About a month ago, reports came out that Yahoo was getting ready to launch a big redesign of Yahoo Mail to better compete with Gmail. That day has now come.

The redesign was announced by CEO Marissa Mayer herself.

“Email is the ultimate daily habit,” she says. “It’s often the first thing we check in the morning and the last thing before going to bed. Why? Because it’s one of the simplest and most basic forms of communication. And since it’s such an important part of our daily lives, we’re making a few improvements to Yahoo! Mail.”

Yahoo is touting speed, ease of use, and cross device availability as the selling points.

“You’ve told us loud and clear that you want fewer distractions when it comes to email,” Mayer adds. “You want to quickly login, communicate, and get on with your day. And we’ve listened. Starting today, the new Yahoo! Mail is fast, easy and available anywhere you go. These improvements will be available on all major platforms: Web, Windows 8, iPhone/iPod touch and Android.”

Yahoo Mail & Messenger GM Vivek Sharma talks more about the offering on the Yahoo Mail blog.

“You can easily scan your inbox and quickly triage – starring important messages that need follow-up, filing messages to folders and deleting unimportant ones – all from the inbox. With infinite scroll, you can quickly find emails from last month or even, last year,” he says. “We’ve also reduced steps to save you time. When you log into Yahoo! Mail on the Web, it’ll take you directly to your inbox. We’ve tweaked the underlying performance so it’s faster to compose and read messages. After you send a message, we now take you right back to the inbox. Collectively, that works out to 36 million minutes saved every day.”

Search has also been improved, with the addition of auto-complete, and the ability to search across the inbox on the mobile apps.

“Photos and attachments now appear at the top of your message,” adds Sharma. “On iPhone and Android, you can easily attach photos directly from your camera roll, or take and send a photo from within Yahoo! Mail. There’s even a simple way to re-size photos, which is important if you’re keeping an eye on your data usage.”

Windows 8 users can use Live Tiles to show new messages arriving on the start screen, and can use Yahoo Mail in Snapped View or Fill View.

The redesign is rolling out over the next few days to “most” users. The mobile apps can be downloaded from their respective market places.