Don’t blink. Some big changes are happening to your Yahoo! Mail.
In the next few weeks, you’ll be able to experience Yahoo! Mail Beta, a faster, cleaner, and safer way for you to communicate and share with the people you care about most. It’s part of our ongoing commitment to deliver the best email service for the 281 million people around the world who use our product. Once the changes roll out, you’ll notice a snappier feel to many of the core features in Yahoo! Mail. For a sneak peek, check out our Yahoo! Product Runway media event that our Chief Product Officer Blake Irving is hosting today.
Here’s what you should expect in Yahoo! Mail Beta:
It shines
Yahoo! Mail Beta will have a cleaner, sleeker interface that will make it easier for you to navigate through your inbox and use other features built into the product. You’ll see this look and feel when you go access Yahoo! Mail Beta on your PC browser, mobile device, or tablet.
It’s fast
We’ve been re-architecting many core features across the product to improve the Yahoo! Mail experience. And with the addition of our cutting edge cloud technology, Yahoo! Mail will become faster and more accessible, enabling users to download and respond to messages in lightning speed.
It’s an anti-spam warrior
Yahoo! Mail Beta will continue to offer great anti-spam features to keep your inbox free of clutter. Yahoo! Mail is the #1 email provider in protecting users from spam, and our inboxes had fewer spam messages than our competitors, according to a 2010 study by the Fraunhofer Institute.
It keeps you connected
Managing your social life will become simpler since you’ll be able to view and update your Facebook and Twitter pages from your inbox.
It’s more than just email
We are enhancing a number of features into the product, such as video, photo sharing tools, a new version of Yahoo! Messenger, easier ways to SMS, and a refurbished inbox search page.
The team will be heads-down until we launch Yahoo! Mail Beta. We can’t wait for you to try it out once it’s ready to go. Stay tuned!
go to http://features.mail.yahoo.com/ and click “try it now”
Um, it says yahoo mail beta is widely available in the United States, but I cannot access it and I LIVE in the U.S. What is this, some kind of scam? It should be available to me, unless they’re making people pay for the new beta. Come on, at least give me something to activate it with. I want to see the new Yahoo! Mail.
I like the simple, clean design.
I used to like Yahoo pre all the recent so called improvements, like many other users I DO NOT want or need all these extra features that keep being added. I particularly I do not want to be linked to facebook or any other social networking site via my mail, they should remain separate or at least have to be added by choice, NOT by default. I want Yahoo to concentrate on being a reliable mail service just as it used to be. I worry about privacy issues, not all of us want to make ourselves known to the wider world!
Thanks for writing Darren. You can use it today! Go to: http://features.mail.yahoo.com/
Jim Hu
Oh no, Web2.0 is about to throw up all over the best webmail client currently available.
Can all these features be turned off and hidden?
Will it work better on my Netbook screen? The ads really get in the way.
If so then it’s ok by me.
Surely with tabs and all, why do you need links to facebook etc.
Just give me plain old reliable e mail. 99% of your clients are small guys. No need for complications. And what’s with all this SHARING.
It’s October 26th. This was posted September 16th and no changes yet. Any ideas on a timeline? A general hint for a successful company is to underpromise and overdeliver, not the other way around.
I have found Yahoo so full of ads that I changed my e-mail and moved. I do not think you are doing a good job nor will you improve later. You are adding too many things when all you need to do is to remove some of the ads and just plain old deliver mail. I do not need facebook and it’s open access to me on or close to my mail. I can go to facebook on my own, thank you. Nothing needs to be interfaced with my mail.
I really like the simplicity of the new Yahoo Mail and I hope the overall performance of the website will be increased greatly. I also hope that you release the entire version at once and not part by part on a scale of a few years, as you did with the current Yahoo Mail (many features were not available in the beta after years!). When I don’t have my notebook with me, I want to have the best e-mail experience possible that brings be close to my e-mail client on my notebook.
It should therefore also be noted, on your commitment to be the best e-mail service provider, that you have to offer all the features your users require. I for example really need to have IMAP access, which is a basic (and often free) service. My daily e-mail behaviour has changed a lot the last months and I rely a lot on folders now. Without IMAP, I can’t use those folders on my favorite e-mail client and therefore can’t use Yahoo Mail the way that I want.
As a Yahoo Mail user for at least seven years, and subscriber for two years, I really ask you to consider offering IMAP access. Whether it’s for subscribers only or not, I don’t care as long as it is available.
I still prefer Yahoo Mail to Gmail
- It looks more professional to me
- It’s visually more clear to see each email at a glance; the meat of Gmail messages are hard to find because they put so much “conversation” header crap in there.
- I still think in folders rather than tags.
My ideal email would have hierarchical folders & the ability to do powerful searches, e.g., “mail between date A and date B, from person X, Y or Z, and with powerpoint attachment”. Thunderbird on my work Linux box can almost do this but not quite.
Bring on the improvements! Happy to see Yahoo Mail hasn’t given up.
There are two features I would really like to see added to Yahoo Mail:
1) The ability to have sub-folders to existing folders in the Cabinet. I have lots of folders now, and could better organize lots of them if I could group some as sub-folders under a main folder
2) The ability to attach existing emails to a newly composed email. I know I can forward an email, but there are times I’d like to send a new email, and attach more than one existing email in my inbox.
As a power user I like minimal graphics and powerful operators on mail.
I would also appreciate grouping real mail separately from generic mail.
Ready to test, send out the beta :-) (power Y! Mail user since 1998)
change is inevitable.
yahoo mail is no exception
beta,mail….bring it on
It would be cool if we could personalise the purple background with custom colours and/or backgrounds. Dynamic themes are great too (i.e. background changes according to the time – morning/noon/night).
I sure hope some of the functions for Mail Plus will be faster like adding/editing a disposable email address, adding/editing mail filters.
It’s a good iteration, makes the interface simpler. Can you also make it a bit tighter? For example, the What’s new/Inbox/Contacts buttons for example look like they could easily fit between the logo and search box. Considering that most displays sold today are widescreen (or, you could say, shortscreen), vertical space is at a premium, which your design doesn’t seem to reflect.
Also, is there any particular reason why you don’t implement archiving? Don’t you think it’s a better solution than having thousands upon thousands emails in the inbox? I think of an inbox is the place for incoming documents, not for the whole archive.
A button that hides selected emails from the inbox, and an extra link in the left menu that lets me temporarily show hidden emails, how much work can that be?
Hi there, regarding check box stuff:
Let’s say I have 32 messages in my inbox, auto preview is disabled and I am pretty sure that 6 of them are nothing and must be deleted. These 6 messages are all around, not one after another. Old way, I have to click click click click until I reach the bottom one and then scroll up then delete.
OK let’s keep the check boxes which are useful for other actions I agree on that but let’s have an X somewhere so I can just click it and get rid of it from the subject line.
Everyday we are receiving more and more emails, this is too much, and email systems should NOT imitate outlook stuff because that was designed when were were only receiving 10 emails a day or less. Now everything is on email so the email client should make our lives easy by being really fast.
I beg you guys to give us a feature to add notes on emails. If you can make it, I will then consider moving back to Yahoo mail. :D
And yes IMAP should be support, ditto on that too!
This looks beautiful. I am using Hotmail at the moment, but I’m almost certainly going to migrate to Yahoo! once the upgrade has been rolled out. It looks amazing… And purple is my favourite colour, so it’s kinda perfect.
Two thumbs up if Yahoo! can deliver what looks like a very much improved and modern inbox.
Yes, please make all the ‘integration’ with facebook and so on OPTIONAL. I have a facebook account but don’t want it integrated with my email. If I want to go on facebook, I’ll go to the facebook site.
I don’t mind you adding the feature in, but please allow me to disable it as a preference as the ‘integration’ in the current yahoo mail is unwelcome to me personally and slows things down.
Praveen — Performance is a key thing we’ve focused on. Can’t wait to get your thoughts on the real thing.
OMG!!
I’ve been never disappointed by Yahoo! <3 :D
I can't wait to try it out!! It looks so promising ;)
and I agree, I hope we can change the color, but I don't mind purple ^_^
Awesome….Cant wait to try it. I hope the interface is changeable though…Thanks for the article.
I recently read an article about the new Yahoo mail and am looking forward to use it. There are some suggestions which I think will make using Yahoo mail more rich and interactive. There should be color category option similar to one used in MS Outlook 2007. Yahoo related services should be more embedded with in the mail interface. Twitter, Delicious, LinkedIn, Flixster, WordPress, Yelp and YouTube must also be added in the “Application” section. Updates for sites should be displayed in the main page (Whats New section).
About time. I had been complaining about the layout/look for sometime. Can’t wait to try it out. :)
@Kuby
Just my thought about the 2:
I like checkbox. Many times I want to do something other than delete. Actually, I delete some e-mail in intervals of three months, and don’t use the checkbox in the process.
They’re more useful for archive, label, mark as spam, as read or as unread a bunch of e-mails. I don’t belive that a button for each option in each e-mail would be an good thing. A drop-down button also won’t be as useful.
I belive the checkbox are a good way to work with this. Just my opinion, of course…
I am skeptical Yahoo will deliver what is promised. Yahoo mail has been lagging for years. The only thing it is good for is as a junk account for online shopping. I deleted all my contacts from Yahoo mail because your so-called applications kept trying to spam them. Now my address book is offline and out of your reach. If you want people to use the service, you will have to earn it.
How about having Exchange ActiveSync support or at least IMAP in the free version. All other major competitors offer this for free. You say you want to deliver the best mail experience to your users: well, adding this feature would be a big step in the right direction.
just add free IMAP/POP3/SMTP/forwarding and yourowndomain.com and Y! mail will rock again
Looks great can’t wait to get my hands on.
Looks like Yahoo Messenger for Vista theme!!! I was looking forward for it and it was discontinued. Hope this wont be discontinued as well.
@Kuby: Really? And if you want to delete say 10 emails, you have to click the X 10 times? Or all on a page?
You could say that you’d have to click 10 check boxes anyway. But, in that case, there is a safety from misclicks (which happen way too frequently than imagined). So if we have the X, either we will need to have a confirmation box (which essentially doubles the number of clicks required to delete an email) or have emails deleted due to misclicks which really makes the interface dangerous to use!
I hope the new interface will get compatibility with all browsers
For the love of God, please make all of these features OPTIONAL! I like the interface the way it is. I don’t need facebook, twitter, and youtube crapping up my inbox. (and let us delete “smart” folders like “unread mail from contacts”)
i cant wait 4 it to be rolled out wish we didnt have to wait a few weeks hurry i wanna try it out now please
Superb. Glad to know Yahoo! is keeping healthy focus on good ol’ mail. (I know it’s too much to ask, but I’ll drone on, anyway, asking for https, forwarding, pop, and imap for non-plus users. All this is important for me and mi esposa when we’re on the road. We’re old fogies enjoying our traveling days.)
Anyway, we wish you great luck. Keep up the good work!
Cheers,
fjpoblam
I agree with Kuby’s comments. It’s only out of sheer laziness and Gmail’s lack of a true folder structure that I haven’t already abandoned ship. I am prepared to be impressed, Yahoo.
Search in Yahoo Mail is currently terrible. Results are poor and slow in coming. It is the main reason I have mostly abandoned my Yahoo mail account as a primary account, though I still do use it.
Do you guys have to reserve THAT MUCH space to ADs?
Will it have Right to Left (Hebrew, Arabic) editing capabilities?
please NO Purple!!!!
Also, Please fix the response time. I wait several seconds; often there is NO response. This is most trying, as I have stubbornly clung to yahoo.
Without the basics, you’ll lose your base
More and more people are using 19-20-22-23 inch LCD screen sizes and as you know, text size is getting smaller smaller. Gmail, hotmail etc are failing to create a better mailing experience by making keeping the text size small. Make a difference, give users ability to increase the overall interface font size. (I can use native support of the browser for zooming however it is not the same)
2. checkboxes are stupid. Instead of checkbox, put a delete X button, why should I check the emails and then GOOOO to the top and hit delete? Make it faster by allowing users to delete messages immediately.
3. When I read an email, either I delete, archive or reply. And we decide what to do to the email at the end of it, especially close the scroll tool, so it will be easy to reach the action.
4. Most important idea: Sometimes, we read an email and we want to put a reminder, a note something about it from us, so next time when we open it, we can also read our own note about it. A simple add a post it would be super cool great.
Kind regards
Kuby
The changes described sound great but I suspect none of them will really matter much if the new Mail does not also include IMAP and threaded conversations, perhaps the two most important features needed to make Yahoo a truly competitive and modern email platform.
In an increasingly mobile world, most of us regularly access our emails from at least 2 or 3 computing devices making email synchronization through IMAP a necessity.
I agree – very excited about trying out it! I’d love to be a beta tester and get a sneak peak!
I’ve used Yahoo! mail for years, almost since day 1, but have moved to another email system (with forwarding) because of eroding capability to sync contacts and calendars. Does the new Yahoo! Mail Beta bring back and also add multiple ways to sync contacts and calendars? If so, it might bring me back too.
Pls don’t mess up. I am very close to shifting entirely to gmail as current yahoo mail performance is very poor. I have been using yahoo mail for close to 10yrs now. But I dont have a choice if perf continues to be poor.
I ca’nt wait to try it.
Awesome….Cant wait to try it. I hope the interface is changeable though…I cant do purple……
A plus user….
Looks great – any idea on timeline for early beta testing to be available?