Yahoo Mail is gearing up to leave beta in a few hours and with the transition will roll out a few new features, the most noteworthy of which is the ability to send text messages from with Yahoo Mail. Dubbing their mail service as a “social communication” tool thanks to ability to allow you to communicate with people via either email, IM, or now TXT, Yahoo Mail does offer some nice things that even email darling, Gmail, doesn’t – namely the unlimited storage space.

Also of note is that Yahoo Mail’s built-in IM client will now be interoperable with Microsoft’s Window’s Live Messenger network. This reminds me of one thing: what the hell is taking Google so long to hook up with AOL’s AIM network? This has been in the works for almost two years now when Google bought a 5% share of AOL and explicitly stated in their press release that this was coming.

Speaking of Google, Gmail continues to be in beta, and continues to offer what seems like an increasingly small 2.8GB of storage.

I still don’t particularly like Yahoo Mail, but I’ll use it if Gmail forces me to.