Yahoo! has finally removed the beta tag from the latest version of its Mail service, kick starting the rollout of the latest version to its 284 million users worldwide today. While Yahoo! Mail is the US’ largest web portal’s email service, it is available in a total of 43 markets and 26 different languages all over the world.
The new version of Yahoo! Mail has some interesting features like social-networking integration – users can respond to Facebook friends directly from an email instead of having to load up a new window/tab for Facebook. Taking a leaf out of Gmail and Hotmail’s pages – Yahoo! Mail also now supports the viewing of slideshows and video from links directly inside their email.
Yahoo! also now has a priority contacts feature – emails from people in your address book will be pushed to the top of your unread messages. Users can also send texts and instant messages from within Yahoo! Mail, and all those texts and messages are also archived by default. YouSendIt (a file sending service) is also integrated into Yahoo! Mail, and so is electronic invitation service, Evite.
Just like Facebook, it looks like Yahoo! wants users to be able to spend as much time on their service instead of having to go elsewhere. These new features are pretty nifty and will bring a lot of added functionality to the web mail service. Let’s hope this rollout won’t cause anymore service outages.