Yahoo! Mail is not catching up anymore. Your move GMail

Using GMail with intermittent connection on my Android device has always been slow, but I simply thought that's the way things should be. Some two months ago, I needed to read my, over a decade old @yahoo.com mail, and I installed Yahoo! Mail app on my Android. What a pleasant surprise that was. It is FAST. Much faster than Gmail. I wrote YMail off on the desktop, but on mobile it was clearly better and I enjoy reading and sending mail on it.

Today, I logged into Yahoo! Mail on my desktop machine, and I was in for another surprise. They fixed the "paging" issue, and made it run even faster than before. Replies are much easier than using GMail's, recently introduced narrow space. Not to mention that PageUp and PageDown keys work properly:

GMail has caused so much pain to me lately. A couple of e-mails sent accidentally because I pressed PageDown and hit space. Instead of moving the cursor to bottom and adding space, GMail moved the focus from text box to the Send button and pressing Space key on it made it send the message. Also, it's impossible to select text with Shift+PageDown in GMail. Unless you have 30" monitor which is presumably why all the Google engineers are completely unaware of the issue. GMail reply is UX nightmare on laptop with standard resolution like 1280x800 or 1366x768.

Another issue I had with Yahoo mail in the past is also gone. Earlier when you had a lot of messages to select (say, like 100+) you would either have to scroll page-by-page in old, classic view or you could switch to modern one which would load everything. With 1000+ messages in my, 14-year old, inbox this posed a problem. Now they fixed that. I loads initial set of messages and keeps loading more as you scroll down. When I reach those 100-something messages I need to select, I can easily select them all in one go. Not that I think about it, GMail does not have this feature, so that's one more reason to use YMail.

Let's face it, with free GMail for domains removed from market, and latest improvements in Yahoo Mail, Yahoo seems to be a clear leader now. It's faster, has more features, and it's much easier to reply to messages. I hope GMail team wakes up soon.

Tweet to @mbabuskov Milan Babuškov, 2013-07-18