Yahoo! Responds!
I find it truly amazing how responsive the folks at Yahoo! have been to many of the articles/posts I have written. They are actively involved in community discussions and receptive to notes about how things can be improved. This time, they respond to our call for standards-based email clients.
What strikes me profoundly is that while they have been ranked among the best performing email clients (regarding support for web standards) they are still unsatisfied. They want to support 100% of our recommendations, and for that they have my applause. Oh, those over achievers.
We reported that Yahoo! Mail (both New and Classic) supports our entire list sans list-style-image. Brian Goodman of the Yahoo! Mail team contacted us to report that they believed their client did indeed support that property. As we discussed possible variables which might be altering the results on various platforms, etc., we discovered that the problem actually resides with a shortcoming Yahoo! Mail has with CSS shorthand. As it turns out list-style-image is supported while list-style is not.
But most seasoned web designers use shorthand because it saves time and bytes. Especially in the email environment where every byte is valuable. The folks at Yahoo! Mail could have shrugged their shoulders and walked away, satisfied with their level of support. But they decided that support for shorthand is important and are going to do something about it.
I am happy to report that Yahoo! Mail has responded to our call! They are going to dig into their application, find the source of this deficiency and crush it. Yes, folks, with one of their future releases Yahoo! Mail will support 100% of our recommendations. When we see this come to fruition we will report the news, so stay tuned.
Thank you, Yahoo!
That makes me rethink my client of choice! It’s currently gmail, one of the worst in the bunch.
It’s great to hear that the major clients are paying attention. I think many of them have been waiting for an independent group to establish some kind of standard.
Had any one of these companies come up with a yardstick on their own it would have been hard to convince others to measure themselves against. The ESP has provided the unbiased test that was needed. Kudos again - and thank you, this is already proving to benefit commercial emailers and their recipients.
That is awesome news.
We are one step closer to achieving our goals. Great news for the few months online, if you ask me!
Keep up the great work, ESP!
Good to see the project is working, especially in such a short space of time.
I use Yahoo myself, for my BT email, and find the application really nice, refreshing and easy to use.
Great to see one of the bigger players taking an interest and responsibility/
Now we just need someone from Gmail to pick up the baton!
Yahoo has always been ahead of the pack for email client features since day 1. An account that doesnt expire in a few weeks of non usage was always my fav. I practically dont even need to check to see if my emails work in Yahoo… 100% of the time!
Thanks for the support, folks. It certainly is nice to gain the attention of a company like Yahoo!. My experience with them has always been productive. They’re attentive and friendly, and have produced a really nice product.
Thank you Yahoo! I hope others will follow suit and work to improve their products as well. A team like this that is willing to jump up and fix problems so quickly deserves our respect.
Way to go gents! Hopefully the Google Machine will catch wind of this and want to exceed what Yahoo! is doing. When they start losing users they will respond - I think.
That’s really cool. I’ve been increasingly impressed with Yahoo over that last couple of years. They bought flickr and delicious, and their whole YUI JavaScript library is really cool.
This is really good news. I’ve had my doubts on the big companies actually taking time out and responding to this great effort. I hope the other companies follow suit, soon.
Sorry, off-topic, but I’m getting this message when trying to subscribe to your RSS feed:
XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: http://feeds.feedburner.com/EmailStandardsProject
Line Number 1, Column 1:
^
Ok, sorry for posting this here but I was unable to find an easy way to get a contact section/email.
Old this standars song and you’re not using <labels > for the checkbox in this form!
Andi, thanks for letting us know about that. I’ve just etsted it in a range of browsers and RSS readers with no luck. I’ve also checked with FeedBurner and everything seems to be purring along nicely. If you (or anyone else) spot the issue again, please let us know.
Juan, nice spotting and thanks for letting us know, that’s been fixed now.
That’s awesome! Kudos to ESP and Yahoo!
Hopefully the Gmail team is listening....
It’s good to see Yahoo! are looking to improve their standards support. I’m still quite upset about the ‘new beta’ of Yahoo! Mail which is really slow, bulky and unstable on Opera.
I think they took the wrong direction with the new beta, I would’ve prefered to see an AJAX’ed up Classic version; but not in the way they’ve done it.
Also, Yahoo! need to roll out a new version of their calendar services. They really suck at the minute compared to competitors. Urgh.
Kudos to Yahoo! for listening to the community. I’ve had my yahoo Email address since they first made them available, and it just keeps getting better.
I agree that the new beta of Yahoo! Mail is a little slow, but I love the interface and functionality so much more than the Classic version. I like the speed of Gmail, but in general I have my subscription-based Emails coming to Yahoo!, because I have found that they render better.
Odd, I just tried to Digg this post by submitting the URL manually - and I received the message ‘This link does not appear to be a working link. Please check the link and try again.’ Tried multiple times with the same result.
I found the following at the Wordpress Support forums: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/146375. Check the response near the bottom by Otto42, regarding a modification to the whitelist file that must be made to the ‘Bad Behavior’ plugin in order to allow someone to Digg your site.
I’m not sure if this is the problem - feel free to delete this post if it’s not relevant or the problem gets resolved. I just wanted to make you aware.
Gmail may be one of the worse clients in the list but it is by far the superior client in comparison to Yahoo… for starters it doesn’t take a life time to load as it crams flashing adverts in and it also doesn’t stick adverts at the end of my emails.
Still they all need to pull their finger out and get up to standards, then maybe I can spend a little less time recreating emails in html 4.0 and a little more time making websites.
@Coxy: yeah, I gave up using the new Yahoo mail on Opera and went back to using the old version.
Yahoo’s reaction to this is certainly commendable but not really surprising when you think of the amount of work they do in other areas that is freely available to other developers - grids, YSlow, YUI etc.
That’s great news!
I keep being more and more impressed and surprised by yahoo. They seem to really care about improving their services for users. I do have a yahoo account, but lately have been using gmail more. News like this makes me contemplate a change back!
Having used Yahoo since 2002 I’ve been consistently happy with it, and now I see why. Commitment.
Just goes to show its not that hard really… Time for google to come to the party?
Nice to see Yahoo! step up to the plate and respond. Baby steps in the right direction is all it takes… Great work!
Fantastico! Hopefully everyone else will be (slowly) coerced into delivering.
As developers and avid internet users us raising the profile of the project, and persuading clients, friends and family to leave certain clients (e.g. Gmail et al) in the dust will help make them listen. Think about the way Firefox took off.
That’s great going! I believe that gmail will jump soon as the big players start following the standards.
Within the Netherlands a very small amount of people use Yahoo email. They would do good to do some research about this fact: in other words listen to their customers.
Because Google is so responsive, Yahoo is losing ground. Good thing that they are taking your comments/critics serious. Lets wait for the results ;)
this week microsoft offered to yahoo for buy. that’s very bad for google.
Yahoo To Turn Down Microsoft Bid
Yahoo is set to reject Microsoft’s unsolicited bid, now worth $42bn (£22bn), as too low, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters on Saturday—the first clear signal the board might be prepared to negotiate and sell the Internet media giant.
yes. Thank you, Yahoo!
my first e mail adress is in yahoo. but yahoo not populer now.i think it’s fist reason is hotmail’s msn
Good to see the project is working, especially in such a short space of time.
Thank you so much that kind of projects make internet more secure and comfortable.. Done great job
Great work. Nice to see Yahoo. step up to the plate and respond. Baby steps in the right direction is all it takes.
Hope everyone notice about these kind of subjects…
Done great
yahoo is improving her services. It is getting easier, faster and more user friendly. they are doing good
Its about time companies listened and adapted there products to the people that matter the most, the customer.
I think they took the wrong direction with the new beta, I would’ve prefered to see an AJAX’ed up Classic version; but not in the way they’ve done it.
“they want to support 100% of our recommendations”
I think this is fantastic and says a lot about Yahoo as a whole. I’ve always respected them and they’ve been my favorite for many years…
That’s fantastic! Hopefully the rest will follow…
Thank you for the informatio. I preffer to use gmail but after reading the comments on this thread and the other documentation, I am not sure anymore about gmail. What I like the best about gmail is that it let’s me track my articles that I have posted in articles directories, everytime someone picks up my articles and posted them on their sites, I get a message to my gmail account (you need a small script to make this work)
THe one I hate the most is hotmail! I keep missing emails from others or my emails keep going to their trash box :(
Thanks again for the information.
Consumer Reports guy
I also use Gmail and I think is the best email service right now. Your project is a fantastic idea, it really opened my eyes and my knowledge of email services has increased greatly.
Is yahoo mail as bad as hotmail?
Thank you.
Joseph
@ everyone with great things to say:
Thanks for your kind words about our project. We put a lot of hard work into this and it’s nice to see that it is appreciated. Not only by web designers but also by the email-client developers who have contributed their efforts in improving the email environment for everyone.
@ home improvement loans guy:
Is Yahoo as bad as Hotmail? Yahoo is a really excellent client. The GUI of the new version tends to be a little slow on occasion because of all of the AJAX add-delivery. However, it is usable, full of nice features and properly renders HTML emails.
Thanks Mark!
One question, if I have to decide between gmail and yahoo paid email (I forgot the name of their paid email service) which one is better?
Thanks,
Joseph
Sorry, you’ll have to make that decision on your own. They each have features that cater to different people with different needs. I was simply pointing out that Yahoo webmail is a good client and probably shouldn’t be put on a “is it worse than” list.
thanks. I think they took the wrong direction with the new beta, I would’ve prefered to see an AJAX’ed up Classic version; but not in the way they’ve done it.
I am beginning to use Google for everything, Email, Google Checkout when I shop, Google alerts on things I like. I noticed today that you can even place TV advertisements through Google. I am going to give Yahoo mail a try an see the comparison.
I use Yahoo myself, for my BT email, and find the application really nice, refreshing and easy to use.
That’s incredible about Yahoo sticking to the standards! I’m totally impressed!
And you know, I’m really happy that microsoft/yahoo deal fell through (at least so far!)… I don’t even want to know what might happen if yahoo got into microsoft’s hands! Standards would be out the window!
Within the Netherlands a very small amount of people use Yahoo email. They would do good to do some research about this fact: in other words listen to their customers.