Let Yahoo! Mail Fetch Your News for You

By now I’m sure most of you have seen the “All Feeds” link over in the left side of the New Yahoo! Mail (it was there in the Beta too), but judging from the fluctuations in the subscriber numbers of this very blog I’m guessing that many of you are not yet using it (or at the very least you aren’t it using for this blog).

Just as a little background, RSS, which is short for “Really Simple Syndication” (some people prefer to call it “Rich Site Summary”), lets you subscribe to RSS feeds from web sites that provide frequently-changing content, such as news, weather, sports, and stock reports. When you subscribe to an RSS feed, updates are “fetched” automatically. Many of you may already use this on your My Yahoo page, but you can also get them straight into Yahoo! Mail.

Even better you can click on feed name and a new tab will open in Mail just for that feed. If there are new items in a given feed the RSS symbol will display as orange , and if there is nothing new to check out it shows as grey .

If you have already added RSS feeds to My Yahoo, those should automatically appear in your “All Feeds” area in Mail, but if you want to add more it is very easy. Let’s try it out by adding the this blog to your feeds, shall we? Click “Add” and a big “Add Content” box will open. Now for any other feed you would have to do a search in the box, but if you look just below the box you will see an option to “Add the Yahoo Mail Beta Blog” (just ignore that it says Beta … I’m getting that fixed).

That’s all there is to it. Now the feed will appear in your Mail and also be added the next time you check back at My Yahoo (ahhh … bask in the “synergy“).

Now if explanation isn’t quite clear enough there is also a great set of Tutorials that our Help team has provided. Take a look at the tutorial to get the step by step details on:

• Overview of RSS
• Adding and Removing RSS Feeds
• Saving RSS Articles
• Forwarding RSS Articles
• Changing the Text Size and Font

There you have it. Be sure to subscribe to this feed so you can always know where to find the blog and when new stuff is available.

Ryan
Community Manager
Yahoo! Mail