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Yahoo is celebrating the 16th birthday of their mail client today, and the company has decided to commemorate the special event by introducing some great new upgrades to their Android app (as well as the apps for desktop computers and iOS devices).
For starters, Yahoo is finally introducing a conversation view, the same sort of threaded messaging system presently found in Gmail. This view has become quite popular over the years, and has proven to be a great, natural way to keep track of all your different email exchanges. It’s an optional change, so if you aren’t down with that you can revert back to the old system at any time.
Yahoo is also making a few premium features free for everyone, including disposable email addresses, enhanced filters and automatic message forwarding, and is also giving everyone 1TB of free mail storage. Quite the generous gesture, I’d say.
Finally, Yahoo is also introducing the ability to change your background across all your different platforms. You can have a beautiful picture curated from the huge Flickr database as a backdrop for your inbox, and applying it on one device will apply it on all of them.
We should note that Yahoo mentioned search, starring, and deleting are now one-click experiences by hovering over the conversation header, though we imagine this applies mainly to the desktop experience. If you have stuck with Yahoo Mail throughout Gmail’s prominence you can find the upgraded application in the Google Play Store here. Let us know how you’re liking all the new changes in the comments section below.
[via Yahoo]
Shame to decided to make the web client horrific. Good job I hardly use it for anything.
i still use it for my newsletter and such email account. It was always unlimited though, so even though 1tb is more than enough, its now limited.
Awful! I hope they think the ‘improvements’ are worthwhile, because I sure don’t
Looks like I now have to upgrade my OS to be able to see the little icons. I’m one of the 13.5% of WinXP SP3 users still holding out :-). You just lost a customer, Yahoo!!
I wrote Google a few times (never Yahoo though as I abandoned their email except consumer type stuff) to ask for the only view I care about – ignore the subject line and thread all email by usernames. Kind of like the way text messages are sorted. when the email involves more than one username, duplicate that on every username thread. Finally sort from newest at top (again just like text messages). A friend suggested I might be able to script into Gmail to do this on my own, but I haven’t tried yet. If it turned out I could do this in Yahoo, but not Google, I might want to come back, though I’ve had more reliability problems with Yahoo than I’ve had with Google.
I am very impressed. The look and feel is an incredible improvement.