Yahoo! Mail Celebrates its 16th Birthday with a Makeover

Ahh, to be 16 again. It’s that time in life when responsibilities begin to ramp up, and the desire to look attractive to others gets kicked into overdrive. Yahoo! sure isn’t oblivious to this, so it conducted a complete makeover on Mail, which, as you might have guessed, just turned sweet 16.

In some ways, the new Yahoo! Mail looks a lot like Gmail, and the addition of “conversations” sure backs that up (a take on “conversation view”, which shows an entire email chain as a thread). The most noticeable change is sure to be new themes, which from the previews look fantastic (and again, make it look a bit like Gmail).

Other new features: POP3 support (/me checks calendar), one-click options added to a pop-up when hovering over an email message, disposable email addresses, enhanced filters, automatic forwarding and a staggering 1TB of storage space (we’d assume that your entire Yahoo! account would feed into this, such as to include Flickr).

Overall, impressive changes. It seems Yahoo! is finally realizing that it can’t rest on its laurels – it needs to give people a reason to continue using its products, and by this, it seems to be on the right track.