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Yahoo! Mail Beta is a sweeping redesign of the once-clunky mail service. Bottom line — It very, very nice. The interface is clean, usable, intuitive, and they take full advantage and use Ajax really well. Here are the details:
The over-riding design is based on Outlook, it looks like. Except, it’s web-based and Outlook is a desktop application. Yahoo! is able to do this with Ajax — great,, great implementation of Ajax here.
The interface is a three pane window, with folders on the left sidebar, mail on the top pane, and a preview pane at the bottom — just like Outlook and, the INBOX is always visible. Very usable and clean.
The new Yahoo! Mail Beta features a tabbed interface whereby you can line-up several messages for later viewing, just like Firefox’s or Flock’s tabbed viewing. The COMPOSE window opens in its own tab, keeping the INBOX available for easy access. Again, very intuitive and natural for the user.
There’s also a host of right-click context menus, such as OPEN, PRINT, REPLY, FORWARD, MARK READ, MARK UNREAD, FLAG, CLEAR FLAG, DELETE, ADD SENDER TO ADDRESS BOOK, and VIEW FULL HEADER. A really cool feature that is Ajax-packed is the drag-and-drop functionality. This is very cool and is so natural for the user. Good stuff.
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Yahoo! Mail Beta versus Gmail? I’m not sure. Gmail’s interface is completely different and focuses more on automated categorization. It kind of works. Yahoo! Mail Beta is just plain useable and very intuitive. They’re both different approaches to Mail. Personally, I think Yahoo! Mail Beta is slick, clean, and very intuitive. At the end of the day, I think Yahoo’s approach is the winner in the consumer market space. In terms of innovation, Gmail is the winner — their automated categorization is really cool and innovative.
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