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Yahoo! Acquires Oddpost 250

Posted by timothy from the blame-gmail dept.
weiyuent writes "We all know the arrival of Gmail has initiated a new round of competition amongst the major webmail providers. Well, Yahoo! has acquired Oddpost and will be integrating Oddpost's amazing interface to strengthen its offerings. One might wonder though how to reconcile Oddpost's MSIE requirement with Yahoo!'s (thus far) cross-platform approach. Oh well, at least it will likely put an end to Oddpost's exasperating attempt to be cute in their communication."
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Yahoo! Acquires Oddpost More

Yahoo! Acquires Oddpost

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  • Client-side 2GB goodness (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @09:46PM (#9692980)
    An IE-only interface and an integrated news client (like the one included with my current provider's [mailsnare.net] webmail) when all I really want is for Yahoo to give me IMAP. I'll even pay for it, as I do with my current provider. I would switch to have Yahoo's nice interface.

    POP3 is soooo 1990's.

    • Mozilla support is coming (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @10:15PM (#9693175)
      Oddpost has stated that they are working on cross-browser support right now.
      • It is pretty sad that they didn't do this from the start. It is not hard to make a standards compliant HTML site. It makes one question the "programming" talents of the people at Oddpost. So far Yahoo! Mail has worked cross-platorm for me and the same with Google. I will stick to those two. I have no place for idiots that cannot make a simple standards compliant web app.

        • Re:Mozilla support is coming (Score:4, Informative)

          by senzafine ( 630873 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @10:56PM (#9693400) Homepage
          Gmail isn't completely crossbrowser either. Gmail in opera simply doesn't work (last I checked).

          It's not necessarily the difficulty of making complex interfaces (dhtml...i.e. drag/drop). But realizing the return on time.

          Spending 25 hours to let 8% (or less at times) at certain points in production just doesn't seem to be worth it.

          However, kudos to those that do go the extra mile. I've been working on a project that had an IE only interface for about a year and a half. About 2 weeks ago we got it working in Mozilla/Firefox. Almost working in safari/konqueror. But honestly...the latter isn't worth our time at the moment.
          • I've taken to designing in Moz/Firefox and tweaking for IE after that. There's typically only a few small changes (then there's the odd nightmare, of course).

            The problem is more often working the other way. How many people made apps with things like XML data islands then found themselves deep in IE without a paddle?

            Anyway, just another view from the trench.
            • Been there. I just recently did that. It sucked. I was targetting the majority of users for our first release (IE). But in hindsight coding for Moz/Firefox and then adapting for IE would have been alot more efficient.

              Lesson Learned.
          • Gmail isn't completely crossbrowser either. Gmail in opera simply doesn't work (last I checked).

            It is also fairly buggy in Safari (you have to reload the page a lot). But it is still in beta.. I'm assuming either Google will fix gmail, or Apple will fix safari.
          • How is this "Informative"? Just because you and your team don't know standard HTML, doesn't mean the rest of the real programming world does not. Also, where in the world do you get and extra 25 hours? If you are worth your weight in salt, you will know how to spit out simple standards compliant HTML in the first place. Seriously, HTML is not a programming language, it is a markup language and is not very hard to learn. Hell, even AOL users can put out some standard HTML.
            • It's informative because my comment wasn't strictly about HTML. It was about complex user interfaces with movable elements via standard drag and drop functionality. These interfaces are much more of a pain than standard "static" layouts. Hence you rarely see them in production. Making a website behave like a desktop application with the use of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript across multiple browsers doesn't take a rocket scientist. But not much does...

              Our code is tweaked for firefox/mozilla now also. But t
              • But the truth be told that it still works better in IE. Not because of the code but because their rendering engine handles some things regarding dhtml better.
                No, it is your code [dhtmlcentral.com]. This site works great in Firefox, moveable elements, maximize, minimized, etc.
          • Tell ya what, how's about you just make cross-platform code to begin with, rather than making IE code and then fixing it?
            • Define cross-platform for me...ie on mac, safari, firefox, konqueror, opera?

              Welcome to the real world where some projects don't have unlimited resources and time. And your target audience is comprised of about 90% IE users. In terms of $ ... that becomes priority.

              Ideally everyone used firefox and then you don't have to worry about it.

              This isn't some complex table/div layout. It's an attempt to bring true desktop functionality to a web browser.
              • All I'm saying is that making it cross-platform from the beginning is a better idea than tacking it on at the end. Maybe if you had built compatibility into your project a year and a half ago, you wouldn't have had to spend the extra 25 hours on it.

                Besides, what about people with disabilities (e.g. bad vision or even blindness)? Even if they used IE, they still might not be able to use your site if it isn't standards-compliant. (I mention this because the kind of people who make IE-only sites tend to al
                • I agree. Under different circumstances I would have liked to do that. Personally if a site doesn't work for me under firefox...I rarely open IE up to view it.

                  One of the driving factors for me was I got sick of opening IE to develop and use the site.

                  At the moment we're not very much targetting users with bad vision and blindness. The site itself is for photo sharing.

                  In time we want to have all the kinks ironed out such as certain accessibility issues. But we're focused on a soft launch targetting as
          • Our shop has basically been forced into IE 5.5 SP2 or greater only. This is because the web facing part of our CRM is very VERY MS focused. The CRM vendor is a Microsoft lackey it seems like, and is completely dependent on Windows environments and SQL server, as well as Microsoft Exchange too.

            Personally, it drives me up the wall, but I don't really have any way to convince anyone to switch to something else, as we have invested heavily in customizing this application to our very specific needs. The data
      • ourbrisbane.com [ourbrisbane.com]'s webmail supports all the nifty features, ie. multi-select, drag'n'drop, preview pane, automatic mail checking, realtime search ala iTunes, right-click menus, shortcut-keys, export to zip, etc etc, its free and fully compatible with Mozilla.

        It uses horde [horde.org] for the message viewing, and the addressbook but the rest I wrote. ourbrisbane.com even agreed to release it back to horde as opensource, but no-one on the list even got back to me...

    • Re:Client-side 2GB goodness (Score:5, Informative)

      by FU_Fish ( 140910 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @10:26PM (#9693235) Homepage
      Try Fusemail [fusemail.com]. They offer an imap and webmail interface for something like $4 quarterly and they can pull your e-mail from your yahoo account and others.

  • Not cross platform (Score:5, Informative)

    by beforewisdom ( 729725 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @09:46PM (#9692984)
    One might wonder though how to reconcile Oddpost's MSIE requirement with Yahoo!'s (thus far) cross-platform approach.
    It is not cross platform. They do not support the ical standard or any non-windows calendar clients. ( yes, I sent them a polite suggestion )

    • Re:Not cross platform (Score:5, Informative)

      by lessthanjakejohn ( 766177 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @09:48PM (#9692996)
      Launchcast does not work in Firefox on windows either.
    • Yahoo's Games section plays host to many third-party developed games that'll only run on Windows and/or IE.
    • This is about email interfaces, not calendar standards.

      Sign up for a test oddpost account and try to open it with ANY non-IE browser. It doesn't work. For a webmail client that's a fairly big deal.

      I don't mind TOO much that exchange isn't -insert-everything-here- complaint because I CAN hit its web interface from firefox in linux and get my work email and calendar. It's not as nice as using it in IE, but it does WORK. That's more than can be said about oddpost.

      • It's not as nice as using it in IE

        I noticed that as well. I wonder _why_ MS choose not to make it standars compliant? All the crap they do with IE can be done in a cross-broser/platform manner, yet for some _strange_ reason MS choose to make it better in IE only. Does MS know how much IE sucks? Or do most MS employees think that IE is some how better then Mozilla/Firefox? Is there any human alive that thinks IE is better then Mozilla/Firefox? And please don't give me reasons because of market share.

        • I bet it is directly related to how they develop their stuff and how they develop it. Their tools like Visual Studio are geared towards their own browser (even though it can be used to write compliant code) and I would imagine that they are not encouraged to use other browsers during testing, or if they do, it would be minimal. They do not have a good reason to spend extra effort to make sure it works in other browsers, so they take the easy route provided by the tools.

          I've personally seen this happen on

        • Re:Not cross platform (Score:3, Interesting)

          by mdfst13 ( 664665 )
          " I wonder _why_ MS choose not to make it standars compliant?"

          We are talking about the company that deliberately set out to make the MS Money experience *worse* by extending the amount of time it took to accomplish tasks. Why? So they could sell more banner ads (recent /. story from MS employee blog). The way I see it, we're lucky Exchange's web pages work in non-IE browsers at all. It's probably just so they can give the impression that IE is better than other browsers (if it didn't work at all, peopl

    • Re:Not cross platform (Score:5, Informative)

      by bwy ( 726112 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @09:55PM (#9693055)
      Cross platform? Hell, their home page is not even cross-browser apparently.

      This page [oddpost.com] seems to not scroll in Mozilla 1.5 even if all the content can't be shown in the browser window because of size. You know you're in trouble when they fuck up their main marketing page.

      • Re:Not cross platform (Score:5, Interesting)

        by bigbadwlf ( 304883 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @10:23PM (#9693217)
        Using Firefox 0.9.2 on Windows, the page lacks a scrollbar but it does scroll with the mouse wheel.
        Strange.
        • Same with Mozilla 1.6, though it took you guys pointing it out for me to notice.

        • Re:Not cross platform (Score:5, Informative)

          by sasha328 ( 203458 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @11:34PM (#9693604) Homepage
          Mouse wheel works, but the up/down arrow keys don't work.

          The source has the following interesting snippet:
          /*var isIE55upForPC = ( ( ua.indexOf( "MSIE" ) != -1 )
          && ( ua.indexOf( "Windows" ) != -1 )
          && ( ua.indexOf( "MSIE 5.0" ) == -1 )
          && ( ua.indexOf( "MSIE 4" ) == -1 )
          && ( ua.indexOf( "MSIE 3" ) == -1 )
          && ( ua.indexOf( "MSIE 2" ) == -1 )
          && ( ua.indexOf( "Opera" ) == -1 ) );*/

          var isIE55upForPC = false; // for purposes of disabling signup
          Notice the "disabling signup" comment for non-IE or Opera browsers.
          I do not use Yahoo, but hope they change this silliness.

        • Very strange (Score:4, Interesting)

          by jesterzog ( 189797 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @11:39PM (#9693630) Journal

          I'm using Firefox 0.8 with the RadialContext extension. That's the pie menu replacement for the right-click context menu.

          If I scroll down the page with the mouse-wheel and right click, the pie menu appears at the top of the page. I have to scroll all the way back up in order to use it. ie. The context menu placement is for some reason confusing window-relative placement with page-relative placement.

          It's possible that this is a bug in RadialContext, although this page with its odd combination of presentation, scripting and style attributes is the first place where I've ever seen it happen.

      • wacked out.. wonder how that happened?
    • There are some more problems. Yahoo! Mail Plus used to bitch after you log out on Mozilla saying that your browser doesn't support a certain protocol. Yahoo! Photos uses Active X for its slideshow. Yahoo! Briefcase's upload buttons don't work under Safari. The SBC Yahoo browser bundled with the ISP's install package uses IE's engine. I've never seen a company more in love with IE than Yahoo. If anything, Oddpost will probably remain IE-only for even longer since Yahoo! acquired it.

    • Re:Not cross platform (Score:3, Informative)

      by Skim123 ( 3322 )
      Nor can you compose HTML-formatted emails using the WYSIWYG tool with browsers other than IE... even though there exist such tools that work in Mozilla FireFox. Not that I'm into writing HTML-formatted emails, or anything.

  • Yahoo is fine the way it is (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SCHecklerX ( 229973 ) <greg@gksnetworks.com> on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @09:47PM (#9692992) Homepage

    Google is good at what it does: searching and newsgroups with a few other potentially useful things.

    Yahoo is good at what it does: news, yellow pages, maps, tv listings, movie listings, etc.

    I use yahoo primarily for 'book' information, and google as a search engine.

    • However, both sides seem to have an eye on overtaking the other's stronghold... Yahoo seems to be readying new search offerings, while Google's getting into the e-mail business for the first time.

      Of course, the results seem to be great for the user. Yahoo has clearly just reinvested in its mail offering which has been static for quite a while up until the pressure of Google came. Now, will Yahoo make Google come up with an even better search than they have now?

  • what's the cost? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @09:48PM (#9693000)
    oddpost is currently a subscription service if i read correctly. will yahoo change all those subscriber accounts into free ones paid by advertising revenue?

  • Hotmail (Score:4, Funny)

    by powerpuffgirls ( 758362 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @09:48PM (#9693003)
    Based on Microsoft's recently move to compete in search engine, I wonder why it doesn't do more in Hotmail? Does it think it has secured enough user base to ignore new comers?

    Oh by the way, if Google has gmail, MS introduce hmail, Apple gives you imail, Sun introduces jmail... :)

    • Re:Hotmail (Score:4, Informative)

      by TheSpoom ( 715771 ) * <{ten.00mrebu} {ta} {todhsals}> on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @10:10PM (#9693155) Homepage Journal
      Umm...

      Hotmail recently gave users 250MB of storage. If that's not directly related to Google starting Gmail, I don't know what is ;^)
      • Hotmail recently gave users 250MB of storage. If that's not directly related to Google starting Gmail, I don't know what is ;^)

        Now if only Hotmail:

        - Had Spam filters as good as GMail
        - Grouped messages into threads
        - Allowed emails to be labeled into "psuedo-groups"
        - Had a blazingly fast interface
        - Keyboard Shortcuts
        - Cross-platform DHTML everything

      • I haven't seen this 250MB of storage yet on my account. I'm sure it's in the works, but it hasn't arrived yet. ...or is my account simply broken?
      • Does anybody know when/why Hotmail dropped support for the format=flowed option of text/plain--RFC3676 (orginally RFC2646).

        It used to support it.

    • >> Oh by the way, if Google has gmail, MS introduce hmail, Apple gives you imail, Sun introduces jmail... :)

      And Excite brings you "email" and skyrockets back into relevance!

  • Easy to remedy... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bergeron76 ( 176351 ) * on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @09:49PM (#9693006) Homepage
    One might wonder though how to reconcile Oddpost's MSIE requirement with Yahoo!'s (thus far) cross-platform approach.

    This is easy to remedy: Microsoft acquires Yahoo!

    MSFT could kill 3 birds with one stone - they could force all existing Yahoo! Mail users to use IE, they would gain a significant market share in the search engine market (against Google), and they'd get Oddpost as a bonus (not that Oddpost is terribly exciting).

    • Re:Easy to remedy... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @09:53PM (#9693046)
      Of course, wasn't Hotmail the hands-down leader in the free web e-mail market before Microsoft aquired it?

    • Re:Easy to remedy... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      • they could force all existing Yahoo! Mail users to use IE
        Since they have no such requirement for Hotmail, it seems very unlikely that they would do that.
      • they would gain a significant market share in the search engine market (against Google),
        Maybe. MSN and Yahoo are about equal right now (link [searchenginewatch.com]), and given that there is overlap between those groups, I'd be willing to bet that the group of users that use both yahoo and MSN is rather larger than those who use yahoo and google.
      • they'd get Oddpost as a
    • Microsoft's biggest problem is that MSFT is flat. The first obligation of any public firm is to shareholders, and so far shareholders of MSFT have been given a pittance of a dividend and a flat chart while the larger market has moved smartly upwards, and much of tech has bubbled.

      Microsoft clearly cannot develop the next generation of margin-growing services on its own, and I expect them to go on a buying spree soon. Shareholders are baying at the moon begging them to use their cash to get that stock moving

  • So that's what an amazing interface is? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @09:51PM (#9693022)
    Looks a heck of a lot like Outlook to me. I didn't know Slashdot posters were in a habit of flattering Microsoft developers.

  • Er... huh? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Senjutsu ( 614542 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @09:52PM (#9693034)
    I took a look at the link to Oddpost, but I'm having trouble seeing what exactly is so amazing about their e-mail interface. It looks like a low rent outlook clone.

    Anyone want to take a stab at explaining to me why Oddpost is so amazing?
    • Because it's a low rent Outlook clone that runs in a web browser. That's right, they took the time to clone outlook using JavaScript and sever-side tools such that the user gets the look and feel of Outlook but can use it without need to install anything on any computer that has MSIE on it.

      The service isn't as popular as it could be because they couldn't use their interface on a free webmail service... it was just too expensive to develop so they had to charge for it. However, it looks like Yahoo's come up
      • Because it's a low rent Outlook clone that runs in a web browser.

        Yeah, I figured that part. I just don't find the interface to be particularly 'amazing'. I never liked Outlook, though, so to each his own.

        That's right, they took the time to clone outlook using JavaScript and sever-side tools such that the user gets the look and feel of Outlook but can use it without need to install anything on any computer that has MSIE on it.

        Are there really very many computers that have IE but don't have Outlook?
    • Come on, I hardly see how asking what others find so amazing about the interface was flamebait. It was intended to stimulate a discussion of the interface, and nothing more.
    • it's hard as hell to write a nontrivial rich client with the existing web technologies.

      it's even harder to write it cross-platform, which is no doubt why Oddpost has always been IE-only. Can't blame them given IE's 95% market share.
      • it's hard as hell to write a nontrivial rich client with the existing web technologies.

        You've guessed wrong, but you mis-understand me.

        From a technical standpoint, it's a fairly neat achievement.

        From an interface standpoint (and the story mentions Oddpoint's amazing interface, mind), I don't find it amazing at all. It's strictly 'been there, done that' except this time on the web. Technically impressive, but 'meh' interface wise, in my opinion. Confusing those two issues (amazing interface vs amazing t
        • yes, it's an amazing interface. the amazing part is that it's done, and done well, in DHTML.
          • If you tell someone they are going to see an amazing interface, they're going to expect an amazing interface, not a standard interface that is an interesting achievement purely because of certain achievements under the hood.

            Amazing job of replicating a standard interface in an unlikely environment? Yes.

            Amazing interface? No.
          • I play carnage blender...so I'm definitely not antagonistic towards you

            but you're definitely wrong...I saw "INCREDIBLE interface" and I groaned because I want the best, and I've just completed the arduous task of migrating to gmail. I opened the oddwhatever link and saw a 3 pane interface...and sighed in relief. It's not an incredible interface, however technically advanced it may be.

            I think it's like saying William Hung is an incredible singer, when what you mean is that the amount of fame is incredibl

    • Re:Er... huh? (Score:4, Funny)

      by corian ( 34925 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @10:52PM (#9693378)
      Anyone want to take a stab at explaining to me why Oddpost is so amazing?

      Because this Slashdot story is actually an advertisement in disguise. Shhhh!

  • Oddpost Features (Score:5, Interesting)

    by neil.pearce ( 53830 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @09:53PM (#9693039) Homepage
    Odpost was pretty cool, a recap of its highlights...
    1) not a lick of advertising - Not any more
    2) accessible via POP & IMAP - Not any more
    3) send & receive large attachments - Not any more
    4) staggeringly effective spam filtering - Not any more
    5) Insert your favourite feature here - Not any more

    • Re:Oddpost Features (Score:5, Informative)

      by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @10:00PM (#9693081)
      We don't know if Yahoo's going to muck up Oddpost's killer features by trying to merge it into Yahoo... or if this is going to be a premium service that they're going to try to upsell their freeloaders into, at which point it may be allowed to run as-is with a much higher userbase and budget.
    • Oddpost was pretty cool, a recap of its highlights...
      1) not a lick of advertising - Not any more
      2) accessible via POP & IMAP - Not any more
      3) send & receive large attachments - Not any more
      4) staggeringly effective spam filtering - Not any more

      Oddpost was a pay service. #1, #2 and #3 were available from Yahoo's premium (pay) service. #4 is available for free. I fail to see, at least with the features you named, how Oddpost will be any lesser of a service under Yahoo! ownership.

  • And in case other people want to write yahoo (Score:5, Interesting)

    by beforewisdom ( 729725 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @09:56PM (#9693058)
    here is a well hidden but useful feedback link:

    http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/my/cgi_feedback

    Yahoo does listen to suggestions, it just takes many iterations and time.

  • Photo management is another one (Score:5, Informative)

    by prostoalex ( 308614 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @09:56PM (#9693059) Homepage Journal
    Google bought a photo management firm today [com.com], meanwhile Yahoo! Photos [yahoo.com] changed its disk space restrictions to unlimited quite a while ago.

    • Re:Photo management is another one (Score:4, Informative)

      by LiquidCoooled ( 634315 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @10:23PM (#9693220) Homepage Journal
      Speaking of benefits,

      Any existing Oddpost subscribers have a special bonus:

      Until then, all Oddpost subscriptions will be extended, free of charge. After the migration, you'll get an additional free year of premium Yahoo! Mail service including two gigs of storage, SpamGuard Plus, advanced virus protection and lots of other goodies.

      Thats from the OddPost announcement [oddpost.com]to subscribers page.

      I think thats quite a sweetener. gMail certainly has rocked the boat, and competition is good.

  • Well... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by XeRXeS-TCN ( 788834 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @09:58PM (#9693074)

    Hardly surprising that Yahoo have done something like this really... after all, the "quick and easy" way of trying to compete with GMail when you have that much money, is obviously to just find something similar and buy it ;P

    I do wonder about the suggestion that Yahoo is in any way cross-platform though. Especially considering the recent protocol change (reported on Slashdot) to lock out third party messenger clients like Trillian and Gaim. They are yet another proprietary company, so they'll design their system to run as *they* like, and if you don't want to adhere to it, tough.

    In saying that though, Oddpost has only *just* been acquired, and it says on their page that they are only starting to develop the merge between their service and Yahoo! Mail, so there is more than ample opportunity to ensure all browser compatibility before the main roll out. Whether they do or not remains to be seen, but I would hope they would take the recent announcements about the insecurity of IE, and the recent 1% loss in market share into account, and ensure that their service will be more universally accessible than it's current incarnation.

  • Is also now available on yahoo.

    Which is great, I can now go weeks at a time before emptying out the email account I use for google groups( the networking people at my job don't even know what usenet is, let alone how to set up a usenet server ).

    Steve

  • More competition is better for everyone (Score:4)

    by rnd() ( 118781 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @10:00PM (#9693089) Homepage
    I think most people have thusfar been impressed by the gmail GUI (I have, even though I've submitted a number of suggestions to Google for how to make it better)...

    If Yahoo begins to offer a richer client experience for email users, then it won't be long before many more people start wanting to use both sites with a variety of browsers, and soon both IE and Mozilla (this is /. so I'll mention Opera as well) will have better standards compliance as a consequence. Note how it's mostly the less-used and more esoteric areas of standard compliance where (today) one finds most of the inconsistencies...
    • Looking at the screenshot of Oddpost I have to say I am not too thrilled with it.

      I like the gmail interace, it is the first email interface I can see myself using extensivly and without too much of a fuzz or the fact that it would feel like a Webmail Interface.

      Where Gmail's is slick the one on Oddpost just... Well, looks odd to me, like a cross between Outlook and some old browser.

      OWA in Exchange 2003 is pretty cool (when you use IE), but from the all out web interfaces Gmail right now wins for me.

  • SBC Yahoo! DSL (Score:2, Insightful)

    by mailman-zero ( 730254 )

    One might wonder though how to reconcile Oddpost's MSIE requirement with Yahoo!'s (thus far) cross-platform approach.

    I happen to live in very small location where Cox Cable Internet Service is not available and my only options are Adelphia *shudder* and SBC. SBC just happens to use Yahoo! for all of their email accounts.

    Until now Linux has never been supported with the service per se, but it has always worked well even though they officially use a proprietary PPPoE connection. I just signed up for

  • the cool thing about Oddpost was that it was a central location for all your emails and a news feed aggregator. what I didn't like was the IE-only requirement.
  • But lets face it. The web browser is a really crappy place to work. RSS is a really interesting use of a hybrid web / rich client technology and that's interesting. Web Services are cool, but nearly unusable in their complexity if you go beyond time & temperature toys -- but the IDEA is right. Anyway, GMAIL is less impressive to this of us wierdo's who got hooked on NOTES years ago (yes, I know its bizzare to code for and feels weird if you're not used to it -- but so does PHP and PYTHON -- but its amazingly cool if you know how to make it do its thing). If Yahoo & Google fight it out for best UI bragging rights, we'll see innovation. Both companies are good at that.

  • Oddpost Creators Mentality... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @10:15PM (#9693178)
    Check the Oddpost tech logs [weblogs.com] for proof of Microsoft rebustness...

    Why doesn't oddpost work with anything other than Internet Explorer?
    I don't get it. I can see how it's annoying if you can't use something you've heard is cool. But it's not evil. I'm all for cross-platformness, but I also don't see the harm if someone wants to take advantage of some kick-ass functionality that exists in IE5W and no where else

    What was the cause of that service problem?
    IE no longer rapidly leaks memIE no longer rapidly leaks memory when sending message after message after message. Or at least leaks much less.ory when sending message after message after message. Or at least leaks much less.

    And that other service problem?
    Yesterday we resolved the MyDoom-related problems with account login and outgoing mail

    And that other service problem?
    After many long hours of toil, we've modified our systems to deal with the surge in email traffic caused by the MyDoom virus.

    Say again?
    Yikes, looks like we spoke too soon. We're still dealing with an onslaught of mail from the MyDoom virus. We'll continue to post updates here.

    How your IIS servers doing?
    Oddpost's performance degraded steadily over the month of November. This was primarily due to a memory leak on our IIS? servers

    MS loving twats...

  • Making it cross-platform (Score:4, Informative)

    by kindofblue ( 308225 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @10:17PM (#9693189)
    Yahoo/Oddpost could try to make it work on Mozilla/Firefox, etc. but I think that it requires some particular extensions built into IE 5+, to do stuff relating to SOAP and drag/drop, I think. At a minimum, some mechanism is required to talk to the server to avoid doing full web page refreshes.

    In other words, porting it is not simply a matter of porting to a different dialect of javascript, CSS, and the DOM.

    Therefore, Mozilla/Firefox, should have an extension and plugin that provides the same functionality required by Oddpost. Afterall, Mozilla users have already gone through the trouble of installing a foreign browser, so installing some good extensions is no big deal. Since Yahoo is very widely used, these nonstandard extensions would be very widely applicable.

    The required functionality could probably be done using a java applet running invisibly in the browser whose sole purpose is to communicate with the mail servers. But this requires launching the java VM which is heavy. That's why a lightweight extension that mimics the needed IE 5+ functionality might be preferable.

    • Re:Making it cross-platform (Score:4, Interesting)

      by BrerBear ( 8338 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @10:40PM (#9693317)
      Yahoo/Oddpost could try to make it work on Mozilla/Firefox, etc. but I think that it requires some particular extensions built into IE 5+, to do stuff relating to SOAP and drag/drop, I think. At a minimum, some mechanism is required to talk to the server to avoid doing full web page refreshes.

      I think you're projecting here. Mozilla / Firefox supports the same XMLHttpRequest functionality that IE does for avoiding full refreshes. There isn't anything really unique to what Oddpost is doing that couldn't be replicated for Moz/IE.

      Poor architectural decisions like this were some of the rejection points when Oddpost tried to sell itself to the company I work for a while back. I guess Yahoo is less discriminating.
      • I stand corrected, I hope. I vaguely recall what I read in the Oddpost FAQ about why it required IE 5. If the needed functionality in already built into standard Mozilla/et al, then great. It should be an easy (or not difficult) port then.
    • Perhaps, I'm not understanding what you're saying. But it seems to me that communicating with a server without full web page requests is simply a matter of using a hidden frame(iframes work nicely) and some javascript. I only poked around gmail a bit, seems to be what they're doing there to periodically get your new messages. I read the oddpost "Learn More" page, seems like that's what they're probably doing too.

      All the other stuff(drag and drop, right click menu, auto complete) is DOM/dhtml stuff that all
  • In this never ending Saga, can even SLASHDOT remain free of this coporate blood bath?

    M@
  • I see a couple of interesting things in this whole Yahoo/Oddpost/GMail webmail [cent-com.com] thing:
    • Will MS join the bandwagon and jazz up Hotmail (or provide a premium service) that does all the javascript funkiness (drag-n-drop, context menus etc)? They've already done this for exchange web access. If so, is that not kinda shooting desktop Outlook in the foot? Will they fall behind again on this New Thing due to their dekstop blinkers?
    • Why do the funky interface thing anyway? A website is a website, and a lot more

  • Begun again, These Browser Wars (Score:5, Interesting)

    by easyfrag ( 210329 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @11:34PM (#9693598)
    Over the past few months we have witnessed something remarkable: Browsers are "hot" again. Look at what's come down the pipes: Gmail, a possible plan for WHAT-WG may eventually turn out to be HTML 5.0, the demo of Apple's Dashboard technology, and now today's purchases by Yahoo and Google.

    Remember a few years ago how the (cross-platform) web browser was going to make the Windows desktop obsolete? We all know how that turned out, Microsoft leveraged its "advantage" in the desktop world to the browser market. But I think MS made a critical mistake in freezing development of IE and waiting for Avalon. We are starting to see some real slick web-based apps that are as useful as local applications. I've seen people here complaining that Oddpost is just a ripoff of Outlook, of course it is, but that's missing the point. What's important is that you can now get a desktop-like experience in the browser that wasn't possible a couple of years ago.

  • amazing interface? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by insomnyuk ( 467714 )
    Why does oddpost's interface look like my old POP3 client?

    Or Outlook 97. Yahoo's interface is a little cartoonish and could use some help with color contrasts (it's tougher to read on certain crappy LCD monitors), but I still prefer it to what screenshots I've seen from Oddpost.

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