Edit: OK, even better than all that, there wasn't any indication or warning that this was going to be shared publicly (rather than sent only to the Yahoo team) when I clicked on the "feedback" button next to the "settings" one. Make of that what you will.

Anyhoo:

So I got a popup when I opened my mail today, inviting me to look at what's new and all that (thought you changed the interface weeks ago now? Bit late to start crowing about it...). It looked like mildly good news, like you'd taken on board criticism of the heinous, enforced new UI and had put in some options that would let us make it look at least vaguely like the 30-year-old bare bones businesslike setup we've become accustomed to and rather appreciate the survival of.

So I went off to look for those straight away, to try and get back some of the former usability and readability of the old interface.

They're not there. Nothing has changed. The settings menus are the same as they were a couple weeks ago. The options I have available are Light or Dark mode, whether there's a message preview or not, whether the in-window tab function is active, and whether new messages compose full screen or as a popup.

Excuse me? You interrupted my flow to bother me with a false promise of a bunch of much desired theme-adjustment features, when nothing of the sort seems to exist? What exactly was the point of that?

Will they be coming along sometime soon and the announcement just went out a little early, or has there been some massive internal miscommunication where those features have actually been scrapped (wouldn't surprise me) but the PR and user help minisite team weren't informed of that (also wouldn't surprise me given the piles of outdated and incorrect info elsewhere around it)?

Seriously, at this point, I'd take just being able to break the inbox / folder views up into limited-size pages again (trying to get any serious distance into the endless scroll is somewhere between painful and impossible when the bloated render engine is trying to keep thousands of message headers live at the same time, rather than 50 or so), reduce the space taken up by each one to a more sensible height, and have an actually usable search function. It doesn't need a hundred different cosmetic fine-adjustment widgets. Oh, and a way to right-click-menu break messages out to individual BROWSER tabs, rather than some less-convenient captive nonsense of your own misguided design. You know, like what we were able to do for about twenty solid years since the invention of the MDI-tabbed web browser, up until this new Yahoo interface was introduced and needlessly broke that functionality.

(Heck, now that I've finally got the IMAP thing figured out, I'm musing over whether to get a modern version of Pine or the like and just dial in through a terminal window. That used to work fine off the text-only greenscreen library catalogue DEC VT terminals back when I was at university in the 2000s. Bypass the web UI and your interminable fiddling with it altogether... All we need for email is the ability to show selectable header text and a folder list, the contents that follow on from there, and a way to attach local files and download attachments to local storage. That's it. Sure, it'll lose all tabbing function, but I can just leave the terminal window with a message of import open and load up a new one to go back to the inbox...

...hmm, I wonder, would that actually work here? Can I just open an email then hit Ctrl-T, Alt-D, type mail.yahoo.com and enter, and be back at the inbox? Obviating the tabbed inbox thing much the same as before, just in reverse order and a little slower and more clunky? Hmmmmmmmmmm...)