How to open new tabs for each mail (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook/Hotmail…)?

Question

Yahoo's old (classic) design allowed me to quickly middle-click each mail link and open in a new tab. I like having one tab open with the complete list of recent mails in my Inbox, and separate tabs for each mail that I can dispose of when I'm done with them.

Now with the new design, I can no longer middle-click or right-click and open mails in a new tab. They only seem to open in the same tab, replacing the previous view, then I have to go back to the Inbox, open another mail and so on, back and forth. This is stupid!

With Yahoo I can probably go back to the Classic view, but that might be disabled soon. Also, I otherwise like the streamlined look and aesthetics of the new design. With Gmail and Outlook/Hotmail I don't even think there's a classic version available.

So how can I make every mail open in a new tab with all these web mail services, without having to first open multiple copies of my Inbox?

(I'm using Firefox/Windows, so if an add-on is the only solution, so be it.)

Answer 1

Yahoo - @Mehper has it right about Yahoo - left-clicking will open the mail in a new tab. Just click back over to the Inbox tab to see the full list again. This gives you tab functionality, just not at the browser level.

An alternative to doing this is to change your "mail options" to show the email preview pane in your inbox view. To see this you can go to the top left (next to your profile avatar) and select:

Options > Mail Options > In a scrolling list (show preview pane) (under behavior)

This will allow you to open email at the bottom with the inbox on the top (no there is no way to make the split vertical)

Outlook - I don't know how to do this in Outlook.

Gmail - For Gmail, you can try using basic HTML view if you want the middle-click functionality: https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html&zy=h

This is a basic view that allows you to middle click to open email in new tabs.

For more about this go to this link: http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=15049

NOTE: The basic HTML view is a little different from what you're used to because the following features aren't available:

• Chat
• Spell checker
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Ability to manage filters
• Adding, editing, importing, or deleting contacts
• Custom 'From:' addresses
• Rich formatting

Answer 2

For the new Gmail, you can open new tabs in the browser by pressing Ctrl + click on the tab.

However, if you close your browser and reopen it, the tabs that you have opened from gmail will not show up (blank pages). The workaround is to open new tabs from gmail (any new inbox tabs) and then copy paste the link address of the old gmail tabs to that new inbox tabs and it will show up again. Somehow gmail is detecting that the tab whther it is opened from this session or from a previous session, so it will prevent loading the content of the tab if it is not coming from the current browser session.

For the new yahoo mail, you can open a new email and then press M . This will return the focus to the inbox immediately. However, still the classic Yahoo is much better in this, because if your browser has crashed accidentally or you want to close it, when you open your last browser's session, say bye bye to all your carefully opened tabs inside the new Yahoo mail!

I remember (in 2011?) Yahoo mail made it possible to restore the yahoo mail's tabs. It will ask you something like do you want to restore your previous session? Also there was a neat feature. You could select the emails that you want to open then you can open all the selected email by one click. But there was some error in restoring the sessions. Sometimes it cannot restore your previous session. So I think they have left this idea due to some difficulties in the implementation. Hopefully, they are still developing these features. But in the meantime I am sticking with the classic Yahoo mail. The browser tabs restoring is very important for me!