As one of the beta testers of Yahoo Beta, I’ve had the luxury of test driving new features  before the general mail users got to.  I was wondering when Yahoo Mail Beta would finally catch up to Google’s GMail in email features.  One of the best features in GMail is the ability to chat with contacts right from your inbox and keep a record of all conversations.

Yahoo Mail will be launching an integration of their Yahoo Messenger with the Yahoo Mail today.  Account owners will be able to now instant message right from their inbox and save all messages.

If you own a Yahoo Mail account, it may take up to several for these new features to get to you - Yahoo has 250 million users it also has to get to…and doesn’t want to overwhelm their systems.

Ryan Kennedy, part of the Yahoo Mail Beta team, has put together a screencast with instructions on how to use the new system here.