Ryan Kennedy had been blogging changelogs to the Yahoo Mail Beta on his personal blog. That effort earned him notice from other Yahoos, leading to Kennedy putting on the shiny white suit, slicking back his hair, and accepting an evangelism role for the product with a broad ‘trust me’ smile.

(Ok, he did accept the evangelism role, but I really don’t know about the wardrobe. I’m counting on you, friend reader, to send me Flickr links of Ryan in said garb if they exist.)

His latest post to Yahoo’s Mail Updates Blog detailed a variety of changes, with the most notable one addressing the speed with which the Mail Beta loaded in the browser.

For the oldies out there, consider the possibility of a ZX80 computing Pi to its final value. Scary, isn’t it? But as Kennedy noted, it’s been on the Mail Beta team’s task list:

There is a lot more to Yahoo Mail Beta than speed, but performance is what people notice first. As the crackerjack coders in Sunnyvale slay this particular dragon, the other tweaks and updates Kennedy reported will be far easier to appreciate:

Kennedy said they have been working to squash a variety of bugs that cropped up in the previous Mail Beta release. They’ve also been working hard to integrate IM with Yahoo Mail Beta, a combination he called “awesome.”

Improving the speed was the real trick, and as this gets better so will appreciation of Yahoo Mail Beta. There’s just one thing I have to ask, though; did Ryan really mean to display his internal email address in the blog post?

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For Yahoo users who haven’t done the “set UK/Ireland as default, join Yahoo Mail Beta, switch Yahoo default back to U.S.” trick to get access to Yahoo’s new look and feel for mail, the chance to make the change has arrived.

Mercury News reported the beta would be opened globally today by Yahoo.

The new inbox includes options for users to access their contacts and calendar, and to view RSS feeds, all from the mail client.

Yahoo Mail serves as a gateway to more profitable services, the report said. A user who has their mail client open regularly may give services like Calendar and Messenger with Voice a try.

Yahoo has been heavily promoting their Answers service from within Mail, too.

Users of Microsoft Outlook will see a resemblance to that mail client when using Yahoo Mail.

The new client still keeps messages in folders. When showing the contents of a folder, the list of messages will appear in one pane of the window, while the contents of a highlighted message will be displayed below the message list.

Those who have been using the new Yahoo home page (complete with Yahoo Yodel when clicking the ! in the Yahoo! logo) have been able to see their top five inbox messages in a Mail preview window.

That feature preceded the full release of the new Mail service.

Yahoo acquired Oddpost in 2004 specifically to bring their Outlook-like mail service to Yahoo Mail.

The new beta has been in testing for quite some time, and some users may find the Yahoo Mail Beta to be slower than the existing client, particularly on older machines. Those who prefer the current mail scheme can switch back to it if they choose.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.