I'm surprised they still apparently have the big banner ad on the right-hand side. I know they have to make money somehow, but it really detracts from an otherwise pretty good-looking design.

Yesterday I saw someone using the previous version of Yahoo mail, and that banner ad had a strobe effect on the border that was constantly flashing. I'm amazed people put up with this -- I guess people have probably developed pretty strong ad blindness (hence the strobe ads).

If I ran a web mail company, I would not want to be part of the arms race of user ad blindness vs. more aggressive ads. As a user I'd take google's textual, potentially relevant ads over this any day. (No, I do not care if google "reads" my email. http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/)