Yahoo's e-mail "upgrade" frustrates longtime users
Yahoo Mail’s big effort to stop the momentum of Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail has succeeded in annoying its own users.
Yahoo rolled out a beta version of mail a couple weeks ago, boasting of new integrations with Facebook and Twitter and greater ability to view photos in email, as part of a more “elegant” interface.
But in the process, Yahoo stripped out two of the most useful links on the mail page – calendar and notepad.
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The only way to access your calendar now seems to be by navigating to the Yahoo home page or the “My Yahoo” page, two sites that I use approximately… never.
To solve the problem I’ve created two additional browser bookmarks for calendar and notepad. So instead of needing one bookmark to access everything I want from Yahoo Mail, now I need three. I’d love to restore the old Yahoo Mail interface, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to do that yet. (Anybody know?)
After loading up the beta last week, I spent a decent amount of time searching for my calendar and thought that this must be a problem of my own visual perception. After all, why on Earth would Yahoo make it harder to access some of the most useful parts of their service?
But I found I’m not the only one after a Google search turned up a discussion thread with more than 100 comments on the lack of calendar and notepad.
“Calendar is very valuable, please bring it back,” one user said in a representative comment.
“If you push this current setup on me next year, this might be the push for me to go with Gmail as I already use GDocs as well,” another user writes.
The calendar “needs to be MORE prominent, not gone,” another writes.
Yahoo employees joined the discussion thread, saying “As this is a beta release, we’re planning to add lots of new features, including a new version of calendar that we think you’re going to like even better than the current one.”
Yahoo also offered a workaround, saying “click on the Gear icon to the right of Applications, and in the Gallery, find Calendar and Notepad and add them to your list. We’re working on ensuring everyone sees these by default.”
I tried that, however, and the gallery doesn’t include calendar and notepad. Several users in the discussion thread also reported the same problem. Once Yahoo officials realized the workaround doesn’t work, they started telling users to access their calendar at “calendar.yahoo.com,” which as noted earlier requires a separate bookmark.
Since Yahoo hasn’t fixed the problem, one user suggested that people using Google Chrome simply import their Yahoo calendar data into Google Calendar and use the Google Calendar extension. That’s another win for Google.
The problem seems to be Yahoo Mail officials cramming so much stuff into the new interface that they’re forgetting about what users actually need. The new interface informed me this morning that “Kendra Wilkinson” is the top trending topic. For those people who want it, Yahoo Mail now offers integration with Facebook, Twitter and the like.
There’s a big new purple space at the top of the screen that pushes email down, actually lessening the amount of screen space devoted to viewing email (yes, I measured).
The applications list on the left hand side has all sorts of tools (edit photos, Evite, Flickr, PayPal and more) but, as mentioned earlier, no calendar and notepad, the two things I and many other users are most likely to actually want in a convenient spot.
While I access my work calendar through Outlook, I use Yahoo Mail’s calendar to remind myself of social events. The service gives you convenient email reminders and, in the old version of Yahoo Mail, kept you up to date with a little bar on the bottom that shows upcoming events. This quick view has also been stripped out.
I’ve been using Yahoo Mail for over a decade, but have noted problems in earlier blog posts, such as one that rendered Yahoo Mail inoperable on Android phones connected to Wi-Fi networks. Want to switch to Gmail? Yahoo makes that difficult, too, by charging users $20 for the privilege of forwarding e-mail, something Gmail offers for free.
Yahoo has fixed the Android Wi-Fi problem, and hopefully this calendar and notepad nonsense will get sorted out soon. I’ve sent requests for information to Yahoo’s public relations team in the hopes of getting a clearer answer than the ones offered to users through the discussion board. I’ll update this post if I hear back.
UPDATE at 2:40 P.M. ET: A Yahoo spokesman confirms “we are working to add a Calendar link to Beta … in a few weeks time,” and points out that Yahoo issued a blog post about other enhancements it intends to make. Also, it turns out there is an easy way to switch back to the original mail interface. On the top left corner of the screen, click “Help” and then click “Return to Original Mail.”
