Uneasy Rhetoric

Bouncing baby Beta has been born. Or, if you prefer, Oddpost’s distinctiveness has been added to Yahoo! Mail. Actually, the other way around is probably more accurate.

If you were an Oddpost user and you received an email from Oddpost offering you the chance to test the new Yahoo! Mail Beta, take it. You’ll need a Yahoo! Mail ID because that’s the account they switch, not your Oddpost account.

The good news:

The development team has managed to maintain the clean look and “desktop application” feel of the original Oddpost. The use of color is more Mac-like - in other words, they haven’t gone overboard to create a splash of colorful everything. Drag and drop still works. There is a preview screen and it can be resized.

The worst thing about Oddpost was its search capability (verily, it sucked). Now the search is more Yahoo!-like.

New messages open in tabs, with the option of opening in new windows. As someone who has been a devoted Firefox user for almsot two years now, I’ve gotten used to tabbed browsing. A tabbed email application makes sense to me.

There are lots of keyboard shortcuts, just like Gmail.

It works in Firefox. No, let me rephrase that. IT WORKS IN FIREFOX! (I had a little trouble getting it to work with 1.5 beta 1, but it seems okay now).

Why it’s still a work in progress:

It’s beta, so it’s still buggy.

The address book has been (partially) ported to the new look, but the calendar and the administration options have not yet.

Inexplicably, the “Compose Mail” button is not among the row of buttons above the mailbox pane, but is instead at the top of the folder pane, just like in the old Yahoo! Mail. Once I get used to the keyboard shortcut, this won’t matter anymore.

Overall, this is an exciting development. I’ve been waiting for it for a long time, and they have not let me down.

Screen capture.

Update: Here’s a Flickr gallery with better screen shots than mine.