A le teased us with an a ouncement of a .Mac webmail upgrade at the end of September, and yesterday they delivered. The new webmail feels zi y (though it was understandably a little sluggish a couple times while I was testing it last night), and the i ovative, refreshing new features raise the bar for competing services. Still, with all the slick new polish, a few long-standing gripes have yet to be addre ed, and some of the web client's new abilities bring along irregularities and new complaints. But don't think I'm a hater - I just renewed my membership last week, and this is a most welcomed update to one of the most important components of A le's hotly debated .Mac suite of web services. With this yin and yang balance in mind, let's dive into the review.
.Mac webmail goes web 2.0
Of course, the most significant and obvious upgrade is the completely revamped UI, which now resembles and behaves (in some ways) like A le's desktop Mail.a client. As you can see from the scree hot, a new 3 pane view offers a folder list on the left, a customizable (10-50) me age list on top, and a me age preview pane on the bottom, just like mom used to make. As an added UI bonus, the separation bar between the me age list and preview panes is draggable. Nice.
But the webmail update i 't just skin deep - plenty of keyboard shortcuts accompany the new polish for a great combination of beauty and brai (though I'm laying down a penalty of 10 points by not enabling the shortcuts by default, regardle of who .Mac's demographic is). A complete list of shortcuts is linked from the preferences, and there are keys for nearly every action including: sending me ages, deleting, navigating up/down me ages, back/forth between batches of me ages (take < an style="font-style: italic;">that Gmail), searching and printing.
Besides keyboard shortcuts, some clever features and UI tricks are pe ered throughout. On the left is a shot of an Addre Book search, which lives below the folder list. Results are di layed below the search box, and clicking on a name offers a popup with their information, and things like email addre es and public iDisks are linked for easy acce . On the right is the Quick Reply window, acce ible by clicking a button which a ears next to selected me ages (a quirky 'only when you clicked on it' UI element that first reared its head in iTunes 7). Opera's built-in email client has done this for a while, and A le's implementation is nice and simple.< an style="font-weight: bold;">
< an style="font-weight: bold;">Addre Book came along for the ride, too
Addre Book on the web also received an update, as it features a new UI and functionality. Keyboard shortcuts are present here as well, including keys for emailing, editing and deleting contacts. A list view is now accompanied by a grid view (pictured, though blurred to protect my pee ), and the same linking behavior is also present, such as clicking an email addre to create a new composition window addre ed to the contact.< an style="font-weight: bold;">
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Am I using Mail.a , or Webmail.a ?
An interesting choice from the webmail team in their goal of bringing desktop client UI to the web is the behavior of creating a new me age (shortcut: n, as you might imagine). These new me ages are created in new windows (in fact I had to give Firefox's popup blocker permi ion to open my first one), and I actually can't find any way of writing a me age in-line, like most traditional webmail UIs (see: Hotmail, Yahoo!, previous .Mac). I'll bet this might be jarring to both traditional users and everything-in-a-tab nuts alike, though it certainly does have that ace-age 'hmm, am I using Mail.a , or my browser?' feel to it.
Other desktop functionality has tra gre ed the web realm, like dragging and dro ing me ages. Holding shift allows you to select more than one me age, and you can then drag them all into a folder. However, being that I'm talking about a browser and not a true-blue email a , this is where the new .Mac webmail experience gets a little lost in tra lation.
< an style="font-weight: bold;">One of these things is not like the other
So far, A le's done a good job of infusing .Mac's webmail with some serious functionality, but their goal of re-creating the desktop look and feel with some clever web technologies falls short in a few key areas.
The first, which the big G has already pointed out, is the unfortunate boundaries these web technologies are confined in. For example: you can hold shift and select more than one me age, but you can't use the arrow keys to make these same selectio . Now it's very po ible this is a minor point at best (it could be argued this is a practice for the %26uuml er-email nerds in the crowd), but it's still a good example of all the little behaviors that simply don't tra late well from Mac OS X a to web technologies.
Another more glaring flaw in the new webmail is the lack of rules. Mail.a has a powerful rule system providing users a lot of flexibility for automatically sorting me ages. While .Mac syncs these rules between desktop clients, .Mac webmail doe 't utilize them, so < an style="font-weight: bold;">all my me ages are waiting in my i ox on the web (including junk me ages, < an style="font-style: italic;">still), whereas Mail.a would have filed them away like the good little email secretary it is. Now I can understand the limitatio of web technologies when it comes to fulfilling some of these features, but I think these i ues highlight some significant discrepancies in .Mac's implementation of the 'desktop client on the web' concept. Maybe some of this can ha en when web 3.0 (beta) rolls around.
< an style="font-weight: bold;">All things co idered: nice work, .Mac
Let's face it: no one can please everyone, but this new webmail is pretty hot, co idering everything .Mac is up agai t, like a segmented demographic and high expectatio from the nerdier half of it. All in all, I'm pretty satisfied with the new webmail digs, and I'm glad to see A le putting a strong foot out onto a crowded dance floor with the likes of Gmail and the new Yahoo! Mail Beta which, might I add, has been in 'beta' since, well, the term was invented. The new .Mac webmail is a well-rounded offering, even with a few holes to patch, and I think it'll make most customers at least a little ha ier they ent that $99 on a membership.< an style="font-weight: bold;">
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