I switched over to the new Yahoo! Mail Beta interface about 2 weeks back and I'm delighted! Here's why it is SO much better than Gmail:
- Interface: The interface is sleek and stylish. The overall look is styled on Outlook with a three pane window - list of folders on the left, messages on the top of the right pane and message preview pane at the bottom. It has nice fonts unlike the big glaring one in the standard interface.
- Speed:The speed is awesome. The speed with which messages are retrieved is commendable.
- Tabbed Interface:One can view multiple messages in different tabs. Double clicking a message opens it in multiple tabs. The Compose window now opens in its own tab. So you have access to the Inbox while composing messages. However what I don't like is the multiple tabs it opens up whenever a new message is sent. There should be a way of turning this off.
- Shortcut keys: "r" for replying to a message, "c" for composing a new message are some of the newly introduced shortcut keys. There are a whole bunch of them. In addition to this, the right-click context menus for Open, Print, Reply, Forward, Mark read/unread, Flag, Clear flag, Delete, is a welcoming new feature. Right clicking on the folder pane allows you to create a new folder. F2 works for editing the name of a folder..what more can one ask for?
- Organizing Messages:There are no menus available to "Move" messages from Inbox to a folder now. It took me a while to undo that habit and just get used to dragging and dropping the messages to the appropriate folder. One can also choose multiple messages and drag them into a folder.
- RSS Feeds: It is integrated into the Folder pane. The feeds themselves show up in the message window.
Yahoo! with its Mail Beta launch has pushed Web Mailing to a new level. It is upto Google now to see how better they can respond to this challenge. Google has always been the master in simple interfaces and easy user navigation but the current Gmail interface is far from a easy usable interface when compared to Yahoo! mail.