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I somehow got into the the Yahoo Mail Beta. The new interface is completely different from the normal Yahoo mail, using a lot of Ajax. You can get more detailed reviews elsewhere, but here are my thoughts. I will start with the good things.

Ajax Goodness

No more refreshing! It looks and acts like a desktop application. You can move emails around by selecting them and dragging them into another folder. You can easily sort messages. There are tabs – when you double click to read an email, the email opens in its own tab. You don’t have to view, say 50 emails at a time and then click next to go to the next 50 emais.

RSS Feeds

You can read RSS feeds from within Yahoo mail. It displays the feeds that are on my My Yahoo page, which was nice. I find it more useful than Gmail’s Web Clips, which shows items from RSS feeds one at a time. If you select an item on an RSS feed, you can choose to post it to your Yahoo 360 blog or your MyWeb account. However I use del.icio.us, another Yahoo service – they should add that as an option too!

Now for the bad things.

Speed

I’m used to seeing this image a lot.

The soccer guy is animated and it’s kind of cute, given that the World Cup is being held right now. I don’t want to watch him though, I want to read my mail!

Once I actually get logged in, sometimes everything runs sluggish, and sometimes it runs fine.

Huge Ads

There are big banner ads that take up a large part of the screen. People with a small resolution (say 800×600) wouldn’t like that very much. Plus, every time I click to read an email, or go to compose a new email, or click on a folder, the ad frame on the right refreshes – it’s very distracting.

Overall, I do like the new Yahoo Mail. It’s pretty neat once you get past the huge ads and can deal with it being slow sometimes. (Hello, Adblock!)