Yahoo Mail Beta: driving me buggy

Slowness

Lack of features

• I used to use Ctrl-F to find the name of a person who recently emailed me in my inbox. It's much easier than scrolling, or looking their name up in an address book. I can't do this anymore.
• I can't view or sort by whether read/unread status.
• I used to be able to attach multiple files in one go ... now I have to do it one at a time.
• There used to be an advanced search that allowed me to narrow down results. It seems to be missing.

Weak UI Choices

• In the old Yahoo Mail I used to set my items per page setting to the maximum -- 200. The page would still load quick and I could scroll through the topmost 200 emails quickly and easily (and use Ctrl-F, like I mentioned above). The new Yahoo Mail doesn't have "pages", it's just one giant page that loads as I scroll. There's two problems with this: One, the load time is slow so instead of getting 200 at a time like I used to, I get one screen's worth, and everytime the scroll bar moves just a bit, it reloads. The other is that my inbox has 3000 Messages. This makes the scrollbar very tiny, dragging it just a pixel seems to change the view in an unknown amount. Did I just skip 10 message, or 100? I don't know. Both of these aspects add up to making it not just difficult, but impossible to visually scan a folder, even when it has as few as 75 emails in it. This is a huge loss.
• Yahoo Mail Beta now has resizable column headers for it's folder view. To me, this is a huge mistake. It's been years since I've used a mail client with resizable columns, and having to micromanage their widths to see all the data I want sucks. The old Yahoo Mail used HTML tables to word-wrap long email addresses and subject lines, which was great. The new one just cuts them off. So, if I want to see all of a long subject line I have to manually resize it to make the Subject column big enough. This, in turn, pushes the other columns off the edge of the screen. There's not even a scroll bar for this, so to see my Flagged column I need to re-resize other columns to be smaller so I can get the Flagged column on-screen.
  
  But here's where it really gets bad. I prefer my default sort method to be by Received date. I think most users do. Well, normally the Received column is off the edge of the screen, which is okay since I often don't check the date directly in the folder view. But, occasionally I misclick a column header and my folder resorts, and this is the sucky part -- there's nothing to click to get it back to the proper sort. I either have to resize my browser or I have to shrink other columns to get the Recieved column back on screen so I can click it again.
  
  This is what I mean when I say this new method requires Micromanagement. The old system never had any of this. In my opinion this is Yahoo trying to emulate an old Desktop feature that is an inferior way to organize data. It's a big mistake.
• The New Yahoo Mail uses Split Buttons, which are buttons that also have a menu built into them. Click on the button itself and a command is activated, like "reply". But click on the little arrow to the right and a menu will drop down. One big problem with split buttons is that they hide data under a hard-to-click button. This means the data inside that menu is a harder to get at, and therefore will be used less. Making the Arrow that opens the menu bigger and easier to click would improve this. Making the menu automatically open when the pointer hovers over the button would be even better.
  
  The second problem with Yahoo Mail Beta's implementation of split buttons is that Yahoo is hiding options in their menus that you can't access any other discoverable way. The only way to access "reply to all", for example, is by clicking the little arrow next to "reply", and then accessing it from the menu. Most other apps (like IE or Firefox) use split buttons to hide redundant options like History, which can also be fully accessed by clicking the back button (without the menu) or in the History pane.
  
  I think Yahoo Mail would benefit from having the Reply split button change to always make the dropdown appear. It would make it easier to hit, and it would make the other options more discoverable.

Summary

Feedback - 23 responses

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