This is a very exciting time for me. If you still don’t know, I work for Yahoo!, specifically Yahoo! Mail. I was hired in November 2004 to work on a top secret project (that everybody already knew was coming).
Before I was acquired by Yahoo!, they picked up a little company with crazy ideas: Oddpost. Packed full of guys who knew how to make Internet Explorer do things that would make most web developers blush, Oddpost was brought into Yahoo! to help turn the webmail world upside down. They posessed a webmail client that looked and behaved like a desktop mail client. Local caching made the application responsive and desktop features such as drag and drop, context menus and more gave the feel of a desktop application with the powerful flexibility of a web application. Yahoo! has a world class mail backend that processes more mail per day than I can fully comprehend. It boasts some of the most powerful spam filtering technology in the world and services millions of users worldwide. Marrying the Oddpost frontend with the Yahoo! backend creates a mail experience unrivaled by competing mail providers.
Yahoo! has been giving demos of the new mail product to bloggers recently: Silicon Beat, Ross Mayfield and several others.
A bunch of die hard developers, testers and managers have spent a ton of time getting this product ready. It’s not as simple as reskinning the existing Oddpost. Yahoo! has an entirely different backend mail system that had to be married to the newly redesigned frontend. Additionally, the Oddpost team was tasked with making their application work in more browsers than just IE.
I’ll post more about this in the coming weeks. I’m trying to be a little careful what I talk about, sticking mostly to the things that are already leaked to the public. But I do plan on talking more about the new Yahoo! Mail in detail.
Update: Mention of the new product on cnet.
Update: Simon Waldman posted his take.
Update: Motley Fool gives it some coverage.
Any way to get on the beta test list? I am a pretty heavy user of Yahoo mail, but I HATE the interface – you have to click 5 times to do one-click tasks!
If you are not looking for beta testers, when will the product be available to the general public?
Thanks,
Jeff
Jeff11@sbcglobal.net
Unfortunately I can’t say when the public beta will begin. All I can do here is openly taunt you all by saying it’s pretty fantastic.
Hey!
I thought us oddpost users got to beta test!
Declan
Having not come to Yahoo! as part of the Oddpost acquisition, I can honestly say I know nothing about the situation involving Oddpost customers.
Where do beta testers go for release notes? I noticed a new build has been rolled out and wanted to see what fixes & new features to hammer on.
BTW: Very nice implementation.
Joe
I try posting them here. I missed the last one accidentally. I’ll post those with this latest set of release notes in a moment.
This is the slowest beta release in history. I got notified that I’d be a tester back in December. Still haven’t gotten the link. Maybe they’re making it perfect first.
You’re joking, right? Obviously you didn’t notice that Google’s GMail has been in beta since April 1, 2004. They’re approaching 2 years of being in beta.
So how on earth is the Yahoo! Mail Beta the slowest beta release in history when we’ve only been in beta since September 2005?
save yahoo mail beta to my yahoo ID