Recently, Yahoo redesigned its mail service again. I’ve talked about Yahoo Mail last August. I hoped for an improvements. Recently, on its 16th birthday, Yahoo gives a new look for its mail service. Quoting from a release published at Yahoo’s blog:

We redesigned Yahoo Mail to be more efficient, too. Things you do all of the time like search, starring, and deleting are now one-click actions that appear when you hover over an email. We also wanted to give you more breathing room in your inbox, so you can collapse the left-hand toolbar to be more productive.

I’m not a big fan of Yahoo email service actually, I’m sold to Google Mail. I use Gmail web-based interface on my daily basis. So, what Yahoo offered on this redesign this time?

1 TB of storage to handle email and attachments.

Yes, that’s huge! Currently, Google ‘only’ offers 15 GB of free storage (shared between Google Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos) with some detailed conditions. The 1 TB storage is tempting for marketing purpose and by number. Do I really need 1TB? I can live with 15 GB Google offers. By having 1 TB of storage, it can handles more than 54 million of emails.
Previously, if you’re a Flickr user, Yahoo also offers 1 TB of storage to store more than 500,000 photos in original quality. This one is really a good deal!

Themes

I’m not a fan of themes for email service. I left my Gmail in the standard look, without fancy themes. Yahoo — since it also owns Flickr — brings some selected photos from Flickr to choose as the background theme. Here how it looks.

For the web interface, I choose the of of the clean theme styles.

Disposable Email Address

You can now have another email address to receive emails. Instead of publishing your real email address, you can tell people another email address. To enable this feature go to Mail Options > Security. First, you need to choose a unique basename.
For example: my email Yahoo Mail address is [email protected]. For the “basename”, I should choose another username. For example “thomasarie21359“. After we can have multiple email address.
The new email address will be using basename-[keyword]@yahoo.com. For example, I can create [email protected] if I want to signup for website that will send me automatic updates after subscribing.
The email sent to that address will go to your primary email address. But, you can manage how it will go to your inbox, e.g. send them directly to a specific folder.
Gmail already has this kind of thing. Sending to [email protected] or [email protected] will to one inbox. This happens because Gmail does not  recognize/ignore the dots in username.

Filters and Mail Forwarding

The filters works to route incoming emails to specific treatment based on some conditions. Just like what Gmail has.

But I think Gmail wins in some points:

• Gmail filters can handle email attachment
• Preview. You can see the filter results first.

And, Yahoo also provide the “forwarding” feature. I think this feature will work perfect if you want to keep receiving the emails to your preferred mail service.
Yahoo Mail team works really hard to improve the service. Some people like the changes, but some other people don’t. On daily basis, I work more on an email client, and mobile phone. You?