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 | In three words yahoo mail is reliable, simple and fully featured. For storage you have 100mb available and an account gives you access to other areas of the yahoo service such as groups, chat and games. | | |
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| Favourable points: | · 100 MB storage
· Effective Spam and image protection
· Rich text editor | | Negative points: | · Global version of yahoo lacks POP access and free greetings.
· A lot of advertising, but does not distract you too badly. | |
Yahoo mail has been available for quite some time. However, more recently it has seen upgrades to its user interface, spam + antivirus protection and greater storage capacity. All of these have added up to make this email service a very good choice. Currently its number of users are lesser than that of hotmail however we believe it deserves far greater popularity.
Design (9/10)
The interface is quick, accessible and easy to use. All the features are just a few clicks away and where you would expect to find them. Page load times are very low. In terms of customisation a number of different styles are available though personally I choose Grey+Orange.
With Yahoo the emphasis is on do what you want and do it quickly. Keyboard shortcuts are one of the ways of achieving this. For example: Ctrl + Shift + C will check for new messages. Drop down menus are also used to provide quicker access to the feature you wish to use.
Reliability (9/10)
As far as reliability is concerned I have yet to experience a time when I could not access my email account or yahoo messenger. So yes, very high reliability!
Security (
9/10) Includes: Spam, antivirus and account security from unauthorised access.
I will dive straight into the deep end. Spam, bulk or unsolicited email, call it what you will but what is important is that it has become a big nuisance in the email users life. To stop this Yahoo offers image and spam identification protection.
Image blocker keeps your address away from spammers. All images in emails are blocked unless they are from a contact in your address book or you choose to display in an email.
Moving on now to the emails themselves. Yahoo uses "SpamGuard" technology which works by attempting to identify unsolicited email and sending them to your bulk mail folder. This is then emptied on a chosen basis. Good, but does it work?
In our test we set up an account and signed up to a number of websites that send junk. Then it was just a matter of time:
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Roughly 3/4 of junk mail were caught. (Good)
· All emails off other friends, including not in our address book were allowed. (Good)
· 1/3 of newsletters we wanted to receive were sent to bulk mail folder. (Fairly Good) To solve the last one we simply added @playstation.com to our safe list.
But, what if you know a little about computers, like me! and you don't post your address well then you wont receive much or any junk. My Yahoo Account has been active for over 3 years and I have yet to receive any junk.
Compare this to hotmail whereby within a few days of activating users have reported already getting spam. So why 9/10 and not 10/10 well, the final category, unauthorised access. For a determined user there are ways of getting into yahoo accounts so keep any personal details out of there, I have not marked Yahoo down by much here because this is the case with many internet services.
Support (6/10)
Well, that was a big category "security". Time to move on to something shorter. Ah, Yahoo Help.
Although Yahoo has a fairly decent help database it does not have very good email support. You could email them and not get a reply in ages or worse not even get a reply.
Accessibility (8/10)
Unfortunately in Firefox and other browsers, some of the more advanced features such as rich text editor are not available. Also worth adding is that WAP access is available for free.
Features
(8/10) The create email screen looks as follows:
It has a really nice, simple, clear design with no adverts getting in your way as you compose your email.
The features of the rich text editor include the usual bold, italics etc and a number of cute emotions. Further more you can attach files as big as 10mb! Huge!
Finally once you are finished composing you can choose to save it to your sent messages, something that will be increasing used with 100mb storage available. Also available is the ability to download an address auto complete tool which will be used to complete addresses as you type:
The second way to add addresses quickly is by simply assigning a nickname to each contact and just typing in the nickname.
An address book, notepad and calendar tool are also available.
The address book is well thought out with the ability to add plentiful information including alternate addresses and 4 custom fields.
Finally once you have added addresses you can search through them and organise them into categories. Remember the day when you used to get a calendar free with hotmail, well those days can be re-lived with Yahoo calendar! You can add tasks and very complex calendar events. Why very complex? Well, let me just take you through some of the options available... repeating event, invitations, send an email reminder, address information, share the calendar. I do not think that there is anything that this calendar can't do! This takes Yahoo mail further than just sending and receiving email and into a personal organisation tool.
Another thing we were very happy about with Yahoo mail is its expiration policy. Unlike the 1 month hotmail expiration policy Yahoo allows up to 4 months. Nice one yahoo!
Paid Features (not rated)
Paid features:
- Larger account size (2 gigabyte)
- No account expiration
The global yahoo has different paid features however these have not yet reached the UK service.
Conclusion
