For those in the US might want to try this one sooner than later, because it might not last …

If you’ve been on the beta invite list for the new Yahoo Mail and haven’t been invited yet, you might try the following trick.

It worked for me this morning, here’s what was experienced step-by-step:

1. Visit and login to your Yahoo account here: edit.yahoo.com/config/set_intl
2. change to locale to English - United Kingdom
3. click on “mail” link in the upper right hand corner of my.yahoo.com and then select “try beta” on the beta invite page.
4. If you are running at 1028×768 resolution you may get a warning message below:

You can change your resolution or bypass and still use the beta.

5. Go back to the edit location link in STEP 1 and then change your locale back to the United States. Now when you visit the mail screen again it will say United States in the upper left corner.

Yahoo Mail looks and behaves like Outlook, only with many ads. I’m still poking around in this so don’t have too much feedback yet.

Some people in the comments that I linked at the top of this post were complaining about how slow it was but it moved along fairly snappy for me in Firefox. I don’t like the ad saturation level, but that’s fairly commonplace for Yahoo stuff. This is something that no matter how cool an interface, how useful they make it, the more ads in our face vs. a competitor with less ads which will you choose?

Yahoo Mail offer 1GB mail space where Gmail offers 2717MB and counting. Creating a new folder was straightforward, just click on the “Add” link and title the folder. Drag and drop function from inbox to folders was smooth and intuitive. One missing feature seems to be how to import from POP3 boxes?

Overall my first impression, save for the advertising, this is a good improvement over the original Yahoo Mail. I don’t think it will move many Gmail users over, mostly because of the many Gmail hacks and plugins but once Yahoo gets some Yahoo Widget competition in full force, the space could get interesting.

Give it a quick try and share what you think.

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