Which Yahoo! Mail do you really have?

Posted November 1st, 2007 at 4:01 pm by Ryan
Categories: General

Based on the comments being left, as well as some of the email that has been rolling in, it has dawned on me that “what we have here, is … failure to communicate” (I guess I’m in a movie mood this week). Anyway, I really don’t want to sound petty but if I’m going to let people here know what is on your minds I need to make sure I’m telling the right stuff to the right people. So the goal of today’s blog post is to help get more of us on the same page with which group of users you may fall into.

Yahoo! has two distinct offerings for Mail. The original version is what we are calling “Classic”, and it’s the HTML version that I’m sure almost all of you have used it at one time or another. The other version, commonly referred to as “Beta”, is known as “New Mail” (or “All New Mail”), is built off of an AJAX framework, and is the one that features drag ‘n’ drop functionality, integrated Messenger, RSS feeds, and a number of other features that have been outlined on this very blog.

Now once you have identified which product you are using the next step is to identify if you have been transitioned to the latest version. For “New Mail” it is very easy. Just about everyone that is using the New Mail is already out of Beta, but the easy way to tell is if the Yahoo! Mail logo in the top left corner still says Beta, you are still awaiting transition. If you are a Classic Mail user, the changes are little more subtle, so I’ll run through some of them.

The most obvious way to tell is looking at the Welcome page after logging in. If you see your Avatar, you are in the older version of Classic

and if you see a new & improved News module below the space where you Avatar used to be, you are in the updated Classic.

If you are in the updated version of Classic your Options link (in the upper right) will no longer look like this -

and instead looks like this (note the links have been reduced and the Options link is now a drop-down menu)

Another way to tell if you are in the updated Classic is the look of your Inbox. Here is the older version (with “Bulk” folder and no flagging option) -