Outlook has served as an inspiration source

Sep 15, 2005 11:26 GMT  ·  By

If you want to see how the future of web e-mail looks like, then you should become a beta tester of the new Yahoo Mail.

Google won the mail storage race, with GMail, but Yahoo preferred to stop adding endless servers and to go for the user instead.

Therefore, the company has decided that the most important upgrade for Yahoo Mail, an eight year-old service, should not be related to inbox capacity, but to a new interface. Yahoo Mail has now tabs (a concept employed by Firefox and some IE clones for some time now), which gave users new organizing possibilities.

The aspect of the new Yahoo Mail is an Outlook meets Thunderbird type mixture, the new interface allowing the opening of every e-mail in its own tab. Aside from these, by introducing a separate tab for the Compose function, accessing the Inbox is now available at all times.

Aside from the fact that the e-mails can be moved now through drag&drop, Yahoo has also introduced contextual menus which open when right clicking and have the same functions as in Outlook: Open, Print, Reply, Forward, Mark read/unread, Flag, Clear flag, Delete, Add sender to Address Book, and View full header (in a popup).

The presence of the Preview Pane under the messages' titles makes the new interface look even more like Outlook, but Yahoo Mail didn't deny the fact that this client is one of the main inspiration sources.

If you add to these features the advanced searching functions and the anti spam technologies, you get the image of a veritable e-mail revolution.