Review : Yahoo Mail Beta
There are 1000s of reviews out there.. praising or criticizing Yahoo mail beta. But my short review is the result based on my experiences for the past 6+ months usage.
Mail Client
I was feeling good to use Yahoo Mail beta for the first time. Reason? It uses the Thunderbird/Eudora style interaction. No page scrolls (but obviously, there are internal scrolls) that make me put my finger on the scroll-wheel. I do not have to learn anything new… it is the same user-experience as a binary email client. Folders on the left. Subjects on the top and message in the bottom.
Shortcut Keys
Shortcut keys are not used widely by web-users. The fact is 98% of the web applications do not offer shortcut keys. Only the rest 2% have shortcut keys support. Yahoo mail beta uses shortcut keys, that you would normally use in your regular email client. “R” for reply, “F” for forward etc. And the most important feature I love is group delete. Just click on a subject, press the arrow keys and select multiple subjects, then press delete. All gone!
In Gmail I have to click on the “Select” boxes (Check boxes technically) and then press the “Delete” or “Archive” button. Sometimes I find this very tedious, when there are lot of messages to be deleted at once.
Folders/Views
Yahoo mail beta sticks to the”Folders” concept.This is one reason I always prefer to use Yahoo mail beta, probably because I am used to that Folders concept. Though Gmail style “Views/Tagged” approach is not different from “Folders”, Folders makes me feel comfortable.
Speed
Yahoo mail beta is quick and easy. Not to mention that, at times I get some XML errors, which I suspect happens because of packet loss or some other connectivity problems. Or even, that may be because of a some glitch at server level. Whatever it is.. I never faced any critical situations. On the whole, I am okay with the speed and responsiveness of the UI and service.
Problems
The problems start with resolutions. Yahoo mail beta definitely requires screens larger than 1024×768. My computer at home uses 1024×768 and it is barely fit to display the yahoo mail UI. The browser occupies the 20% of vertical space and Yahoo mail’s top headings occupies another 10% of vertical space, leaving the rest 70% for mail UI.
Because of this real estate problem, I can only see 7 or 8 subjects and just-bare-minimum of the message body at any time.
Conclusion
Yahoo mail beta is good. And the UI is targeted at corporate users or assuming that all users will prefer this mail-client style UI. I guess that will be a bad assumption because people do not have time to learn.