Chat inside your Inbox!
First it was Google the great to introduce this fantastic feature of chatting inside the Inbox and now Yahoo has come up with the same feature. I guess employees at different organizations and students would have appreciated this feature the most as at many organizations and similarly at schools/colleges chatting is not allowed and to stop people from chatting, no IM applications are installed on PCs there. Though web messengers have resolved this problem to a great extent but then again they become too obvious while u use them so u can easily get caught 
Furthermore chatting facilities inside inbox turn out to be very helpful for the ones using smart phones, PDAs etc. as well.
It has been more than a month since Yahoo introduced this feature in Yahoo Mail Beta and I wanted to blog about it soon after I found it but then decided to wait for some time and see how it evolves. Initially there were some bugs like even if no one is online it would show 1 contact as online and excitedly when you try to check out who’s online you see a smiley with ‘Me’ written in front of it.
Apart from this I remember not finding any status options other than ‘Online’ but now all the regular status options have been made available including my all time favorite “Invisible” 
Other than this you can chat pretty smoothly as so far I haven’t experienced any hitches while using it.
Following are some of the screen shots I captured while using it
Update:
I just found out that the bug about showing the user himself/herself as a contact is still there. When one chooses to stay ‘Invisible’ it does not show up ,however, as soon as u change ur status to ‘Online’ or ‘Busy’, a contact appears to be online on ur list and that contact is noone but u urself….weird…Yahoo needs to check this out!
Although it came long after a similar feature was introduced in gmail, I still prefer the IM service within yahoo mail, simply because I am a great fan of the yahoo smileys!
Comment by Sidhusaaheb — July 10, 2007 @ 7:03 pm
I haven’t use yahoo messenger much (hardly 4-5 times
), so i still prefer gmail browser chat over yahoo’s. but I do like new yahoo mail beta interface, much better then hotmails’ ,which is a bit slow,
…have resolved this problem to a great extent but then again they become too obvious while u use them so u can easily get caught .
, just make ur chat window transparent, open you IDE , and move chat window on top of it 
, your boss will be suprised to see how hard your are working , 
May i recommend something for this,
i made that specially for the said purpose
Comment by Syed Faraz Mahmood — July 11, 2007 @ 1:41 pm
sorry i messed up with hyperlink ref tag in the above post
Comment by Syed Faraz Mahmood — July 11, 2007 @ 1:42 pm
Yahoo’s new interface is very nice indeed. And the chat integration is becoming an expected feature with web mail.
Personally I don’t use Yahoo’s email or chat. Gmail has the best mail management system IMO. And the only IM network I generally use is Jabber/XMPP. (It appeals to my nature as a developer and supporter of open technologies)
Comment by waqas — July 12, 2007 @ 6:19 am
**ahem ahem**
someone sounds familiar here
Comment by Asma — July 13, 2007 @ 11:30 am
@Sidhusaaheb
He he….i like the Audibles but don’t hav them in browser chat
@Faraz
Faraz bhai..u rock
Waah waah…thanks for sharing this app ….i’m going to try it out but noway at my office…i’m a darpok bachi 
@Waqas
Which one of the various available Jabber clients (for Win) do u like the most? I’m asking b’coz i have never used ne of them but wanna try one out now based upon ur recommendation
@Asma
hmmmm…….yeah the topi wali larki
Comment by Fariha Akhtar — July 14, 2007 @ 12:30 am
@Fariha
I’m always using the latest dev build of Miranda IM. But be warned, its not for the faint of heart
Its *extremely* customizable, but takes time to configure. Kind of like Gentoo Linux. The packaged version is minimal, and requires setting up for things like popups, etc.
http://www.miranda-im.org/development/
Pandion is probably the prettiest client, though no longer actively developed.
http://www.pandion.be/
Comment by waqas — July 19, 2007 @ 10:29 pm
@Fariha
I’m always using the latest dev build of Miranda IM. But be warned, its not for the faint of heart
Its *extremely* customizable, but takes time to configure. Kind of like Gentoo Linux. The packaged version is minimal, and requires setting up for things like popups, etc.
http://www.miranda-im.org/development/
Pandion is probably the prettiest client, though no longer actively developed.
http://www.pandion.be/
If you like easy, stick with Google Talk (which doesn’t have much in terms of features).
Comment by waqas — July 19, 2007 @ 10:49 pm
Hmm, sorry for the (almost) duplicate, comment wasn’t showing.
Might as well shoot a third while I’m at it
Comment by waqas — July 20, 2007 @ 8:09 am
gooooooooooooooooood
Comment by abdulrehman — February 1, 2008 @ 8:02 pm
it is very good facility
Comment by ikram rahim — October 5, 2008 @ 7:24 pm
AIM/AOL Mail also has the chat feature now.
Comment by cd — October 12, 2008 @ 2:35 am