Yahoo! Mail enters public beta

The new Yahoo! Mail has entered public beta, incorporating many features from Oddpost into a new PHP front-end. The new Yahoo! Mail features a two-pane interface for reading feeds in one scrollable page.

Yahoo Mail fetch rss feed

Yahoo! Mail product manager Ethan Diamond told Richard MacManus “the [feed reading] feature is kinda in stealth mode; we are not drawing much attention to it.” Yahoo! Mail will auto-subscribe users to “the most popular feeds across the Yahoo! network”, adding a few feeds to Yahoo! Mail’s user base of over 250 million users.

The Yahoo! Mail feed view is built on-top of the My Yahoo! feed platform backend (api1.my.mud.yahoo.com). A user’s list of subscribed feeds are the same throughout the system and there is no display of read/unread count. Yahoo! Mail will display information from the most recent fetch of your feed in descending order by creation date for up to 51 items. Yahoo! tracks the view state of each entry on mouse-over but there is no click-tracking on outbound links.

Yahoo! displays the time and date it discovered a published entry regardless of the publisher’s own data. There seems to be a bit of a lag based on my testing of frequently updated feeds this morning, so be sure to ping Yahoo! with each post or millions of users might not see your latest content. Yahoo! is still failing Atom title conformance tests among other things.