Yeah, we’ve been busy bees. First the unlimited storage announcement. Then the web service announcement. Today we’re announcing an update to Yahoo! Mail Beta.
I broke the ymailupdates.com post down into three parts, mostly because it worked with the title (yeah, the “Bigger” part of the post is forced, but “better…FASTER” just didn’t seem to cut it). Anyway, the “Better” part of the update includes a ton of updates that were made in response to user feedback. We’ve really taken to heart the things we hear about the most in terms of switching costs from classic to Yahoo! Mail Beta. Checkboxes were one of those things. Some users either don’t want to Shift-click or just aren’t comfortable with it.
On the “Faster” end, we really have put a very focused effort into making it faster. Weekly meetings with the frontend folks, us web services folks and a couple of really good performance people have had major payoffs. We’ve nailed down several areas that were creating performance bottlenecks. While we didn’t get them all, we’ve made some serious headway.
One performance measure in particular, componentization, has yielded some good results. Componentization, in this case, means breaking up the app so it’s no longer monolithic and loaded entirely at launch. Now several components are loaded on demand as they’re needed. It was interesting to hear last week, while I was at ETech, that Zimbra announced a similar strategy in their application.
Hi Ryan! Thanks for regularly updating Yahoo! Mail. I particularly like the weather feature, but at the moment, it isn’t useful to me since I can’t read degrees in Fahrenheit. Could you add an option to display the temperature in Celsius? Thanks a lot in advance, and cheers all the best!
Ok, I love the new Yahoo Mail Beta and have been shouting this to anyone who’ll listen for over 1 year now, but please please please… make it so that after a saved draft message is sent that it leaves the drafts folder… or at least becomes READ in the drafts folder. Thanks.
great job y!mail team! the load was so fast, the y!mail guy didn’t even show up. i kind of miss him. i got a question, did the “delete” button get moved? i think it might have since i almost clicked some other button when i went to go delete something.
Hey Ryan!
When is this reaching farm 308? Oh and for Caghan, in Canada you have celcius…
Hi! Tim, so it’s country-sensitive is it? I wonder if the unit of temperature is based on the registered user’s location. Then all they need to do is to associate all European countries, such as Germany, with Celsius.
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for leaving the note re: my post on yahoo mail. I am quite attached to my address, as I have been using it for nearly 10 years now and would like to continue (and have grown accustomed to the features I do use). Just knowing that you’re involved and *care* is enough to get me to renew the service for the next year. Thanks for stopping by!
Another satisfied customer.
Dave, I’m totally with you on the draft thing. I want the draft GONE once I’ve finished it. It used to work in previous builds. I’ll ping the frontend guys and see what changed.
Tim, I can’t give you an exact date. Hopefully soon, though. Farm 308 is one of the first to get new builds. So as long as everything checks out on our first farms, it shouldn’t be too long.
Caghan, yeah…you’re not the first to complain about the F vs. C thing. I’ve brought it up with the frontend developers.
Hi Ryan,
I know this is a little off topic, and I am very excited about unlimited storage, I have a question about Yahoo Mail and copying into Word. I discovered that you are one to the main people working on Yahoo Mail, so I figured I’d go to the source. Will copy/paste from Yahoo Mail into Word ever work again? I know I can do a specialty paste, but 95% of us use control C control V 95% of the time and it is easy to forget that this option no longer works from Yahoo Mail. I have had at least 30 documents or outlook emails frozen and ruined because of this problem and it is very frustrating and sometimes incredibly madening. I have put in countless requests for fixes and updates into Yahoo, but the best I ever get is a reply saying “the problem has been expedited and we’re working on it.” I have considered switching email accounts over this, but I love Yahoo Mail and don’t want to. Please, just let me know, is this a lost cause? Will I ever be able to use my hot keys for copy and paste again?
Like the new update it’s faster too to use.
One request though, I have nearly every email I have received or send since 1999 and I would like an easier way to browse these thousands of e-mails.
For any folder I would like to be able to view emails by year, month, week. So it would work similar to a calendar view of e-mail. There are a number of ways of doing this, a timeline bar which appears that you can slide through, or select two points between which to view emails. Another way would be to add to the More actions menu and add Group Emails > By Week, Month or Year.
Most people I know have broadband now, so I haven’t tried the new beta on a dial-up connection yet to see if it’s speedier but will do soon. Often when travelling or using busy public WiFi spots the speed available can be very slow and I have found Mail beta nearly unsuable at dial-up speed.
Luke
Hi,
Just noticed, the sent folder now shows in bold with the number of unread messages beside it in brackets. There is no need for this as it’s expected that all sent mail would not be read by the sender.
Can you guys bring back a send feedback feature please.
That release is waaaaaay faster! Just one thing… on dial-up the new welcome screen slows everything down. And the fact that somethings don’t load can be a disadvantage…
Did the delete button move with this release? I find myself hitting the delete button lately when I want to hit the reply button!
It did, because too many people were clicking on delete when they meant spam or spam when they meant delete. Several people have been complaining about the delete/reply confusion now…so it wouldn’t surprise me if the buttons get shuffled one more time.
Personally, I don’t use the buttons. I stick to the keyboard shortcuts. So this isn’t really an issue I’ve noticed, myself.
Yeah -the delete key has to be relocated if at all possible. I keep accidently hitting it instead of the reply button.
Another vote for moving the delete button–I’m too trained now to look for it on the right side…
When is Yahoo going to give Mac users the ability to sync Yahoo address book/calendar/email with their computers? I love my Yahoo Mail Beta (I’m a premium user) but I feel like the proverbial red-headed stepchild.
Lack of synchronization is actually causing me to consider (egads) switching and I know it has turned some of my friends away despite my evangelism for all things Yahoo.
Hi Ryan -
I’ve been noticing that the pictures people attach to their email messages to me can no longer be viewed within the body of the e-mail. I have to download each attachment in order to view it. It seems like yahoo is loading all the pictures initially, and at first I can see them, but once yahoo is done loading all the attachments, they are no longer visible within the email. Any thoughts?
Thanks!
I too have noticed the same problem of not being able to view attachments (photos) after the email has loaded. VERY IRRITATING. So much so, I have considered switching to Gmail.
Will this be a permanent irritant or will we once again be able to view the attachments without having to “download” each one?
Hi Ryan!
I was just wondering when everyone would receive their limitless storage. I have received mine (yay) but I know that friends of mine haven’t. Thank you.
Could we add photos to our contacts? That’s the one thing I like in gmail.
Hi Ryan,
Was wondering if you knew anything about the ‘Loading Yahoo! Mail…’ issue when trying to use the new Beta in Firefox?
I happen to have dial-up and the browser is just waiting to load Yahoo mail with the message – in quotes above – displayed with a revolving set of arrows in front of it.
I also noticed my dial-up status shows that over 30 MBs have been downloaded as well (and still going strong at this point).
Is Yahoo mail downloading itself or messages or something, as I have not requested any other downloads (I don’t think Windows is doing it – usually I would see a download icon in tray which I don’t see)?
Anyway, I have seen a couple of posts on Yahoo Answers and they seem to think it is a bug (with no resolution yet).
Thank you,
James.
Safari support? When? Yahoo! Mail Beta has been blocking Safari since 2006.
Quite amusing, when you have Jerry Yang mouthing off at WWDC how they’re loving to innovate with Apple.
I think I’m staying on GMail, thanks. It didnt’ take them upwards of a year.
Hi Ryan!
So how’s it going with the Celsius vs. Fahrenheit thing? (See my comment at the very beginning and your answer in comment #8.)
I am not writing this to the “other” Ryan’s blog since I know that you are more closely involved with the developers.
Thanks and cheers all the best!
I’ve been using the new yahoo mail for a while now and loved it. I’m presently away on vacation and only have access to dial up. Yahoo mail is brutally slow on dialup. I have tried my gmail and it gives me an option of a basic view using HTML. Yahoo just craps out and doesn’t load most of the time. Some times it works, but takes 5 or more minutes to load. I see no data access while I’m waiting for it to load, so the problem seems to be with yahoo, not the connection speed. It’s really frustrating. I’m considering moving all my mail to gmail.