Yahoo appears to be trying to win back a shred of favorability with Yahoo Mail users, announcing that it is bringing back its tabs feature.

There have been numerous gripes with Yahoo’s recent redesigns, and the lack of tabs has been a big one. After a lengthy service outage disaster, users could certainly use some good news.

Yahoo’s Jeff Bonforte writes on the Yahoo Mail blog, “When we launched the new version of Mail in October, we removed Tabs. One of the things you told us that annoyed you about tabs is that the more you had open, the harder they were to manage, and you wanted multitasking to be easy. With your feedback, we launched Recent view to help you jump between emails, drafts and search results more easily, but many of you still missed tabs. So we’re bringing back tabs, but this time, they’re a bit smarter.”
You can turn on the new tabs by going to View, then Multitasking, then Tabs.

“Now here’s the cool part,” says Bonforte. “Sometimes when you have a lot of tabs open, it’s hard to find the one you want. We’ve fixed that. In the tab menu (under the arrow icon after the last tab) you will see an option to Preview All. Open a few tabs and see how it works. And there is a very handy keyboard shortcut for this feature. Hit the ‘esc’ key. Your screen will clear off (we call this ‘boss mode’). There is a little icon in the bottom left corner that looks like a set of squares. Click that and now when you enter the boss mode, you will see all your tabs in a preview mode.”
The company says the feature will be available to all users globally over the next few days.

As far as the service issues are concerned, it’s unclear how many people are still having problems. Yahoo’s latest update on the subject came on Thursday, when it said it’s reaching out directly to all users affected by the outage. They encourage users to contact Customer Care and give a phone number.

From the sound of it, the Customer Care line has been giving users even more problems.

“We’ve heard that some users are experiencing longer wait times than usual,” Yahoo says. “We appreciate your patience while we work through a large volume of calls. We are adding agents quickly to support this large volume of calls.”