The New Yahoo! Mail: A Mixed Message

News reports from throughout the tech world are out about Yahoo!’s release of its new Mail application from beta. Problem is, it’s not out of beta. Not yet, at least.

Log in to the service (first debuted in September ’06) and you find the ‘Beta’ tag still fit snug right below the logo. Why’s it still there? Well, the company’s going to perform a sort of worldwide “rollout”. According to Elinor Mills of CNET’s Webware blog, it’s going to happen over the next six weeks. So, by the first week of October, you should be experiencing the new Yahoo! Mail without seeing another beta disclosure. Probably. Maybe. Who knows.

More newsworthy, perhaps, is the bonus announcement of some additional features to be presented with the official rollout. Along with Outlook-esque revamp and the introduction of a new tab-based structure, comes the ability to send and receive both Yahoo! and Windows Live instant messages as well as SMS messages freely. Meaning no cost to you. Texting a note to a phone might cost the mobile’s owner some change, but you stay in the clear. How nice for you. How unfair for them. So life goes.

Unfortunately, while the features are plenty, the new Yahoo! Mail is as a whole quite disappointing. Whereas its aged ancestor - still live and kicking, mind you - is devoid of some common features delivered as standard freebies by many services elsewhere on the Web - POP3 access, for one - the new version offers a strange mismatch of experiences. In short, it’s a downgrade.

POP3 is still paid-for feature, as was originally the case. Can’t quite understand why. If you know, do enlighten me, please.

And on the flip side (visually speaking), the new structure of the application is far too complicated, or at least appears to be so. There now seem to be more links and things in the same amount of space, that, if one is migrating over after years spent using the original utility, are likely to be difficult to grapple with. As “at home” users of desktop-based email clients may be with the new Yahoo! Mail, such individuals would not opt to use a Web-based application of this kind over their trusty local ute anyway, so I come away feeling only as if the new service has simply been created to get some oohs and ahhs from a supply of mainstream tech journalists over “how far Yahoo! has come” and how “advanced” the company’s new offering indeed is.

A better path for Yahoo! to have taken would have been to bring about a tasteful, conservative update on the old styling (keep it dead simple, or as much as is possible given the times) with a significant revamp at the backend. Bring into the fold real-time updates, so as to avoid manual refreshes. Remove graphic advertisements entirely. Include both the IM and SMS features. And allow free POP3 access. If they wish to charge an annual fee for something, I would rather it be the complete removal of advertising and a hefty storage upgrade.

The new Yahoo! Mail is slow, it’s needlessly complex, and gives one the impression that the company simply grew too ambitious on the layout side of things, and did not realize that, at the end of the day, they’ve delivered Yahoo! Mail as it always was (apart from the additions of IM and SMS, of course), only now it’s got itself a semi-professional face to flaunt. Which I could do without, personally.

In all, I much prefer the original application at the moment, which, despite its inadequacies, is far easier to handle than its successor. And I’ve no doubt a great many Yahoo! Mail users will feel the same.

(Note: Roughly 20 minutes after sending off an SMS to my mobile phone from within Yahoo! Mail, the message had yet to arrive on my handset. Blame it on the 'Beta', I guess.)

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