Yahoo Mail Beta: driving me buggy

Feb-2-06, 1:01 am by Hanford
File under: Google, Yahoo, AJAX, Mail, Bad User Interface

I've been using Yahoo Mail Beta for the last month or so, and it's really starting to drive me buggy.

When I first started using it, I was quite impressed. It featured drag-and-drop folder operations, multiple tabs, and more. But a recenty a few aspects about it have really been bothering me.

Slowness

It's slow. Sometimes it's really slow. Frustratingly slow. Loading it is slow. Checking different folders is slow. Getting a message preview is slow. And composing or replying to a message is so monsterously slow that I want to go to my fridge, grab the half-full carton of egg nog left over from December, then get in my car, drive over to Yahoo, and "egg nog" their building. Yes, it's really that slow.

After hitting "reply", I get the email reply box, and I even get a flashly little text carat. Everything looks loaded and ready to go, but it's it's not. After starting to type, the carat goes away and takes a good 10 to 15 seconds before I can type anything. Then, when I'm just about to ready to pull the mouse out of the computer in frustration, about 1/3rd of the characters I have typed come pouring into my email. By the time I actually get it working and ready to type I have often have forgotten what I was going to say in my email.

The other slowdowns are more tollerable, and probably not too much slower than the old Yahoo Mail, but there's a problem. With the old Yahoo there was occasionally slowness on page loads. Sometimes it would time out, but it was easy to hit refresh, or re-click the link to get Mail back on track. With the new Yahoo Mail Beta, hitting refresh causes the entire application to relaunch -- which is pretty slow too.

UPDATE:The super-duper slowness appears to be Firefox 1.5. Yahoo mail seems to run very fine on IE6 and on my laptop which has Firefox 1.05 installed. Still frustrating, but it's apromising sign since it will probably be fixed.

Lack of features

Yahoo Mail Beta is missing some important things that I grew used to in the old email system. Mostly, I'm not a fan of "two steps forward, one step back". I hope Yahoo can address the following problems, like:

I used to use Ctrl-F to find the name of a person who recently emailed me in my inbox. It's much easier than scrolling, or looking their name up in an address book. I can't do this anymore.
I can't view or sort by whether read/unread status.
I used to be able to attach multiple files in one go ... now I have to do it one at a time.
There used to be an advanced search that allowed me to narrow down results. It seems to be missing.

Weak UI Choices

In the old Yahoo Mail I used to set my items per page setting to the maximum -- 200. The page would still load quick and I could scroll through the topmost 200 emails quickly and easily (and use Ctrl-F, like I mentioned above). The new Yahoo Mail doesn't have "pages", it's just one giant page that loads as I scroll. There's two problems with this: One, the load time is slow so instead of getting 200 at a time like I used to, I get one screen's worth, and everytime the scroll bar moves just a bit, it reloads. The other is that my inbox has 3000 Messages. This makes the scrollbar very tiny, dragging it just a pixel seems to change the view in an unknown amount. Did I just skip 10 message, or 100? I don't know. Both of these aspects add up to making it not just difficult, but impossible to visually scan a folder, even when it has as few as 75 emails in it. This is a huge loss.
Yahoo Mail Beta now has resizable column headers for it's folder view. To me, this is a huge mistake. It's been years since I've used a mail client with resizable columns, and having to micromanage their widths to see all the data I want sucks. The old Yahoo Mail used HTML tables to word-wrap long email addresses and subject lines, which was great. The new one just cuts them off. So, if I want to see all of a long subject line I have to manually resize it to make the Subject column big enough. This, in turn, pushes the other columns off the edge of the screen. There's not even a scroll bar for this, so to see my Flagged column I need to re-resize other columns to be smaller so I can get the Flagged column on-screen.

But here's where it really gets bad. I prefer my default sort method to be by Received date. I think most users do. Well, normally the Received column is off the edge of the screen, which is okay since I often don't check the date directly in the folder view. But, occasionally I misclick a column header and my folder resorts, and this is the sucky part -- there's nothing to click to get it back to the proper sort. I either have to resize my browser or I have to shrink other columns to get the Recieved column back on screen so I can click it again.

This is what I mean when I say this new method requires Micromanagement. The old system never had any of this. In my opinion this is Yahoo trying to emulate an old Desktop feature that is an inferior way to organize data. It's a big mistake.
The New Yahoo Mail uses Split Buttons, which are buttons that also have a menu built into them. Click on the button itself and a command is activated, like "reply". But click on the little arrow to the right and a menu will drop down. One big problem with split buttons is that they hide data under a hard-to-click button. This means the data inside that menu is a harder to get at, and therefore will be used less. Making the Arrow that opens the menu bigger and easier to click would improve this. Making the menu automatically open when the pointer hovers over the button would be even better.

The second problem with Yahoo Mail Beta's implementation of split buttons is that Yahoo is hiding options in their menus that you can't access any other discoverable way. The only way to access "reply to all", for example, is by clicking the little arrow next to "reply", and then accessing it from the menu. Most other apps (like IE or Firefox) use split buttons to hide redundant options like History, which can also be fully accessed by clicking the back button (without the menu) or in the History pane.

I think Yahoo Mail would benefit from having the Reply split button change to always make the dropdown appear. It would make it easier to hit, and it would make the other options more discoverable.

Summary

I do like the new Yahoo Mail, it's certainly better than Gmail (the email app so advanced it requires reading the help file to figure out what the hell is going on) and I know it's still in beta, but Beta is the time to give feedback, right? I hope it gets faster, and I hope that Yahoo realizes that in some cases cloning the behavior of Outlook is a bad thing. I'm rooting for you, Yahoo!

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saba wrote: Sep-23-07, 4:21 pm

hi,

i'd been using yahoo mail (classic) and then beta for a long time now. i preferred yahoo mail to gmail, and was a staunch yahoo mail user - until one day, they locked me out of my account.

all i do is send and receive emails to my clients. i used to literally LIVE in my yahoo mail. and now they've disabled it, citing `a violation of the tos` as the reason! i've read the tos thrice, talked to yahoo customer service 5 times, and written to them N times asking for some clue about the problem, but all i've received are canned responses.

it is a horrible experience, it seems i've died online. but one thing is for sure - i'm never using yahoo again. i do miss yahoo mail beta, i really liked it. but this is a big blow.

hello gmail.

yvonne wrote: Aug-9-07, 1:35 pm

I am having great difficulty with yahoo beta . I cannot find my address book, and it is very slow. I have been trying to get back to old Yahoo, which was very effuiient, but although I keep clicking Switch Back nothing happens. Wh can I find to help me?

wilma wrote: Jun-7-07, 9:21 am

I think Yahoo had the right Idea and if it wasn't so slow they would be flying.It has everything you would need so come on yahoo speed it up because your old yahoo was a lot faster.
wilma

ros wrote: May-20-07, 1:49 pm

brilliant! thanks emmanuel!

Emmanuel wrote: May-9-07, 5:22 am

I get this issue with resizing of reading pane as well, in Firefox. The fix is like this:
1- Log out of Yahoo mail.
2- go to menu Tools > Clean Private Data.
3- Uncheck all boxes. Check "cookies". Yes, you'll have to delete your cookies, or at least the ones related to Yahoo.
4- Log back in to Yahoo mail. DO NOT resize the reading pane again.
Emmanuel

Helena wrote: Mar-27-07, 6:47 am

I had a problem with Yahoo Mail Beta which was driving me completely nuts. Or problems, actually. One was that I had installed the Skype extension for Firefox, which messed up my divider between inbox and reading pane. I found the solution to this on Yahoo Answers, but now I couldn't find it again...

The other was that the settings for the reading pane is stored in cookies. Look in C:Documents and SettingsYOURUSERNAMECookies and search for anything yahoo related and delete it. This might solve the problem. A description of the solution can be found here:
http://ph.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070108172435AAN2PUw

ros wrote: Mar-12-07, 7:49 am

i tried to change the size of the reading pane in beta, and it jumped right down to the smallest possible size, and won't move back again. i tried returning to old yahoo and then back to beta in case the original settings would return, but no such luck. does anyone have any ideas as to how to fix this??

Ann wrote: Dec-9-06, 6:32 pm

I love the old yahoo. Beta doesn't work for me. Attaching is faster now though...

Hanford wrote: Oct-24-06, 3:36 pm

PatriciaB,

I can't remember the name of the extention, but it did several different functions for displaying Tabs and History as pictures so you could visually identify pages rather than using just their name/icon.

PatriciaB wrote: Oct-24-06, 5:55 am

which plugin?

another question related to add-ons: anyone know if there is a firefox extension or plugin that causes parts of the yahoo mail beta interface to disappear? i just upgraded the laptop to 1.5 from 1.07; tabs, icons all disappeared. in some cases i can mouse over where they should be, the functionality is still there, just the image is missing. in the case of icons inside the folder itself - like read, replied, the new spam thingy, etc - functionality & icon are both gone. i had updated firefox on the desktop (which i don't use as much & doesn't have as many extensions installed), to make sure i didn't lose anything i liked. no problems w/ yahoo mail beta on that machine. i'm convinced its prolly an extension, if anyone knows which it would be really helpful. if its one i can do w/o, that's much easier than rolling back firefox to a previous version.

Hanford wrote: Oct-15-06, 3:11 pm

Just another comment to point out a lot of my Yahoo Mail speed problems were due to the fact that I had a Firefox plugin that was crapping up the entire experience and dragging it to a hault.

Yahoo Mail is still slow, but it's no longer unbearably slow.

YashK wrote: Oct-8-06, 9:26 pm

After switching to yahoo beta and then back to original yahoo..i am not able to download anything from yahoo mail!! donn know what is happening...

jason wrote: Oct-8-06, 4:58 am

i have a lil problem with my email.when i send email to someone i cant see whether the mail has been sent or not.the replied sign which shuld appear beside the senders mail is not visible.pls what is wrong.let me have ur feedbaq asap.regards

jitendra wrote: Sep-14-06, 11:10 pm

i have used this new yahoo mail beta version for looking its good but when i send any mails to the same id i.e., to my id itself i am not getting mails and also no mail is being sent to other email ids but the message shown as email sent and the mails will be in sent folder . I am not getting what the hell is going on in this yahoo mail beta..

Khai wrote: Sep-9-06, 6:28 am

The thing is that, all of you that have a comment in the new yahoo mail beta is soooo stupid! thats why the yahoo created a new mail interface so that it will change the old one and add new features. It's just all of you do not know how to use the new Yahoo mail. All people have comments and reactions are low tech! Stupid! My advice is, study the new yahoo mail very carefully before you react. Theres no other mail like yahoo. It is complete! All of you sucks!

Devans00 wrote: Aug-7-06, 5:29 pm

I'm very disturbed by lack of ability to do Advanced Search (by folder) and lack of ability to sort search results. I hate when applications removed useful features in the name of "improvement".

Pascal A. Droogmans wrote: Aug-2-06, 6:30 am

One would expect when accessing the contacts a new tab appears but no. It is very inconvenient when having your Mail tab open, that it switches to contacts instead of opening a new tab.

When receiving mail with much address/contact information, it would be handy to copy/paste from one tab to another. If anybody has a workaround by not using notepad, I'm glad to know.

I agree on Mike's comment concerning the categories, it's hell without them.
On top of this it would be nice that some categories are also known within yahoo 360°, and not only the added friends.

Still waiting on the calender function to appear in a new tab, would make life a lot easier, when signing out.

And to close a bit positive, ... Drag & Drop is great.

Zie wrote: Jul-20-06, 12:13 am

I've been using Yahoo Mail Beta for some time and recently some frustrating errors have occured that have rendered my e-mail practically unusable. Yahoo's been no help at all for they seem to have gone out of their way to make sure people can't get easy access to their customer service reps or techinicians! All I get on "help" is a bunch of FAQs and one way feedback without access to a human helping me troubleshoot.

My problem is definitely atypical and requires Technical Support:

1. Left hand pane where all the folders are displayed - I cannot click on any of them anymore. Means I cannot access the standard Sent, Drafts or other personally created folders. I can only click "empty" next to "spam" and "trash";

2. Upper right hand corner "Options" and "Help" Unresponsive. I cannot access option or help feature;

3. Everytime you want to click on, or reply to, a message, a new "tab" or reading pane is opened. These cannot be closed and I end up with many reading panes.

4. When I try to edit my contacts, I am unable to save changes. When I try to close the edit window, a dialog warns me that I have not saved. I try to clic on "save" in this warning dialog and it still does not save.

I have used Yahoo Mail for years and this is just inexplicable. I have really unable to use my Yahoo e-mail and I cannot get help with it!

Has anyone else had this problem!

mike wrote: Apr-20-06, 4:05 am

Has anyone found a way in the BETA to use the different address categories? I have almost 800 addresses in my address book (work, different clubs, etc) and the old version allowed me to select which category I wanted to look through, the BETA does not. Any idea if this is possible?

I agree ithe BETA is much slower, but even the legacy Yahoo has slowed to a crawl). In fact all the Yahoo pages seemed to have slowed down.

blog.hanfordlemoore » Blog Archive » Gmail: Arrow of Mystery and Sub wrote: Mar-5-06, 3:02 pm

[...] Recently I blogged a bit about the bugs in Yahoo Mail Beta and a few people have chimed in to let me know their own thoughts. Here’s what one person said about Yahoo vs. Gmail: your right about one thing: its antaganizingly slow. horribly slow. [...]

anonymous wrote: Feb-12-06, 8:02 pm

your right about one thing: its antaganizingly slow. horribly slow.

your completely wrong about another: it is in no way shape or form, better than gmail. gmail is a MUCH better online email service. nothing really compares to gmail as of yet even with yahoo's new offering..

the new yahoo mail beta acts and looks like a computer application, but its code is so slow and horrid its impossible to use. it will only get marginally better in its final release. one thing about gmail is that it's lightning quick, and leads to a satisfying experience.

Hanford wrote: Feb-6-06, 10:23 pm

Joe, thanks for the comments.

1. Yeah, I can use the search box. But for years I've been using ctrl-F and it worked great. And since it was searching on the page, the results were instant. Just a bit of voodoo behavior on my part, but still missing.

2. I never discovered this, thanks! It's very helpful. to know. What's bizarre is that I couldn't have predicted that result -- if anything I would have thought that it would sort on "Replied". Here's hoping that yahoo makes it more discoverable.

3 and 4, I agree, I suspect they're coming, but they're not hear yet and it isbothering me.

Joe Beaulaurier wrote: Feb-6-06, 6:41 pm

Just a quick note to help you overcome the perceived "Lack of Features" items in your post:
1. You don't need to scroll to find anything instead of using Ctl-F. Instead, type the name of the sender, their email addy, or anything really into the "Find Messages" box and be amazed at how fast you get a separate tab listing all hits including some 'snippets' from each message to assist in locating just the one you need.
2. View by Read or Unread status, simply click the column heading with the "i" within a dark circle. All unread messages will percolate to the top of the list.
3. Attaching multiple files - a limitation of the current version. We know from presence of this feature in the original UI that this will be improved upon.
4. Advanced search - ditto.

Hope this helps you to better enjoy the beta UI!

Joe Beaulaurier

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