Yahoo unveils total email redesign inspired by Flickr and Tumblr

[mmadhankumar]

Yahoo’s march to modernize its core products continues with a significant redesign of Yahoo Mail that brings Flickr-generated themes, a new compose screen, and a host of other features designed to win back defectors. The company is also putting a cap on its previously unlimited storage: 1 terabyte, which the company says should be good for 6,000 years of email. The redesign is rolling out today simultaneously on the web, and for apps on Android, iOS, and Windows 8.

Mail is a pillar of Yahoo’s products, with more than 100 million daily users. And yet like many of Yahoo’s products, it was overtaken in recent years by Google’s equivalent offering — Gmail now has more than 425 million monthly users. It became the biggest email service in the world by offering tons of free storage, smartly threaded conversations, and a service that often felt faster than its peers.

With today’s update, which comes on Yahoo Mail’s 16th birthday, Yahoo aims to leapfrog Gmail on each of those counts — even as it transforms to look more like Gmail than ever. Yahoo has put significant focus on mail this year, introducing new tablet apps and releasing unused email addresses back into the wild. (That last move led to criticism over security concerns.) The goal is to get Mail growing again. If Yahoo owns your inbox, it can steer you to many other Yahoo products. But will a younger generation of users give it a chance?

Yahoo is also now giving away for free premium features that were once part of Mail Plus, which cost $19.99 a year. Free users can now create disposable addresses to hand out to marketers, automatically forward Yahoo Mail to another account, and get offline access to their messages with POP. The only thing they don’t get from Mail Plus is an inbox free of advertisements; to go ad-free, you can pay Yahoo $50 a year. (Existing Mail Plus users can keep their current plans, though it’s not clear why they would want to.)

Yahoo unveils total email redesign inspired by Flickr and Tumblr | The Verge