following the verizon acquisition, yahoo today launches a revamped and rebuilt mail application for its 225 million monthly active users. The update includes a new design, feature set, and technology stack, as well as a new subscription plan for desktop and mobile called Yahoo Mail Pro.
The news is part of several changes coming for Yahoo, under its new corporate parent, Oath, the combination of Yahoo and AOL (which also owns TechCrunch), all of which are now operated by Verizon. For example, earlier this week, Yahoo was found to be exiting a previous deal with AT&T, which had allowed customers with AT&T email addresses to sign in to Yahoo’s websites.
however, despite the overhaul and redesign of yahoo mail technology, which introduces a better-performing and more attractive version of the product than we’ve seen in the past, it may be difficult for yahoo to attract new users to your email. service. The company was plagued by two massive security breaches that affected more than a billion users, which ended up knocking $350 million off the asking price of the Verizon/Yahoo deal that closed in June for $4.5 billion.
Simply put, email is a product where users conduct their lives, conduct business, and share personal and private information. Yahoo’s story does not inspire confidence, given that its data breaches were some of the largest in Internet history. That’s unfortunate, in a way, because Google deserves to have some real competition for its dominant Gmail service, which passed the 1 billion monthly active user mark last year.
There are three main parts to the yahoo mail revamp, starting with a rebuilt front-end technology stack, now leveraging open source technologies like react, redux, node.js, react-intl, and others. The goal here is to be able to offer a yahoo mail service that is faster to launch and generally better for international and low bandwidth users in particular.
yahoo says that its optimizations have been able to reduce its javascript and css footprint by 50 percent, compared to the previous desktop product, which means the application will launch much faster. as a result, searching and reading messages is also faster.
in addition, the new product reduces the memory used by the browser, is more reliable, more accessible and is built in a way that will allow its developers to be more agile in terms of updates and other pushes.
for yahoo mail users, however, these changes will be hidden and not necessarily noticeable beyond a general feeling that the application seems faster. more obvious will be the redesign and new feature set.
The updated look of yahoo mail is one of a much cleaner and more modern application. it looks like something built in 2017 rather than an old, legacy product that kept getting repainted over the years. it also reminds us a bit of microsoft’s outlook.com in terms of its interface, rather than the highly functional but not-so-pretty inbox of gmail.
here is the old product:
and here is the new one:
Items in the new inbox have more space between them, which makes it feel less cluttered, but it’s not ideal for those who receive a lot of email.
The app can now be customized with new colorful themes, features stationery, and email writers can use the emoji set that Twitter opened in their messages.
yahoo has also taken inspiration from a number of newer email applications to make it easier for users to find certain types of messages. In the left-side navigation, Yahoo Mail will offer links to automatically created folders that collect your photos and documents for quick access.
There are other little tweaks too, like rich previews that let you hover over attachments to see what’s in them; a search mode that reflects your personalized settings for how you prefer to view your emails; a redesigned settings screen where your changes instantly update the app; and accessibility improvements, including support for nvda and voice-over screen readers, as well as options for light-sensitive and low-vision readers.
The third major change is the introduction of Yahoo Mail Pro, an ad-free version of Yahoo Mail that includes customer support. this is an update to mail without ads, introduced a few years ago as an annual subscription.
yahoo mail pro offers a $15 discount on the ad-free product for annual subscribers at $34.99 per year and introduces a monthly option of $3.49/month. You can also choose to subscribe to a mobile-only version of the product for $0.99/month or $9.99/year, which offers ad-free service on the Yahoo Mail apps for iOS or Android.
all subscriptions include priority support for desktop and mobile devices.
Yahoo Mail Pro is available on desktop and mobile devices (via in-app purchases) to all US English-speaking users. uu. today, and will soon reach other markets. The redesigned desktop app is also available worldwide today, in English, with other languages to follow.