Yahoo's new email interface

[darkoshi]

Forestfen is having difficulties with Yahoo's new web-mail interface. Its "Clean, simple design that makes email a breeze" is different from how it was before, and therefore is not simple for her. I'm sure there are many other similarly disgruntled non-tech-savvy users like her.

Last week somehow all her Inbox messages got moved to the Trash folder, and I had to show her how to restore them. It might have happened due to the "Select All" checkbox and the "Delete" button being right next to each other, making it easy to accidentally click both.

I've suggested a few times she switch to Gmail. But her business cards have her Yahoo email address, so she doesn't want to change it.

.

This is from Yahoo Mail's Additional Terms of Service:
By using the Services, you consent to allow Yahoo!’s automated systems to scan and analyze all incoming and outgoing communications content sent and received from your account (such as Mail and Messenger content including instant messages and SMS messages) including those stored in your account to, without limitation, provide personally relevant product features and content, to match and serve targeted advertising and for spam and malware detection and abuse protection. Unless expressly stated otherwise, you will not be allowed to opt out of this feature. If you consent to this ATOS and communicate with non-Yahoo! users using the Services, you are responsible for notifying those users about this feature.

Bold font added by me - I find that last sentence rather objectionable. I wonder if Gmail has something similar in their TOS.

Comments

[fayanora]

Posting a response here because LJ is being slower than a coprolite¹: I just now looked at the new Yahoo Mail on my account, and it looks no different to me than it did before. However, I'm not a really good judge because I gave up on Yahoo Mail over a year ago because I was fed up with them constantly changing shit around, so I understand your friend's pain. Constantly having to learn a new interface on the same website is what drove me away from them after being with them for over 10 years. The only reason I still occasionally access my Yahoo Mail account is to keep an archive of over 10 years worth of emails. I use Gmail now. Gmail occasionally makes slight changes, like most websites do, but annoying as they are, it's preferable to the kinds of changes Yahoo Mail keeps making.

Oh, and another reason for leaving Yahoo Mail: they only have the one interface available, so if I was on a computer where that interface made the page (and other pages, sometimes the whole computer) slower than a snail's shit, there was no option but to tolerate it or reboot the computer. With Gmail, if the primary interface is slowing my computer down, I can switch to a "plain HTML" interface that is much better on bandwidth.

It toook some getting used to Gmail's putting umpteen emails and replies in conversation view, but once I got used to that, it grew on me. It's useful being able to click on readily available links to expand the conversation, if I've forgotten what a friend and I have been talking about. Kind of like having a chat log in email, except old messages in a "conversation" are hidden by default.

I also like Gmail's customability.

1 = Fancy word for a fossilized turd.

[fayanora]

Oh, also... I'm not sure how it's done, but there's a Gmail feature that lets emails from other email providers be forwarded to Gmail. I don't use it, haven't tried to, because I get tons of spam at my old Yahoo address.

[darkoshi]

The last time I checked, Yahoo mail couldn't be forwarded to Gmail unless you had a paid Yahoo plan, because only the paid Yahoo accounts work with POP.

I like Gmail, because it has free POP, so I can use a separate email client like Thunderbird with it.

Maybe I'll be able to convince FF to switch someday.