Two years is a really long time to test a software product, but that's about how long it took for Yahoo to finish its slick new version of Yahoo Mail, the popular email program you access from a Web browser. This new Yahoo Mail entered its beta, or test, stage in September 2005, and this week it emerged in finished form.

The result is a polished, fairly powerful email program that I prefer to Google's much-hyped Gmail, which is undergoing an even longer gestation. It has been in beta status since April 2004.

I've been testing the new Yahoo Mail on both Windows and Macintosh computers. It has some downsides, but it beats Gmail, in my view, both in terms of features and in terms of its ability to act like a standard computer program rather than a Web page, something for which Gmail often gets more credit.

A closer competitor to Yahoo Mail is actually Microsoft's Hotmail, now called Windows Live Hotmail. But Yahoo tops Hotmail, too, in my opinion.