What is Yahoo Mail upto?

Gmail's rolling out features by the dozen -- let's see what Yahoo Mail's up to for the past month or so.

If recent memory serves right, Gmail's on a somewhat of a roll right now as a webmail service -- it allows free PC-to-phone calls (one million dialled this service within 24-hours of launch) and prioritizes your inbox for you. Yahoo Mail is one of its biggest competitors in the web email service space.

Yahoo Mail may seem to be on the backfoot, seeing Gmail's recent developments, but underestimate the search and webmail giant at your risk.

Earlier this year, Yahoo started allowing users to update their Facebook status from within their Yahoo Mail inbox. All this in an effort to keep Yahoo Mail users better connected with their social circle. Yahoo Contacts within Yahoo Mail makes sharing and receiving Facebook updates in your Yahoo Mail very easy.

Well, not exactly like Gmail's Priority Inbox feature, but Yahoo Mail started a priority inbox feature a lot earlier than Gmail -- only it isn't entirely automated. A Yahoo Mail user gets to manually decide which mails to see everytime they login to their Yahoo Mail inbox, by adding contacts and allowing Yahoo Mail to do the rest.

Yahoo Mail is also optimized for the mobile and handheld Web browsing platforms -- like iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android phones. It even supports HTML5 webmail for iPhone. Recently in August, Yahoo Mail announced an iPad optimized webmail/browsing experience. Yahoo Mail allows local caching capabilities to access your emails even when your iPad's offline.

Apart from improved functionality and user-interface tweaks, Yahoo Mail keeps adding fun-themed features like Cool Fonts -- personalize your emails and messages; use and get alerts from Yahoo Apps, and more. All this on top of its inbox IM service, Yahoo Messenger.

So it isn't like the folks at Yahoo Mail aren't doing anything. Google's Gmail might be blazing all guns at the moment, but there are some good reasons why people still stick to Yahoo Mail and Yahoo! as a portal, in general.