Been browsing the new Yahoo! Mail beta and it’s very nice indeed. Think cleaner Oddpost (and yes I know that Yahoo! bought Oddpost, I was one of the first people in Europe to sign up for Oddpost when it first came out. Just loved Ethan’s sense of humour). The new service works with Firefox too and not just IE.
Highlights –
- Very fast address book import from Outlook Express et al
- Uncluttered OE type interface, clean no adverts on the main page!
- Cool mail search at your fingertips, seems to work very well and fast.
- Nice options like forwarding messages to mobile devices and a vacation autoresponder
- Fast tab navigation for compose, search et al
- Quick save of received image attachments to Yahoo! Photo for sharing.
The spellchecker doesn’t work with Firefox yet though, and I still think the log-in is too slow. But hey, it’s beta right?
Oh and they’ve updated their free Intellisync feature to work with Pocket PCs as well as OE, Outlook and others. So you can sync your address book and calendar while out and about on the road, which I personally think is super neat. Speaking of which, did you know you could set up a shared public calendar with a couple of clicks? So that it could be viewed and even edited by someone else (e.g. your assistant) as and when? No, neither did I.
Hmm…I think the Yahoo! – Google battle is becoming quite interesting. Considering that the former was all but dead in the water a couple of years ago. And I’ve got to say that the Microsoft Mail Beta (supposedly a replacement for Hotmail?) looks really, really pants. Sorry guys. Some other screen grabs of the Yahoo! offering after the jump.
Click on thumbnails for larger.
Sharing
Autocomplete is cool
This is where you compose yourself
Options galore
