Yahoo's gorgeous new Mail app adds photo and document preview, while device-based keys mean no more passwords
"We're basically going to kill passwords," Yahoo's Fernando Delgado said during a recent press briefing about the new Yahoo mail apps.
But a novel way to bypass passwords is just one of the features found on Yahoo's new iOS and Android apps, which arrive on the still widely used Yahoo Mail's 18th birthday. The apps, as well as the Yahoo Mail Web interface, can now handle multiple email accounts.
Yahoo Account Key uses push notifications to verify you rather than making you type in a password. As Delgado put it, the current username and password standard has become too complex and doesn't actually protect the user.
Yahoo's system reminds me of Duo Mobile, where you simply OK a notification on your phone to get logged into a secure site. Yahoo will roll out Account Key security to Mail first, and then to its other Web services later.
Like a lot of recent mobile mail clients, the Yahoo Mail app now lets you swipe right and left to delete or mark an email as read. The inbox shows photo avatars for users pulled either connected Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook accounts, or from typography images from Flickr.
The new search function makes finding messages, photos, or attachments from a particular contact a cinch, with view-switching buttons for each content type. The app also makes it easier to insert photos from a smartphone than has typically been the case for mobile email clients. It's certainly simpler than on the iPhone stock mail app, at least. You simply tap a Plus sign button.
The app makes use of the "long press" gesture, for sending an email to yourself and for selecting multiple emails from the inbox. And if you're bored looking at your email, a news button gets you caught up with the goings on of the day. Tapping into a story presents a Flipboard-like view.
In addition to Yahoo mail accounts, the new app supports Outlook.com, Hotmail, and AOL Mail accounts. While there are plenty of people who use those services, a strangely missing option here is Gmail. The rich search feature mentioned above works across all these account types.
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