Yahoo! Mail practically beautiful.

In the midst of cries of the Google nerds and the merciless onslaught of acquisitions done by Googlee we have ignored the wisdom of the Jedi master Yoda of Internet - Yahoo!. According to various sources Yahoo still is the most visited site on the Internet. Being the mother battle ship of information why not.

Coming to the topic. We've loathed over Google's AJAXy GMail and Windows Live Mail but some of us just missed out on Yahoo! Mail beta (Web 2.0 style) - No experience required.

IMHO, the most beautiful aspect of this UI is it did not try creating a new UI. Yes, it just photocopied Outlook and is immensely clean. A million and one thing is happening on the screen yet nothing is intimidating.

Things I liked list:

1. Clean, non-intimidating UI
2. Tabs. I loved this. So, now if I search my mail instead of taking away my current veiw a new tab is created for the results. No more "Grrr.. It looks like popup blocker ...." either.
3. Nicely integrated with Yahoo! Calendar. No more leaving the screen it is there at the bottom subtly ready to take dates.
4. Autocomplete of what all is already saved.
5. The page has fair amount of ads yet none of them are intrusive and none of them so far have asked me to light their farts.
6. While composing mail one can come out to a new window and it still gives the option to merge with the original browser window.
7. All this heavy duty AJAX is fast with no glitches considering this to be beta (first time login takes a few seconds as all the fanciness is cached.).
8. Drag-n-drop (one or multiple) mails
9. Easy access to mark mail as spam
10. Coolth is the way to mark emails for followups
11. Own context menu where needed
12. Excellent keyboard access
13. If for any reason, I can switch back to old version

One thing I would want to see is tag based organization of emails. So far all providers have nice folder based organization.

Closing notes, I liked Yahoo! charts want to see all of Yahoo! Finance change to 2.0 and ditto for calendar especially since it is directly integrated with Mail.