DeWitt Clinton

Introduction:

Email, for better or for worse, is the most important form of communication today. While email will someday be supplanted (or rather subsumed) by more sophisticated message routing technologies, the average Internet user still spends a tremendous amount of time reading and writing email. As such, our choice of email client has a tremendous impact on our overall productivity.

When the first “second-generation” web email client appeared in Gmail, I realized for the first time that the web browser really did live up to its potential as a desktop replacement. Gmail was the first web email client that was simply better than the desktop equivalents. And now, with Yahoo! Mail Beta, there is a second contender for that crown.

A week or two ago I decided to give Yahoo! Mail a full evaluation. As it took several days before I was able to use the new beta, I experienced first-hand the difference between the first and second generations of webmail. And there is no comparison — the AJAX-enabled rich email client beats a static HTML application hands down.

This review takes an early look at the Yahoo! Mail Beta from the perspective of someone that uses email extensively, receives a high volume of messages, works primarily on Linux and Mac OSX, has been a fan of Gmail and other second-generation web applications, and has an extensive technical background. And while I would normally wait until it is out of beta (or at least in public beta) before writing a review, I found that the application is already so reliable and powerful that it merits mention even at this early stage.

The great:

Drag and drop. I’ll admit, drag and drop is the last thing I would have expected to find so useful. My mail reader of choice up until Gmail was mutt, the command-line mail-reader of hackers everywhere. For years I found that the drag and drop paradigm was less efficient than programmable keyboard shortcuts and macros for managing large volumes of email. But after switching to Thunderbird for my work email, I started realizing the benefit of drag and drop for quickly moving groups of messages around.

Tabs: I love tabbed browsing. After using my first Firefox build with a tabbed interface, there is no other UI paradigm I want to use. Opening new windows in the foreground and waiting for them to load now seems so inefficient. I even use tabs in my Konsole terminal, having switched to KDE partly because of this very feature. While tab support isn’t perfect yet (see Missing below), it is fantastic to keep search results around while you switch contexts.

Cross-Platform: While cross-platform support would be assumed for a webmail application, when you see what the new Yahoo! Mail Beta can do with DHTML you will be amazed that they have managed to get this working on Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX, and on both Internet Explorer and Firefox. (No Safari or Opera support yet, but give it time.)

The good:

Little UI touches: When you drag a message to a folder, the “tooltip” that follows the cursor around a) contains an abbreviated version of the subject line, b) turns translucent, and c) has a context-sensitive icon that shows whether or not you can drop the message on the current target under the mouse. And under the “View” menu during the Beta, there is a greyed out option saying that “More View Options Are Coming Soon”, letting the user know that this feature is under active development. And you can select multiple messages by holding down the “control” key, or ranges of messages with the “shift” key, just like you would with a native desktop application. These little things that “just work right” make all of the difference in the world.

From addresses: If you upgrade to Mail Plus for $20/yr, you can change your outgoing “From” address. For me this is a “must-have” feature. Gmail lets you do this for free, whereas Hotmail doesn’t let you do it at all (I believe), but $20/yr seems like a perfectly reasonable price. If you look closely in the Options screen, you can set one of your addresses as the default — a great feature if you want to use Yahoo! Mail as your primary client, but don’t want to switch to a @yahoo.com address.

Contacts: Contact management is integrated directly into the new Yahoo! Mail Beta. You can create aliases for groups of recipients, categories your contacts, add custom fields, add recipients to your contact list when you email them, print your contact list, and import and export the contact list in several popular formats. A few of these features can only be accessed via the old Options screen, but over time I expect that they will all be migrated over to the new interface.

POP access: This may only be a feature that comes with Mail Plus, but the Yahoo! Mail servers can be both polled by POP clients and set up to poll other POP servers.

The not so good:

Options: While it is great that the preferences for the old Yahoo! Mail and the new Beta are shared, the Options interface should be incorporated into the new application. It is jarring to go back to the old preferences interface after spending time in the Beta. Particularly because Yahoo! has a habit of asking you to login at irregular intervals for no predictable reason. (One or two login screens a day I could understand. 10 or 20 is a bit excessive.)

Scrolling: The scroll wheel works perfectly in the message pane, but doesn’t work in the list of messages.

Spam Filters: Even after a week of training on a high volume of email (both spam and legitimate), the Yahoo! Mail application was still letting through more spam than Gmail. I am getting around 20 a day in my Inbox at Yahoo, and only 4 or so with Gmail. (All my email is delivered to both accounts, so it is a fairly unbiased test.) And when is an email provider going to allow you to set a preference that says “I speak only English and Swahili” and automatically filter out all other mail? I mean, 90% of the spam that reaches my inbox is in Chinese or Russian, and I know for sure that no one is legitimately writing to me in those languages — how hard could it be to prevent this type of spam from happening?

From address bugs: The default “From” address is not honored when you forward emails. It is also not honored when you reply to an email message that was sent to a different address than your default “reply to.” This is a problem for people that don’t ever want to accidentally send something from their @yahoo address.

Spell checking: Spell checking isn’t implemented yet, at least not in Mozilla. It will be done, of course, before the final release of the new Yahoo! Mail.

The missing:

Conversations: I had no idea how useful conversation threading would be until I started using Gmail. It is almost a deal-breaker that the Yahoo! Mail Beta doesn’t support it yet.

Labels/tags: One thing that Gmail taught us is that labels (i.e., tags) can replace folders altogether. What Yahoo! Mail should do is provide an interface for adding arbitrary tags to messages and then use this list of tags as the list of folders. And to preserve consistency with the current paradigm, when a message is dragged onto a tag/folder, then that message is automatically tagged accordingly, just like adding it to a folder.

Advanced search: I have to believe this feature is in the works, but there absolutely needs to be a way to search by something besides keyword. Search by date, by size, by sender, by subject, by recipient, by status, etc. Every mail program in the world has an advanced search feature — and for a good reason, keyword search alone doesn’t do nearly enough for email. (Also, the keyword search results shouldn’t include messages marked as “Spam,” or at least do so optionally.) And one feature that no one else has — but Yahoo! should consider adding first — is the ability to search arbitrary headers.

Saved search folders/virtual folders: Once advanced search is implemented, it should be possible to save that search as a virtual folder. Between virtual folders and labels, the old paradigm of traditional folders is completely obviated in favor of a much more powerful model. This is the future of the way people will interact with large volumes of data, and email is certainly an ideal candidate for pushing this model forward.

Open message in background: There should be a mechanism for opening an email message in a tab and load it in the background. This might be hard to implement, as it would require the JavaScript to intercept the middle-click event, but it would be worth considering. The user could scan their inbox and simply middle-click on all the messages they intend to read. Each of those messages would all quietly load in a new tab, and the user could click through them one by one when they are ready.

Advanced filtering rules: One feature that made Gmail work for me was the ability to set up rather sophisticated logic for applying labels, filtering, and forwarding email. In fact, if Gmail didn’t have these advanced features, I wouldn’t even be able to give Yahoo! Mail a fair test right now, as some of my email only ends up on Gmail and needs to be selectively forwarded to Yahoo. I won’t ever be able to fully migrate until I can set up advanced forwarding rules from Yahoo! Mail, (to the BlackBerry, for example), so this ultimately is also a “must-have”.

IMAP support: Yahoo! Mail should support not just POP, but also IMAP. IMAP is a much better protocol than POP for keeping multiple accounts in sync.

Title: A very small but useful addition would be if the title of the page (the one that is shown in the title bar of the browser window or the browser tab) could be changed to include the number of new email messages in the inbox. This would make it easier for the user to know at a glance whether to check their inbox.

Personal Gripe:

I may be one of the few people in the world who would care about this, but I really want to be able to change my Yahoo! email address to my Yahoo account name. I’d pay good money to be able to do this. Or owe someone on the Yahoo! team a huge favor…

Conclusion:

The new Yahoo! Mail Beta has the potential to be the best web email client available. The user interface is already the most impressive use of AJAX technology I’ve seen, and once the back-end functionality (labels, virtual folders, search, etc), catches up, this will be the mail client to beat.

If your current webmail provider offers forwarding or POP support, and you can justify the $20/yr fee for Yahoo! Mail Plus, then I highly recommend giving the new Yahoo! Mail a try when it comes out of beta. Forward your old messages over to your Yahoo! account, and use Mail Plus to change your “From” header to whichever email account you prefer. At worst, you’ll be out $20. At best, you may find you have a new favorite email application.

Adding Mail Plus is a good deal at $20/yr. Not only do you get to change your From address, but you get more space than you will likely need for a while (2GB), and best of all, there are no ads, either on the mail interface or on the outgoing messages. Mail Plus also reputedly comes with better spam filtering, though I’d be hard pressed to describe the differences. Mail Plus also comes with Address Guard, which lets you set up an email address in the form basename-keyword@yahoo.com to create single-use or disposable email addresses. (Gmail offers the option of accountname+keyword@gmail.com for free. This is effectively the same, but the “+” is not supported by some websites and the technique is easy for a spammer to work around.)

But if I had to choose between Gmail and Yahoo! Mail Beta without Mail Plus, I’d give the nod to Gmail at this point in time. Gmail doesn’t insert outgoing ads, comes with over 2GB standard, allows changing the From address, etc. (Granted, after 18 months of using Gmail exclusively, I’m only using 400MB, and I’ve never deleted anything, so past a certain point disk space isn’t necessarily a good criteria. If they want to offer 200GB to hold my music collection, that’s another story, though.)

The Yahoo! Mail Beta (with Mail Plus) is almost ready to take the title of “best web email application,” and it is already reliable enough for day-to-day use. Personally, I am going to continue to use the new Yahoo! Mail as my primary email client, and I look forward to seeing what the team comes up with next. If Yahoo! can add features such as advanced search, labels, and conversations, I will remain a convert. If not, I will probably try and host my own email again and use a second-generation application such as Zimbra, which already supports all of these features and more in an open source suite. But either way, the corner has been turned on webmail, and web applications will never be the same.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 8th, 2005 by DeWitt Clinton and is filed under work. You can bookmark this post at delicious. You can digg this post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.