• September 15, 2005

Faced with increasingly aggressive competition, Yahoo! on Wednesday launched a faster, sleeker version of its mail application. Available initially to a subset of users, the new service resides in a browser just like Yahoo!'s existing mail program, but behaves more like a desktop client a la Microsoft's Outlook.

"We got rid of the time the browser needs to refresh and redraw the page," a Yahoo! spokeswoman said. Other enhancements include a drag and drop e-mail organization, and an inbox containing all e-mails on the top of the page with a separate pane for previewing e-mail. The revamp--the most significant since Yahoo! stopped charging for the service eight years ago--drew on technology from Oddpost, an e-mail start-up that Yahoo! acquired last year.

--Gavin O'Malley