Yahoo! Mail Quietly Out of Beta
The new stylish Yahoo! Mail interface appears to be out of beta. This morning I noticed a few subtle changes like new icons, different colors and the missing "Beta" tag in the header. For those that don't know this Yahoo! mail interface does a great job to give a desktop quality interface to mail in the browser and best of all it uses technologies we use right here at work like the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library and PHP. In fact, last I knew Yahoo was employing one of the founders of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf.
Some time ago I decided I didn't like system administration anymore including the management my my own email. That was about when I saw the announcement of the new Yahoo! Mail beta and after giving it a try I opted to move my personal mail over to Yahoo! by upgrading to a Yahoo! Mail Plus. All was good. But then they messed it up...sort of. How? They came out with Yahoo! Mobile
See, that little application attempts to bring Yahoo! to your mobile device and does so quite admirably. The problem is that while you can check your Yahoo! mail, if you have a Yahoo! Mail Plus account tied to another domain, you can't check that account. I ask you what good is it to allow me to access the mail account tied to the yahoo.com domain which I don't use? Instead I should be able to switch over to my Yahoo! Mail Plus account like I can online.
Another problem for you Linux users out there, you can't use the Yahoo! IM client built into the new Yahoo! Mail Interface nor can you send SMS text messages. I wouldn't be surprised if Mac users have these same problems. I don't there are a number of technical issues preventing this but I can only hope they are being worked on so that those of us non-Microsoft users can enjoy these features.
So Yahoo! consider this constructive criticism and keep doing your thing.
