In addition to the attention it has been putting on acquiring new talent, Yahoo is also intent on making sure its old products, many of which had become out of date and stale, meet a certain standard as well.
That includes Yahoo Mail, which got a big update last month. But, as with anything that gets overhauled, sometimes the good gets thrown out with the bad.
One thing that was removed was one of the features that made me love Yahoo Mail (and hate Gmail): the ability to have more than one e-mail open at once. Just the simple task of being able to enter into a separate e-mail without having to go back and search for it over and over makes like just that much simpler.
So good news: Yahoo announced Friday that the feature is coming back. And with some “improvements” to boot.
“Our goal was to let you accomplish even more with your inbox, making everyday communications easy and simple. While we made a lot of improvements, many of you reached out to let us know what elements you missed most,” Ratan Hudda, Director of Engineering at Yahoo, wrote.
“It was clear how important it is to be able to quickly jump between emails, search results and drafts.”
From now on, Yahoo Mail will include a “Recent” view option on the left side of the inbox, which will show you messages that are being composed, recently opened emails and the latest search.
Yahoo is even making it that much easier to find, giving them some keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+[ and Ctrl+] on Windows, aka ⌘+[ and ⌘+] on a Mac, will allow users to cycle between tabs.
The Recent tab bar will start rolling out over the next week.
Mail updates
Last month’s redesign of Yahoo Mail completely overhauled the look and feel of the service.
It introduced “conversations” which grouped emails in threads, as well as shortcuts for searching, starring, and deleting mail. All of those actions now appear when a user hovers over an email.
Yahoo also decided to give each user a huge amount of new storage, 1TB to be exact. That is 1,000 GB of data.
The company also introduced the ability of users to use their Flickr photos to give their mail a theme. That means that people could put their face as the background of their email if they really wanted to.
This was not the only update Yahoo made to the service in the past year.
In December of 2012, Yahoo redesigned YahooMail for Web, Windows 8, iPhone and Android, to make it faster and less cumbersome and, in April, Yahoo integrated Dropbox into Mail to get rid of filesize restrictions.
(Image source: http://yahoomail.tumblr.com)
