I use Yahoo! Mail every day. Scratch that, I use it every hour… really, at least every 10 minutes. In contrast, I haven’t used My Yahoo! in over a year. I think that the major reason I don’t use it is that’s out-of-sight and out-of-mind. I keep a dedicate tab open at all times for mail, and feel like I can’t afford a second one dedicated for a homepage. Therefore, it doesn’t get used. Now, if My Y! was integrated with Y! Mail, I’d tend to use it much more.

Currently, the connection from mail is a little link that opens the My Yahoo! homepage in a new tab. So, yeah, you could argue that it’s only a click away, but it just feels removed. It feels like I’m heading off into some new place when I’d really like to just flip over an use some module of My Y! for a second.

Mail confuses the issue more with it’s “Home” tab right next to the “Inbox” tab. Within this tab is some My Y!-type information such as news and weather, but it’s not customizable (weather knows my home) and it’s really of little value to me. I never use it.

Here’s My Yahoo! homepage, chock full of personalized and customized goodness including feeds, news, weather, search, etc. Note the overlap of the Mail Preview. I guess I could keep this page open in a tab all of the time and just bounce into mail when something in the preview strikes my fancy, but that that doesn’t feel right.

Now, what it the “Home” tab in mail looked more like this? Pull the good stuff from My Y! in there. Better yet, merge this tab with the “Inbox” and you’re really got something.

Oh, and to save real estate, please get rid of the search form in the upper-right of the page. We already have a search box built into the browser just a few pixels away. I even default it to search Yahoo!