Yesterday morning I finally got my invite to try out Yahoo Mail’s new beta. Wow, what a slick application. I really like the improvements. One of my favorites is a very minor thing, but something I use a lot. That is the addition of a “Show Images” button at the top of html emails. I hated scrolling all the way to the bottom and searching for that tiny link every time I wanted to load email images.

There are many other things I like about this new version, but I’m going to focus on the things I’d like to see improved, for now.

First off, I love the idea of bring my RSS feeds in to my Yahoo Mail. If Yahoo would make a few more improvements I’d completely move from Bloglines to Yahoo Mail for RSS. (And I’m a BIG Bloglines fan!) The biggest things I think that they could do to make RSS more robust is giving the ability for sub-folders and putting the feed tree on another tab. The reason behind the other tab suggestion is that I am currently subscribed to almost 100 feeds and even with sub-folders it would push my mail folders way off the screen.

I’ve whipped up a couple mock-ups showing how I think these ideas could be executed.

This is the current way Yahoo is doing RSS feeds in the mail beta.

If they would split the email and RSS to separate tabs then the right column becomes much more manageable when you have a lot of feeds.

Also, the addition of folders would help keep the feeds organized.

My only other issue with the RSS part of this beta is the performance. Everything loads quick enough, but the scrolling of the feeds page is way too jumpy. I’ve tried it on both Mac and Windows and in several different browsers, all giving the same jumpy results. Granted I’d get use to it, but I like how smooth Bloglines pages scroll when I’m using my mouse’s scroll wheel.

Finally, there are two other little tweaks I’d like to see added. The options to move the reading panel to the right instead of the bottom of the screen (like in outlook) would be nice to have. Also, the ability to have the reading panel return to a blank screen rather than the next email when you delete an email. Both of these are minor and I see them as settings you could switch off and on.

That’s all I have for now. I can’t wait to see how Yahoo continues to improve this product. Now if only they would beef up the notepad section. Then I could drop Backpack and let Yahoo handle that stuff too.