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Monday, May 9, 2011

New Yahoo! Mail


New Yahoo! Mail has a revised interface which contains mostly Ajax (JavaScript and XML). It is very similar to a heavy mail client like Outlook (Drag and drop capabilities, Mail search, tabs). The new Yahoo! Mail comes with an integrated Messenger; as a result, users are able to chat with Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger contacts while reading their e-mail. As of August 26, 2007, the new Yahoo! Mail came out of Beta period. The development of what has now become the new interface, started since July 2004, although it is possible other prototypes were in development before then. It is currently compatible with Internet Explorer 7, Firefox and Safari as well as Camino and other Gecko based browsers. (As part of Yahoo!'s plan to eventually upgrade all of their sites to be compatible with Firefox.Although it is usable under Opera, there are slight visual problems regarding the layout. In September 2005 Yahoo! began beta testing a significantly enhanced version of their e-mail service, based on Ajax scripting acquired from Oddpost, along with new philosophical approaches to e-mail, including the Oddpost design philosophy (which Google made heavy use of in Gmail): Given that the All-New Yahoo! Mail is based on Oddpost, it features the same underlying code base, including the implementation of this design concept to minimize the amount of data sent during an e-mail session by creating a JavaScript UI engine on the client side and sending "Datapacks" instead of reloading the whole interface on every click like a traditional webmail service (e.g. traditional Yahoo! Mail). This makes the service much faster than its counterparts. However, unlike Oddpost, All-New Yahoo! Mail runs on a variety of OSes and browsers, and runs perfectly under Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox. On February 13, 2008, Yahoo! announced on the Yahoo! Mail blog that it would begin supporting version 3 of the Mac OS X default browser Safari, as well as the Mac versions of Firefox. The look and feel of the new version is designed to mimic a desktop e-mail client, and it offers unlimited storage space, tabbed e-mails, RSS feeds, drag-and-drop capabilities, advanced keyboard shortcuts, advanced search, integration with Yahoo! Calendar and Messenger, Domain Keys, address auto-complete and more. The All-New Yahoo! Mail also has a mascot called Liam, who is basically a little boy, who is shown in the "Help" panel as well as in the loading screen. Liam is "mail" spelled backward.

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