:: Update: This post has been revised (new text is underlined, edits are in strikeout) based on feedback from Paul Stamatiou.
Apple has officially launched a new Ajax webmail client for its .Mac members. It includes drag-and-drop functionality, a message pane, address book integration, message previews/flagging, keyboard shortcuts and more.
It's nice to see Apple start to use some of the same Web 2.0 technologies offer the same functionality that others like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have been using had for some time. The new .Mac webmail is a significant improvement over the prior version. The search feature in particular is slick. Still, it has some huge holes.
For starters, I see no way to mark a message as spam. And there's been a lot of spam lately in my infrequently used .Mac mail account. Second, when you reply to a message that's in HTML, you can only do so using plain text. Also, there's no RSS feed integration. Too bad. That's a lost opportunity.
I don't expect .Mac to challenge any of the big three webmail platforms anytime soon. In fact, I bet some of the big webmail platforms will add gobs of non-mail features like video subscriptions to become even more essential than they are now. (By the way the new Windows Live Mail and Yahoo Mail have a lot to give Gmail a run for their money.) The new .Mac mail is an improvement - but a disappointing evolutionary one for a company that has been so revolutionary.
Here's a look at some screen grabs I took...
