All-New Mail Gets Kudos from WSJ

I hate to make it look like I’m tooting my own horn, but since I’m still relatively new to Yahoo! I’m technically really tooting horns for all of the folks who have labored (somewhere between months and years) to bring you the all-new Yahoo! Mail, and since that is the case I can blare away. Late last week the Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mossberg provided his take on the new product, and despite a few complaints (some of which you too have raised) he appears to be impressed. Below is the intro from his story on WSJ.com.

Years in the Making, Powerful Yahoo Mail Is Worth the Wait
by Walter Mossberg

Two years is a really long time to test a software product, but that’s about how long it took for Yahoo to finish its slick new version of Yahoo Mail, the popular email program you access from a Web browser. This new Yahoo Mail entered its beta, or test, stage in September 2005, and this week it emerged in finished form.

The result is a polished, fairly powerful email program that I prefer to Google’s much-hyped Gmail, which is undergoing an even longer gestation. It has been in beta status since April 2004.

I’ve been testing the new Yahoo Mail on both Windows and Macintosh computers. It has some downsides, but it beats Gmail, in my view, both in terms of features and in terms of its ability to act like a standard computer program rather than a Web page often gets more credit.

A closer competitor to Yahoo Mail is actually Microsoft’s Hotmail, now called Windows Live Hotmail. But Yahoo tops Hotmail, too, in my opinion…

UPDATE: Adding a great video blog from Walt, if you would rather watch/listen than read.

Ryan Knight
Community Manager
Yahoo! Mail