to prevent ads like this; I couldn’t find one. Then I looked for something to switch away from Yahoo to. After all, if Yahoo isn’t going to respect my workspace, who needs ‘em? Before taking that step, I found a Firefox plugin that allows me to block anything in Flash, and that’s what I did. So now I’m happy, but Yahoo’s advertisers aren’t getting their ads to me. I have no objection to ads in general, but they have to respect my space. I would bet that if things continue like this, that plugin will become quite popular.
All Yahoo has to do is exercise some quality standards in ads it accepts and I’d be happy.
Holy Cow, there are a lot of Liam’s to go through! I had fun with the vote.
I do agree with u that is all I have to say.
Wats happening Inside..!!?? People are always interested in tht. Coming Up Next…Is always has better advertising then anything else. Just Keep blogging. And Useful and interesting too…staying in competition is not easy now days..!!
I would make one more suggestion. I Central Blog for all yahoo products and coming ups’
And make YMail bet out soon..!!
All the best..!!