Years in the Making, Powerful Yahoo Mail Is Worth the Wait
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, something for which Gmail 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.
The new Yahoo Mail, which works in Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows, and in Firefox on the Macintosh, is now more than just an email program. Like Gmail, but unlike Hotmail, it has a built-in instant-messaging module. You can choose to communicate with any of your contacts via a real-time chat, right from within Yahoo Mail, as long as that contact is online and has an IM account on either the Yahoo or Microsoft instant-messaging networks. You don’t need to be running your IM program.
Unlike either of its competitors, however, the new Yahoo Mail also allows you to exchange text messages with people on cellphones, although the message exchange must be initiated from Yahoo Mail.
Yahoo Mail offers unlimited storage of emails and attachments free of charge, and a very fast and good search capability — like Gmail’s — so you can keep years of messages on hand and retrieve them quickly. Gmail offers 2.9 gigabytes of storage free. It sells extra storage for prices ranging from $20 a year for six gigabytes to $500 a year for 250 gigabytes. Hotmail is in the process of boosting its storage to five gigabytes, free, and 10 gigabytes for $20 a year.
With Yahoo Mail, you can send attachments of up to 10 megabytes per message and 20 megabytes if you opt for a $20-a-year plan that also eliminates the annoying banner ads that litter the free version. Gmail offers attachments of up to 20 megabytes free. Hotmail allows 10 megabyte attachments and 20 megabytes under its $20-a-year plan, which also banishes ads. Gmail has no banner ads, just text ads that run alongside the emails and can’t be eliminated.
This new Yahoo Mail is gradually being rolled out in coming weeks. The company still plans to retain the older version of Yahoo Mail, now called Classic, for people who prefer it, or for those using browsers that are incompatible with the new version, such as Apple’s Safari.
The new Yahoo Mail allows you to do things that once were impossible in a Web-based email program. For instance, you can drag messages to new folders, or select a group of messages in the same way you would with a standard email program, to delete them or mark them as read or unread. Unlike in Gmail, when you right-click on a message you get a list of options that pertain to the mail program — like “Reply to Sender” — instead of options that pertain to the use of the browser — like “Add to Favorites.”
Also, Yahoo Mail features a very nice tabbed interface that Gmail and Hotmail lack. With this interface, which is separate from the browser’s own tabs, you could have your inbox in one tab, an instant-message or text-message conversation going on in another and a new email you are composing occupying yet another. You can move among these tabs without losing the content in any of them.
And like Hotmail but not Gmail, Yahoo Mail offers a preview pane, like Microsoft’s Outlook, so you can see the contents of an email without opening it. Gmail offers just a “snippet” of the message content. Unlike Gmail, which forces you to view your emails as bunched-up “conversations,” Yahoo Mail — like Hotmail — displays them as a standard email program does, sorting them by date, sender, subject or size.
So what are the downsides of Yahoo Mail?
Well, the biggest is probably that unless you pay for the $20-a-year premium plan, you can’t view your Yahoo mail account in a standard email program such as Outlook or Apple Mail. Gmail allows this free of charge. Hotmail allows it free in Outlook and in Windows Mail, though it will soon announce the capability for other email programs for premium members and, eventually, for free members as well.
Also, I found Yahoo Mail could sometimes be slow. When I created a new folder and tried to drag 200 emails into it, I was warned that I couldn’t do that because the new folder was “still being created.”
But overall, Yahoo did a really good job making its online mail program versatile, powerful and accessible.
Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.
Comments
Wow…this is one of the very rare cases where I’d have to say I disagree completely with your review. I’ve tried to use the new version of Yahoo! Mail twice now, and each time I’ve switched back. I think the new version doesn’t really make things much easier and instead is more of an indication of how Yahoo! is becoming more like Microsoft — through the introduction of bloatware. In fact, I think it is very much an example of a failed paradigm: trying to do things on the web the same way things were done on the PC prior to the advent of the web. While I admit GMail is not perfect, it does try to change the way you interact with email in a way that does not just try to simulate Outlook.
I also would not downplay the invasive and annoying expansion of advertising in the UI. It is aggressively bad: if you click the “show me my whole email” option, it actually flips the option off again to show the display ads when you switch to the next message.
I suppose I’ll need to try to live with it again and see if I come around…
Posted by Warren Habib at August 29th, 2007 at 8:49 pmI too have used the new Yahoo! Mail for several months. I have to agree with the previous poster, nothing new here.And,my biggest complaint being that Yahoo! Mail is painfully slow.
Luckily, I haven’t seen any ads since I’m already paying $19.95/yr.
Gmail is faster, easier and provides nice threading for mailing lists. If the new Yahoo! Mail has threading, I haven’t figured it out yet. Gmail has a nice interface - the buttons are just in the right place when you need them. (although, I don’t particularly like them scanning my emails.)
I’m thinking about going back to Pine
Posted by brad fuller at August 29th, 2007 at 11:01 pmDrag and drop impossible in other Web-based email apps? I think that you may be getting an email from Mr. Jobs about this one. Of course, .Mac costs $99/year (MSRP), but Mac users do get an an awful lot more for that money, particularly in terms of keeping all their information synced across computers and made available online. As for dragging and dropping, we have been doing that for some time.
Thanks for what is always a great weekly read,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas Massengale at August 30th, 2007 at 12:12 amYahoo mail is painfully slow and has a weak spam/junk filter.
Posted by Pirg Nori at August 30th, 2007 at 4:58 amYahoo Mail is sometimes slow, sometimes won’t open certain e-mails unless you go bac later, and won’t open in all browsers. GMail is simple, fast, with far better and faster search capabilities. It also lets you preview attachments as HTML or as Google documents before you download them. This is especially handy with PDF attachments. Googletalk’s integration with GMail is better than the almost childish-looking Yahoo Messenger integration, which is rather annoying, especially if you open your IM client after opening Yahoo Mail. Overall, Yahoo Mail is better and more flexible than it was before, but doesn’t deserve a superior review.
Posted by Joe Webb at August 30th, 2007 at 5:03 amWow, count me in as another first-time disagreer with Walt. First, there are all those aggressive ads, but what really bothers me about Yahoo is the absolutely horrible spam protection of the free version. It’s as if they’re saying, “we’re basically going to make the service useless unless you pony up twenty bucks.” And it is useless. Gmail’s is much better, and for me, anyway, makes it a much better experience.
Posted by jeff kisseloff at August 30th, 2007 at 5:31 amDitto to all of the negatory above, Red Rider
Posted by Richard Mitnick at August 30th, 2007 at 6:40 amDid you compare Spam-filtering features across the three services, Walt?
Anecdotally, I’ve found Gmail to be the best at spam filtering. Curious if there’s more empirical data on this feature for the three services.
Thanks.
Posted by Michael Parekh at August 30th, 2007 at 8:23 amI’m also interested in how well Yahoo!’s spam filtering works as compared to Gmail (which I use) and Hotmail (which I used before Gmail came out).
Posted by Jon Leopold at August 30th, 2007 at 8:35 amWalt, is Yahoo Mail your primary webmail account.
If not, which service do you use?
Posted by mark casey at August 30th, 2007 at 9:47 amWalt, in your 3rd to last paragraph you mentioned Hotmail allows email access via Outlook for free. Is this a typo? I think this is incorrect on two counts; it is not free and once you pay it only works with Outlook Express. I had quite the experience trying to setup, unsuccessfully, Outlook after paying and with Microsoft Support “help”.
Posted by Ben Burrows at August 30th, 2007 at 10:09 amMy problem with all the solutions: MS, Yahoo and GMail, is that many IT departments block access to them through company proxy servers. So what good is an email program that you can’t access from you desk at work?
Posted by Eric Welch at August 30th, 2007 at 10:24 amI must retract my previous statements and I apologize for doubting Walt.
Posted by Ben Burrows at August 30th, 2007 at 10:37 amHotmail can be accessed for free from Outlook.
I couldn’t disagree more with this evaluation, mainly due to the number, size and extreme intrusiveness (flashing, spinning etc) of the graphical banner ads and button ads. They take up fully 1/4 of the screen, and load each and every time a new page or email is opened. As an att-yahoo dsl subscriber, I am dismayed that att-yahoo chooses to foist the ads on paying subscribers. Moreover, the graphical ads load extremely slowly, and a good percentage of the time cause the page loading to hang.
Yahoo has received hundreds of complaints posted to their yodel site on this issue.
Bottom line is Yahoo has taken an otherwise nice interface and bloated and ruined it with the sheer size and number of graphical ads.
Posted by Steve Chuck at August 30th, 2007 at 1:29 pmWalt,
Something you missed on your review of Gmail and Y! mail:
I used Y! mail for years. And I pay for an ad-free account with spam filtering, etc. I used it to check my own pop email address, I never used the Yahoo address. But there is a big problem with this. If you get a lot of mail, and you are away from the computer for a day before you check your pop mailbox from Yahoo, it can take a very long time to download all your new mail! Try downloading 100 new messages though an outside pop to Y! mail. It is rather unpleasant.
Trying out gmail, I found that it AUTOMATICALLY checks your pop mailbox for you every 30 to 60 minutes. Thus when you log onto gmail all your messages are already there, you have no horrendous wait for the email to download. Additionally, gmails spam filters seem pretty good, perhaps better than Y!, so most of the junk mail is already gone as well.
This difference in how the programs handle pop-ing an outside mailbox is a big deal. I much prefer the Y! interface, but the fact that the program only pops your mail when you request it, and does it slowly, makes it unusable for those of us who get a lot of mail from an outside address.
Gmail has become my preferred web mail, just for the automatic popping. The only flaw it has with this, is that when you manually want to update your mail (avoiding the 30 to 60 minute wait for it to automatically happen) you have to dig into the account settings to force it to happen immediately. If gmail would put a download button on the main page, it would handle this perfectly. I’m hoping!
Of course, Y! could add automatic email download like gmail has and then it would be a great program for people who use an outside address. But until then, it’s gmail for us.
Posted by Carl Liebold at August 30th, 2007 at 3:45 pmWalt,
I couldn’t disagree more and echo the others.
I use gmail for it’s amazing search capabilities. That was something you never covered in your review. I can find any email written in the past with a few search words. I can even find old attachements and bring them up on my BlackBerry using the gmail client.
And I agree with others on their praise for gmail’s effective spam filtering. I send all my email, even email from Yahoo through gmail’s filtering.
Walt, I usually agree with most of your reviews, but this is one review that seems to miss the mark by a long distance.
Posted by phil aker at August 31st, 2007 at 7:34 amCarl,
Here is a way you can do it.
Tools -> Send/Receive -> Send/Receive Settings -> Define Send/Receive Groups
Check “Schedule an automatic send/receive every ‘X’ minutes”.
Most likely you used Gmail tool to configure your outlook thus, it took care of it.
Walt,
Posted by Nirav Bhavsar at August 31st, 2007 at 5:03 pmVery nice article. Couldn’t agree with you more.
Walt,
Posted by Nirav Bhavsar at August 31st, 2007 at 6:38 pmCouple of feature that you didn’t mention are; calendar at the bottom and RSS reader. The placement of the calendar is nice and the fact that now you can see maps right within mail without opening a new window and getting distracted. And, being able to send SMS from email is game changing; just like gmail did with chat within gmail.
Once logged in, I can chat, send sms, read news, see my corporate calendar (using autosync for Outlook) and ofcourse check emails without ever leaving the page. I like the ability to flag my emails for followup and the fact that you never have to leave your page in order to add an event in your calendar. It has become muh more stickier than ever. I am the guy who likes more features and utlize them for better. This is certainly an application for me.
Nirav, I think you missed the point of my post. Yahoo doesn’t even have the menu tree you suggested! Although I’m not sure, I suspect you are talking about having outlook check a yahoo mailbox. (I’m not sure, because I don’t use outlook.) That’s not what I was about. I mean you cannot get Yahoo to automatically check an outside pop mailbox at another ISP.
Posted by Carl Liebold at August 31st, 2007 at 10:08 pmC
Carl,
Posted by Nirav Bhavsar at September 1st, 2007 at 12:47 pmI take that back. I was definitely talking about fetching emails into Outlook. I use outlook to get emails from my yahoo,gmail and hotmail accounts. I do agree that it would be great to have that ability in yahoomail.
Carl,
Posted by Nirav Bhavsar at September 2nd, 2007 at 2:08 amI just gave it a try by your method. I am pulling emails from Gmail into Yahoomail without any issues. Perhaps they have fixed any issues they had at the time. But, thank you for the good tip on that. Another way of doing the same is “forwarding” mail from gmail into yahoo. And, that works pretty well too. Since, I like the RSS/Calendar/News/Weather thingy I may well just get rid of using Outlook for personal mails.
Thanks for the idea once again.
Y! will not automatically download the messages for you. Read my original post.
Posted by Carl Liebold at September 2nd, 2007 at 6:03 pmC
I usually like your opinions, but this is such a biased (for Yahoo!) article that you have written. You are clearly not objective, and are clearly just anti-Microsoft.
Posted by Kirit Sarvaiya at September 4th, 2007 at 10:02 amThe reason people stick to Yahoo! Mail Classic is because the new Yahoo! Mail is just something to abhor.
Hotmail has all the benefits, and is really fast; the only thing inhibiting me (temporarily, I assure) is that my personal domain name is stuck with Yahoo! Mail and it’s just a pain to figure out how to get out of their quagmire of Customer Service and understand how to migrate my domain name away to Hotmail.
WOW! I was caught off guard by all the negative feedback re the latest YahooMail, which I have found to be just wonderful.
I started with email when Netscape was ‘born’, and over the years have dabbled with most of the emerging email clients, sticking with Netscape until Mozilla Thunderbird came along (and with it the wonderful FireFox browser). I presently have a Gmail account, and use Thunderbird for outgoing emails where I need to Drag&Drop jpg, gif, and bmp files into the body of the message (Thunderbird automatically converts bmp to a compressed jpg).
However, Y! has become my favorite for lots of reasons: unlimited storage; wonderful tabs feature; great search capability; very logical layout (GUI); first class support; drag & drop; auto spell correction; and so much more.
I am a real fan of Google in general, so when Gmail first hit the street, I enthusiastically signed up for a gmail.com account, using it for miscellaneous work. I was very disappointed for various reasons. I do not have any experience with HotMail.
So, FWIW, and IMNSHO, I find the latest YahooMail to be an excellent program — agreeing with Walter Mossberg, and other professional reviewers — who have rated Y! #1 amongst the online email programs.
David Carlson
Posted by David Carlson at September 4th, 2007 at 6:35 pmFresno CA
Carl,
Posted by Nirav Bhavsar at September 4th, 2007 at 8:02 pmI did see your original mail. Now, I am pulling emails from Gmail into my Y! Mail. So, instead of using Outlook to pull my emails from Y! and Gmail; I am pulling everything from Gmail into my yahoo. And, with yahoo Go; it automatically downloads on my WM phone. Works like a breeze for me. Thans again for the info.
Carl, Just curious. How do you get to know that gmail checks emails every 30-40 mins.? Coz, when I log into Y! mail I do see forwarded emails (from my gmail) from afternoon already there. Now, what I don’t know is whether Y! pulled it when I logged in or they were already there. Perhaps gmail is so fast that we don’t realize they were pulled when we log in.
Posted by Nirav Bhavsar at September 4th, 2007 at 8:27 pmNirav, I’m not talking about a forwarding mechanism. And I’m not talking about the Y! native mailbox (xxx@yahoo.com). Forwarding to your Y! mailbox is not the same thing as checking your outside pop server with Y!.
Posted by Carl Liebold at September 5th, 2007 at 10:41 amGmail has a menu (look in settings / accounts / and in the “Get mail from other acounts” click on “history”). It will show you how often it has checked your outside pop mailbox.
Y! will never automatically check your outside pop mailbox unless you ask it to do it by clicking on “check mail” and pull down to select the outside pop mailbox you want to check. Leave your Y! mail alone for a day and or two, and then when you go and manually check your mail, it has to download your 200 messages since yesterday: it takes forever. And if the spam checking is weak, it dumps far too many of the spam messages in you mailbox as well. It makes for a horrible experience when checking your email from a internet cafe in Sicily after spending two days travelling. Example: Say you work at Nirav.com. Your company hosts your email box: boss@nirav.com. You travel to Prague on business without your laptop. After the 14 hour trip plus two nights, lets say 30 hours, you find an internet kiosk and logon to Y! You try and use Y! mail to check the nirav.com pop server. You will find it is horrible and be using gmail the next day…
C
My experience with Yahoo Mail is that the spam filter is AWFUL!
Gmail has been filtering mail for the last 10 months - 600-800 a DAY - and maybe 50 spams have gotten thru THE WHOLE TIME - Yahoo lets in dozens and dozens PER DAY!
What’s with the Yahoo technical staff?
Posted by Robert Woods at December 5th, 2007 at 1:32 am