Yahoo Mail Mobile Apps Get Updated To Prove It's Still Alive

Once the darling of the young Web, Yahoo has now become a sort of a joke. Owning a Yahoo email address, while not uncommon, is sometimes a point of ridicule among younger netizens. Trying to salvage the sinking ship, Verizon, under its OATH (now Verizon Media) subsidiary, acquired Yahoo and its assets, including Tumblr. Now Verizon is trying to prove that Yahoo, particularly Yahoo Mail, can keep up with the times with an update to its Android and iOS apps that try to provide features needed by today's modern email users.

No longer is it sufficient for email service providers to just, well, provide email services. Organizing by folders, both manually and automatically, as well as spam filtering is fine only for the most casual of email users. For everyone else, the deluge of information coming into inboxes need smarter methods of organization, preferably without having to burden the user.

The new Yahoo Mail apps promise exactly that. It automatically creates "views" that collect similar emails into a single convenient place, like money-saving deals, package tracking, and plane tickets. It also has a dedicated View for finding all photos and files attached to emails. There's also the promise of a one-tap tool to unsubscribe from unwanted newsletters.

Visually speaking, the app gets a refresh that takes into account today's taller phones, moving the navigation bar to the bottom of the screen. The layout is said to be cleaner and more customizable. The latter might be useful when juggling multiple accounts in the app. After all, you can use the Yahoo Mail app for more than just Yahoo Mail accounts.

The question, of course, is whether you will. The new features are indeed what you might expect from modern email apps but Yahoo's past still looms over it like a ghost. This is, after all, the Internet company that repeatedly exposed its users to data breaches and didn't tell them about it until it was too late.