While many are looking for a big new makeover for Gmail, its smaller competitor, Yahoo Mail, jumped in today first with its own set of updates, covering both new customization features and faster performance times.
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The changes come about 10 months after Yahoo Mail implemented its own major redesign, and are an extension of some of the themes the company introduced back then.
change and iteration are the talk of the day, it seems: today, yahoo mail’s chief oath (which also owns techcrunch), also announced a new president and chief operating officer, k. guru gowrappan, who joins from alibaba and in his distant past also worked at yahoo, quixey and zynga. (In addition, Oath’s former Senior Director of Publishing Products, Simon Khalaf, has also parted ways with the company.)
yahoo mail has a long way to go to grow its user base. Leaving aside the fact that many people have stopped using email in favor of messaging apps and more integrated communication platforms like slack, yahoo mail itself has had its own competition and security issues.
Most importantly, the service suffered one of the largest user data breaches in internet history, affecting more than a billion people and impacting the price verizon ultimately paid by about $350 million when acquired yahoo last year.
that, plus yahoo mail’s lack of updates for many years, and the rapid rise of the very popular google gmail and very office friendly services like microsoft, have served to keep yahoo mail’s growth low control.
I requested an update on active monthly users, but have not received it yet. however, last year the company said it had 225 million active users. As a point of comparison, Gmail today has over a billion (according to a figure confirmed by Google in 2016). my guess is that the gap between the two has only grown over time.
Still, you can tell that Yahoo has been thinking ahead in some ways: Last year, the company introduced a pro version that you pay for without ads.
given the wave of criticism now hitting facebook (and by extension all “free” ad-based services) about the kind of information that is collected, exchanged and used in connection with us, It will be interesting to see how much more the idea of paid services instead of free ad-based catches. We have asked a yahoo mail spokesperson for any updated numbers that can be shared on the number of subscribers.
In any case, today the focus of yahoo mail is on improving the performance of the entire mail product, affecting both paid and free levels.
For one thing, the company continues to iterate on the new redux architecture it introduced when it announced its rebuild last year.
Among the changes now underway, yahoo says there is now a 50 percent reduction in javascript exceptions; and a 20 percent reduction in overall API failures, including 20 percent when checking for new emails, 30 percent when reading emails, and 20 percent when sending emails. page load performance increased by 10 percent and box rendering by 40 percent, numbers that users may not understand in any practical way, but which inevitably make the yahoo mail experience that much more fluid.
In terms of new features, there are several areas where yahoo mail is adding more bells and whistles that focus on customization.
yahoo mail said that photo themes, the ability to add new backgrounds behind the otherwise relatively simple mail service’s actual interface, have been one of the most requested features for the product.
so, taking advantage of the previous ability to change the color of your background, you can now also add photos (illustrated in the gif above). Given flickr’s existence in the yahoo stable, and the way yahoo has been using images in other products like its weather app, I’m surprised it’s taken this long to get this one up and running.
another new feature is better and tighter integration with your calendar.
Specifically, Yahoo Mail will now allow users to create and send calendar invitations directly from the mail service. this will also mean that users can now shortcut by accepting invitations (or declining) without even opening the mail. Gmail users may be familiar with this feature, and again it’s a welcome and necessary (and pending) addition to the Yahoo webmail service.
finally, yahoo mail is adding more pizzazz to its out of office responders.
I can’t help but think of The Office and other TV shows and movies that parody the boring monotony of desk work when I hear improvements like these: features that make very mundane things like ooo responders more “fun” “. ” yet! having received many “crazy” notes, I know people love to play with this, so here’s to the crazy.
You can now add gifs and custom stationery to make your autoresponders stand out a little more.
We will update this post when we get more user numbers from the company.