New in Yahoo! Mail – Chat with your Windows Live Messenger friends

OK – this is the second post for this feature (read the first one if you want). OK, it was there in the beta but we’ve beefed it up with a couple of key additions… best of which, you can now chat to people on Windows Live™ Messenger too.

What’s all this then?
We’ve integrated Yahoo! Messenger into New Yahoo! Mail. That means you can now have a live conversation with someone right from within your Yahoo! Mail mailbox. You can talk this way with anyone who has a Yahoo! or Windows Live™ Messenger ID. That’s almost everyone isn’t it?

Here’s how
When you log into your mailbox you’ll see, at the top of the window, a status message and a drop down arrow. When you click that icon, here’s what you’re going to see…

Once you set yourself Available, your contact list will show all of your contacts that have set themselves Available too. From here, you can select anyone on that list and start a conversation with them right from the comfort of your own Mailbox window. Here’s what it’s going to look like when you’re engrossed in a conversation with one of your friends:

Or, like this, or this…
We’ve added a couple of other new ways to start a chat. Yahoo! Mail is more than just email these days, so if you click on the arrow next to the New button (top left) you can choose “Chat” to open a chat window and go from there. Or, if you want to be really flash, you can use the keyboard shortcut. Just hit “c” and you’re off.

Not up for a chat?
As always, you can always turn this feature off too. I’ve posted about how to do that.
Happy chatting!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Beta Team