Anyone who knows me (or has ever heard me rant ad nauseam on the subject) knows that I am a diehard Gmail user, even uninstalling M$’s Outlook 2003 earlier this year to migrate completely to Gmail.
I’ve never looked back, and the addition of the excellent Google Calendar application (review coming soon) has cemented my relationship with Google. I have no intentions of switching email clients anytime soon. Still, this review over at PaulStamitiou.com made me curious, so I decided to see what all the fuss was about.
I already had a Yahoo! Mail account that I let go to the wayside once my Yahoo! Mail Plus subscription ran out a year ago, as the amount of spam I was getting was quite ridiculous (and, as mentioned in this article, the Plus account does not protect you from Yahoo’s advertisements either).
This post made me curious, so I used the German account hack from Lifehacker.com to get a beta invite. First, I went to my Yahoo! Mail page, and nothing much had changed. (12,000 pieces of mail, less than 20 of which were messages to me, but 600 made it into my Inbox O_o) Then, I followed the excellent Lifehacker instructions. My invite popped up automatically, I accepted it, and I was redirected back to my new Mail interface.
The interface took forever to load, and threatened to crash Firefox. True, I’m on the slowest available DSL (256K I believe), but I usually don’t notice a difference from my old 6MB cable connection (except when I try to download large files). Most of the time, my internet connection is more than sufficient for my needs. And I have no intention of paying for a faster connection just so that Yahoo! Mail will work better, so I doubt I’ll be using this account much at all.
The loading issue put me off so much that I didnt do much playing around with the interface. Once it finally loaded, I did click through the folders I had, and try to resize the windows a bit. Looked at the other Yahoo! apps (Calendar, Contacts…). Overall, I was significantly less than impressed.
Here’s the long and short of it all: It is drag and drop friendly, and includes a way to integrate RSS feeds into your mail client (although I do that now with Gmail). Unfortunately, the strain on my computer does not make the few pluses worth using this even as a backup solution.
For now, I’ll stick with using Gmail’s web interface as my primary email client. Should anything go wrong (and I doubt it will, as I’ve had no problems with Gmail in the years I’ve been using it), Thunderbird is all the backup support I need.
Here’s the review that started it all, complete with screenshots:
PaulStamatiou.com » Review: Yahoo! Mail Beta
it is good