When you think of email, you probably think of Gmail or Outlook. But Yahoo Mail is still around, and it just got a big update.
On Tuesday, Yahoo Mail rolled out its biggest redesign in nearly a decade. The company says this one is faster than ever and comes with a host of new features designed to help users save time and be more productive. You can try the new version.
The design is cleaner and less cluttered. It’s also more customizable than before: You can choose different color themes for the interface, for example. And there are new ways to organize your emails too. You can collapse the left-hand sidebar that shows your folders and switch between them quickly by clicking on icons at the bottom of the screen instead.
Yahoo has also integrated several third-party apps into Mail so you don’t have to leave your inbox to use them. For example, you can open up a Dropbox file directly from an email, edit it and then save it back to Dropbox without leaving Yahoo Mail.
But perhaps most interestingly, Yahoo has also added several new “smart” features powered by machine learning algorithms. One is called “suggested phrases.” When you’re composing an email, Yahoo will suggest short sentences you might want to use as a reply based on what you’ve written so far.
Another feature is called “quick actions.” When you hover over an email in your inbox, little icons appear that let you do things like RSVP to an event invitation or archive a message with one click — again without having to actually open the email itself.
And finally there’s something called “smart unsubscribe.” This uses machine learning to detect when you get emails from mailing lists or newsletters that you never read — if it thinks they’re not important, it’ll offer to unsubscribe on your behalf.
Yahoo says all these features will improve over time as they learn more about how people use them.
The company says it’s also made big under-the-hood improvements to Yahoo Mail that make it twice as fast to load and respond to emails. It’s also added a new way to search for emails: You can now filter your search results by sender, attachment type, date or folder.
Yahoo Mail is still one of the world’s most popular email services, fourth behind Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Outlook.com and Apple’s iCloud Mail. But its user base has been declining over the past several years as those newer services (and others) have gained millions of new users.
The company says it hopes this big update will help win back some of those users who have left — or at least get them to give Yahoo Mail another try.
Source: zdnet
