Yahoomail is no longer advisable. Review on YahooMail

Dear reader,

For many people Internet means email and email means yahoo!. For people who are not computer savvy like grandpas and our fathers and mothers yahoo! is the window to the Internet. Have you ever tried reasoning out with them that there is life beyond yahoo! and google search?

Once upon a time 7 out of 10 people from all around the world use to visit yahoo!. Now that google has become a verb and a part of the English dictionary and inevitable aspect of the current Zeitgeist this can't be true any longer.

But the early bird catches the worm. Well, hotmail was earlier than yahoo! but yahoo! was a full fledged portal and yahoo's email and instant messaging service caught on like wild fire. I am not really sure who were the first to introduce instant messaging but my first first tryst with IM certainly was yahoo! chat.

To chat you needed to create an email ID. Voila! What an excellent marketing idea? This was the final nail on the coffin. Most non computer savvy individuals need exactly one email ID and they inevitably went to yahoo!.

Later yahoo! became an Internet behemoth and determined to a large extent the new age Internet economy. More than money it was the recall among people that set yahoo! out from the rest of the pack.

And yahoo! search was also nearly as good as altavista in those days.

Then google happened sometime in 1998 as a Stanford phd project and the rest is history.

Now roughly a decade hence I would still say that what altavista was to google, is what yahoomail is to gmail or for that matter any other Internet mail service.

First let us spend a minute analyzing what accounted for its success and present popularity. What makes it so difficult for us to shoo people away from yahoo?

Definitely yahoo! chat comes to mind. There was no reason for people to consider alternatives because yahoo! mail worked all the time and defined the idea of free email service itself. In those days people did not know how email worked or what to expect, so for them yahoo! was the benchmark.

Since yahoo! was also a very popular marketing the email service was not a problem at all. Every guy and his brother in law could get an account with yahoo! in minutes and people looked no further.

All this is history now.

Today the entire Internet landscape has changed completely. It is no longer a technical term. It has become an inseparable part of our lives so much that even an illiterate man on the streets of India knows what Internet is.

And yahoomail remains like a fossil, an unadulterated relic of the 1990s. I cannot recollect a single improvement or change even for the worse since then. To see that people still flock to it like bees that sit on...

Let us see what sucks so much with yahoo!

a) The interface is the lousiest the human mind can conceive. In fact it is so boring that I forget that there were colors other than dull grey and the worst shade of blue

b) The ads! Man, they get on your nerves though I am more or less programmed to ignore them but subconsciously they make you feel uneasy

c) The GUI controls, the mouse never shows which is which. Can't they give meaningful pictures like in hotmail? Incidentally gmail also got it wrong though today it is no longer that relevant since standard email operations are well entrenched in our psyche

d) Attaching files sucks big time! Man, how many times do I have to click? And I really wonder whether you can design it worse than that

e) This one takes the biscuit. I first check the bulk folder , than only I check the Inbox.I am not kidding. I am serious. If you meet me I can show you. Because I am so confident of yahoo!'s spam filtering and concept of bulk folder that most of their problems will be solved if they just switched the names. In fact all my mouthshut alerts land up right at the bulk folder. Even messages from Jasmine Ahuja.

f) There is so little real estate to type the mail. All sorts of ads and other complicated html take up a bulk of screen space distracting you away

g) Settings. Man, To change my full name from lower case to Upper Case , well I can say it was a project on its own. It took me several months and several attempts to figure out where on earth that info came from. Contrast this with the simple, one click gmail settings interface

h) Have you got the message, ''Yahoo! doesnt understand your browser's request'' error? I get it often with the email alerts from mouthshut. I just delete the mail since I can't read it and I can't figure out which mail is the culprit easily

i) The bulk folder messages once deleted go back to the Bulk folder instead of to the next message. Now since for me inbox means bulk folder this is a pain.

j) Then of course the limited space , size limitations on attachments and stuff. I don't care much about these things

Don't you think life could be better? Emailing is one of the most important activities for most of us and we spend a lot of time with it. Surely it should be a charming experience. Not dull or boring.

Don't you agree?