Last month ReadWriteWeb covered a number of Yahoo updates to Mail, Search and Messenger. The most notable items appear to be the ability to monitor friends and status updates from a single dashboard. Being the singular entry-point for multiple services including Flickr, Mail and Messenger is likely to be a major facet of the Yahoo campaign. Nevertheless, while the company remains a leading advertising and email player, critics argue that these recent life streaming features do not offer the same ease of use as sites like Facebook and Friendfeed. It will be interesting to see if the new campaign can convince users to stay within the Yahoo ecosystem for all of their communications and business needs.

Photo Credit: Franco Follini

Gmail Labs already has a feature that allows users to view multiple inboxes at the same time, so this new feature could potentially be built on top of this, with an inbox with high-priority messages at the top and the rest of the messages at the bottom.

Is this a Useful Way to Organize Mail?

Whether this is necessarily a better way to organize mail is a different question. After all, there is also a lot of implicit information in when a message was sent. That said, though, a lot of us have hundreds or even thousands of unread messages (at least those of us that haven't become a slave to the inbox zero philosophy), so it will be interesting to see if this new feature (if indeed it is real) will be able to help us to organize our dysfunctional inboxes.

Note: we searched the Gmail code for the references to the 'Magic Inbox' ourselves and came away empty-handed. Chances are, that Google is only testing this for a small number of users right now.

Showing the new panes on the right works best when you have a wide-screen monitor with a relatively high resolution. Otherwise, the additional 'inboxes' take up too much space and you won't be able to read the subject lines of your incoming messages. If you add a lot of new inboxes, this will also make your screen look extremely cluttered.

You can also chose to have Gmail display the extra inboxes underneath or above your standard inbox, though this method probably works best when you set Gmail to only show a small number of messages in your standard inbox.

This new feature will surely help those of us who get a lot of email to get a quicker overview of our incoming mail, but given the name, we had hoped that it would allow us to combine multiple Gmail accounts into one, which would be even more helpful for those of us who manage more than one email account through Gmail.

Among the new features are the ability to enhance your calendar with photos from Flickr, a built-in to-do list, and support for drag and drop. Yahoo Calendar can now also send out reminders for important events by email, IM, or SMS.

Yahoo will roll this new functionality out slowly, starting as a closed beta in the U.S., Brazil, India, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. Over time, Yahoo will roll the new calendar out to all Yahoo Mail users.

Why Now?

According to Yahoo's data, only about 8 million out of its 280 million Yahoo mail customers use Yahoo's Calendar now. As John Kremer, Yahoo's VP for Yahoo Mail, told us today, this was one of the main reasons why Yahoo started redesigning the calendar. John also told us that he thought now was the right time to reevaluate the calendar, as users are starting to become more comfortable with online calendaring and calendar sharing. Also, the widespread adoption of open standards like iCal and CalDAV is making it easier for different services to provide interoperability and is driving the adoption of online calendars.

Until now, Yahoo did not integrate the Yahoo Calendar well with Yahoo Mail. While Google Mail has far fewer users than Yahoo Mail, its users are far more likely to also use the Google Calendar, thanks to, in no small part, the straightforward integration between the two.

Cleaner, Easier to Use Interface

The new interface for Yahoo Calendar is a lot cleaner than the old one and integrates a number of features from Zimbra's calendar, including the ability to zoom in and out from a specific date.

The integration with Flickr is still in its early stages. Right now, the calendar will only display a limited set of Flickr's recently highlighted photos, but over time, Yahoo will allow you to choose your own pictures.

In this new beta, Yahoo also now allows you to layer different calendars and gives you very granular controls for sharing these. You can also very easily subscribe to other calendars. Yahoo will also make it very easy to integrate calendar information from other Yahoo properties, including Yahoo TV and Sports.

In the next version of this beta, Yahoo will also integrate a number of social features into the calendar, including data from Upcoming.org. It also looks like Yahoo is planning another overhaul of the site's design to incorporate these features.

Yahoo Taking the Lead for Mainstream Adoption of Calendaring Standards

Other online calendars like Google Calendar or 30 Boxes already offer a lot of this functionality, but Yahoo Calendar has a far wider mainstream adoption than any other calendar. It's good to see that Yahoo is taking the lead here and is planning to roll this beta out publicly around Q1 of 2009, as Yahoo can lead the market towards greater adoption of these open standards and online calendaring in general.

If Jon Perlow has his way, Google may be able to save you from that moment of regret, too.

"When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind?"

Set to late-night Friday and Saturday by default, Mail Goggles can be configured to give you pause any day of the week at any time period you prefer. So, if you're more likely to send off regrettable emails on Monday than Friday, you're still covered.

To enable Mail Goggles, visit the Labs area in Gmail, select the time period you prefer, and save the changes.

Once you have registered your sub-domain, you don't have to register the actual email addresses you want to use. Instead, any email sent to your sub-domain, no matter the part before the '@,' will arrive in your inbox. By default, OtherInbox filters incoming email by sender, but it also makes sense to sign up for new services with addresses like "123onlinestore@xxx.otherinbox.com" so that you can keep track on who is potentially selling your email address to spammers.

By default, OtherInbox will email the first message that comes in from a new address to your standard email account. Every forwarded message is prefaced by a number of links that allow you to turn of forwarding messages from this address or to block further messages from this sender. You can also have Otherinbox send you a daily digest of new messages. IMAP support is forthcoming.

Controlling Spam

There are a large number of potential uses for OtherInbox, but the most straightforward is to use it for signing up for new services online. If a company starts sending you spam, you can just block every email from this service or to this email address with just one click.

The OtherInbox interface is similar to that of pretty much every other online email service (and actually quite reminiscent of Apple's MobileMe), but the main difference is that OtherInbox automatically filters your mail by sender and creates a folder for every sender (see screenshot).

What About Gmail?

If you are already using Gmail, you could, of course, make use of the "+" feature, which allows you to create email address like "john123+facebook@gmail.com," but Gmail does not filter those out automatically like OtherInbox would, which means you would still have to create a filter for every one of those addresses. Over time, that simply takes too much time and work.

Verdict

Overall, OtherInbox is the slickest disposable address service we have seen so far. While other services like GuerillaMail, MintEmail, or e4ward offer similar services, none of them feature the simple user interface and complete set of features that OtherInbox does.

Invites

We quickly ran out of our first batch of invites, Otherinbox gave us a few more to hand out to our readers. Just click here to claim yours.

Boston Globe writer Scott Kirsner tested the service last week and saw even faster turn around - his documents were available on the Pixily website in one day and returned to him in paper form in two days after sending them. That's pretty awesome.

Pixily offers subscription plans from $5 to $60 per month, for your first 50 to 200 pages mailed in and with 1,000 to 12,000 pages of storage. All stored documents are made available in PDF format, so there shouldn't be any concern about losing them if you cancel your subscription.

This is the kind of service that cloud computing makes possible. The Amazon Web Services blog has a brief description of how Pixily uses multiple AWS offerings to keep their prices low.

Trusting People With Your Mail

The "mixed media" nature of this company, combining real world and digital, is one of the things that makes it so interesting. There are other services like this but each are a little different. See also Earth Class Mail, which intercepts your mail before it gets to you and lets you sort it online and Scribd's Paper to iPaper service, which is free, takes its sweet time in scanning your documents and then serves ads next to them online.

Are you willing to send important paper documents to a startup company online? Privacy and security could definitely be a big concern. We are quite interested to see how Pixily works and will report back after spending some time with our new subscription.

You can watch a 5 minute screencast about Pixily here.