Sporting a French gray color palette, AOL recently released a new AOL Mail Beta (codename: Cayman) to update the current web-based email product. It offers a clean Ajax interface extending a users usable space and making it easier to manage and organize large quantities of email. It is pretty slick. The biggest notable improvement is that messages can be read inline rather than via a pop-up window. However, if pop-up windows are your thing, than you can also opt to open messages in new windows. Users can now access email more quickly as the AOL Mail Beta has removed a click from the process. There are a number of additional interesting features including a right pane that give users quick access to "to do lists", "contacts" and even "celebrity gossip" via TMZ.com. Just remember, this is beta so there are some known issues that
will be corrected before the product is ready for prime time.
AOL offers free email accounts and 2GB of storage space and you can even select your own personal email domain. I am extremely pleased with the new web mail product and would urge you to give it a try. I'd love to hear what you think.
Disclosure: I am an AOL employee. I do not work on AOL Mail but I am the product manager for two other AOL products.
