Yahoo To Update Mail Service

tonyq writes "Yahoo! is beginning beta testing of a completely reworked UI for Yahoo! Mail that incorporates DHTML technologies. The web-based application resembles a desktop e-mail client. Features include message preview; drag-and-drop filing; the capability of quickly searching e-mail headers, body text and attachments; and the ability to view multiple e-mails at the same time in separate windows and scroll through all message headers in a folder rather than one page at a time. Other niceties are auto-complete, right-click menus and standard keyboard shortcuts. A user who got an early look has graciously posted screenshots. Yahoo is also taking signups on their what's new for Mail page."

Still no encryption?

[Catamaran]

I might switch back to yahoo from gmail if they ever allow me to log in encrypted and remain encrypted (I know that I can log in via https, but after that the connection reverts to unencrypted).

No plaintext protocols for login, please

[gdav]

Or, for that matter, for my data.

Why do any webmail services still use unencrypted http? I'd be quite glad to see nothing but https on any services that I log in to.

Looks Great, but...

[ackthpt]

Where are the ads? This is Yahoo and they need to generate revenue. I don't like Yahoo mail because of all the ads in the current incarnation. I think this is probably a bit deceptive. There's gotta be ads in there somewhere, lots of them.

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[soft_guy]

That's right. I've probably signed up 10 or 12 times for Yahoo mail accounts, but I've never even had a GMail invite.

Mirrordot

[aembleton]

Mirrordot have cached the screenshots: http://mirrordot.org/stories/657bff49a3acdb9421bf2 24780af814f/index.html [mirrordot.org]

Compatibility?

[pwnage]

How come none of you goofballs has asked the important question yet: does this new interface work with standards-compliant browsers, or is this just more crap that will require Internet Explorer?

Re:It looks impressive

[Seumas]

Yeah, I'm going to trust my email and privacy to a company that worked with the Chinese government to imprison a journalist for a decade.

Re:No plaintext protocols for login, please

[Bogtha]

Why do any webmail services still use unencrypted http?

Have you forgotten that typical emails will pass between a number of hosts unencrypted as it is being delivered? Where's the advantage in encrypting the last leg of the journey if none of the others are encrypted?

Re:yahoo's answer to gmail.

[Anonymous Coward]

But you still can't get GMail without advertisements plastered all over the inbox and the messages.

You know, when I read this I was genuinely surprised. I remember reading about how the contextual ads depend on keywords found in your email etc, but don't actually remember seeing any.

I just logged into my GMail account, and whaddaya know? There are adverts there! I swear, I've never even noticed them before. I don't class that as "plastered all over the inbox", I class that as "low-key" or perhaps "almost unnoticable".

Re:yahoo blahhoo

[mikejz84]

99.99% of the time if it's html, it's not worth reading.

How are they rolling this out?

[Faxmaster]

Are they just rolling this out to users at random? I'm a paid subscriber (Plus user) and I didn't get the change...I even signed up on their Mail Beta user tester page. You would think paying customers would get all the new toys first.

Re:No plaintext protocols for login, please

[Anonymous Coward]

because during the last leg of the journey is when people who know you personally are likely to interfere. for example, the network admin at your job may find out that you have been quitely trying to sue the corp, and your vulnerabilities were discussed with the lawyer over personal email. now, any other admin spying wouldnt care except for the fact that this is YOUR admin at your job.

Will they also fix their login??

[tji]

One of the things I dislike the most about Yahoo! Mail is their login process..

1. It defaults to clear http, not https. Nice way to encourage users to expose their passwords... This should obviously default to https, and require users to jump through hoops to send their password in the clear. (GMail uses https for authentication).

2. Authentication only lasts a day, then your session expires and you have to re-authenticate. For me, the expiration usually happened when I was typing a long reply to an e-mail, and clicked "send" only to be greeted with the error message saying I needed to authenticate again (in the clear), and my message was lost.

This combination is particularly briliant... encourage insecure authentication, then require users to do it often.

This is just one of many ways that GMail beats Yahoo! Mail.. I'll check out the improvements, but I doubt I'll ever go back to Yahoo.

Re:Zimbra's offering is very similar to Yahoo's

[wtanaka]

Zimbra's UI is sluggish on a slow computer. Yahoo Mail won't make that mistake.

POP3

[furrywithwings]

When is Yahoo going to get their head out of their ass and offer POP3 access? Google offers a superior service, more space, and Pop3. And yahoo mail is NOT worth the $19 a year just to get the same features as google. Sorry Yahoo, not news worthy! Thanks for playing though.

i only want one feature

[adrianmonk]

I use my Yahoo! Mail that I've had since about 1998 on a daily basis, and I really only want one new feature: I want to be able to move to the next message in the list in well under a second.

Preferably, now that I am sitting at a computer with a 1.25 MHz PowerPC processor and 1 GB of RAM, I'd like to be able to do this as fast as I used to be able to do on a SPARCstation 2 (which had a 40 MHz processor) equipped with a whopping 64 MB of RAM. Ten years ago, on that computer that was 1.5 orders of magnitude slower than the one I'm using now, I could go to the next message in about 0.1 seconds.

Yes, I realize there are web servers and things (like the open Internet) involved here, but it should still be do-able. If need be, they could easily prefetch and cache messages in the browser's memory, so that when I hit the "next" button, it goes there right away. And I don't mind if unusually large messages don't load that quickly.

It would also be nice to be able to jump from mailbox index to message body and back in a fraction of a second and vice versa, while I'm asking for things.

This all sounds nice, but

[beforewisdom]

This all sounds nice, I will enjoy it, but what I really want from everyone...my web mail, google's usenet, mozilla's news client and the people who make web board software is better filtering.

Yahoo ( the paid version ) has good anti-spam features, but I could get so much more out of them if their plain old filters were more flexible/ powerful.

With the exception of slashdot, most web based forums suffer from either too much control or too little control. The site owners do not want to play umpire, hear complaints, etc and I can't blame them. The time has come for 100% ( note the 100% ) user controlled content.

By this I mean giving the user the ability to make it as if a regular objectionable poster never existed in the forum. Making his/her original posts vanish, along with all replys to his/her post and any mention of him/her.

The org that comes out with this first ( proprietary or open source ) will be able to very visibly set their software apart from all other similar software. The forum owner who implements such software will have a hook for drawing in members, his/her board will not just be another board among many boards for that same subject.

People really want this.

Google seems to be hesitant about these kind of filters. The mozilla mail client will take the entire thread/tree of posts out, they know it is a bug, but nobody seems motivated to fix it.

Yahoo can give their email filters much more flexibility and power, but they do not.

I'm guessing filters are a lot of work, that is why these various groups have been slow to do it.

It seems like what people want the most, more control in getting rid of the crap they don't want.