I just noticed several really nice additions to my Yahoo Mail. One reason I like web based apps is that you open your mail app one day and it just got better. No downloads, no system reboots, no waiting. New features I noticed:
- A new way of handling attachments inline with the message, seems much faster and more efficient than the old one.
- Options are now integrated into the app and the unread message count is shown in the Windows taskbar.
- A new calendar bar across the bottom that shows you the most important upcoming events for the day. It looks like a good example of putting a very useful feature into a tiny bit of screen real estate. I’d love to use it with my 30boxes calendar (does the mini calendar understand RSS?).
- A couple of new columns in the inbox: a message size column which is useful for finding those giant attachments when you need to clear out space in your inbox, the rest of the time the size column strikes me as UI clutter (why would I care how big a message is?). There’s also a new spam zapper column that allows you to ‘delete and mark as spam’ a message without opening it. Seems like a welcome productivity improvement, but why put this button right next to the flagging button? I constantly flag and unflag messages for follow up, now I have to be extra careful because if I’m off by a few pixels I’ll zap the message as spam by accident :).
- I think the home tab might have changed as well (it has news in it now), though I hadn’t been in that tab for a while, say maybe it changed some time ago.
I use the Yahoo Mail beta as my main mail client, which means I spend hours in it every day. It’s a fantastic app and it just got even better. I wish they had comments enabled on the (WordPress powered!) Yahoo mail blog, then I could leave my feedback right there!
Update: One little thing that bothers me: the spam folder is now bolded when there’s new spam (which is pretty much always). I liked it better when it was unbold and not calling for my attention all the time.
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