Streamlining a Classic!

As George Lucas found out after deciding that Greedo shot first, messing with a classic can be a delicate thing. The Yahoo! Mail team took a long, hard look at what happened to George and came up with a couple key takeaways:

• Of course Han shot first (actually only a few of us really cared about that one)
• When changing a classic it is better to do stuff people want, than to do stuff people don’t want (everyone agreed on that one).

So it is with those takeaways in mind (ok, probably just the 2nd) that the Classic team embarked on a journey to make some major changes to Yahoo! Mail Classic.

Yep, you read that correctly, Classic Mail will be going through some changes. I guess it was probably expected. After all, we did just celebrate the little fella’s 10th birthday. Isn’t that the time in your life when things really start to change?

A handful of you may have already noticed some differences in the interface (some subtle, and some not so subtle). Others may have heard the news coming all the way out of India, where it was just announced that Yahoo! Mail will be available for the first time in Hindi. Now you could be asking how those events would be connected … and I’ll tell you. The Classic team has been working diligently to fine tune the underlying technology for Classic Mail. That fine tuning is the foundation that has been critical not only in making the product available in Hindi, but also in making it easier to update features for all of Classic. In short, they are both part of the same overall project.

With all of the recent hubbub around New Mail, more than a few of you lit up the comments area on this blog asking about the future of Classic. I’m happy to say that I can now share with you some details about the future you’ve been so anxious about. In a nutshell there are features that have been added, changed, and removed. We’ve been keeping an eye on what functionality users have been requesting, as well as stuff that people just weren’t really using much (or in many cases at all). The changes span many areas, and we feel like you will be happy with the results. Some of the highlights that you will be seeing in the coming months include:

• Auto-save to Draft – Yahoo! Mail Classic now automatically saves a copy of the message you’re working on in your Drafts folder in case you lose your internet connection or your computer malfunctions.
• Simpler uploading and downloading attachments – In most cases, downloading now requires just one click!
• One-Click Flagging – The new Flag column (just one column to the right of the check-boxes) makes it super easy to flag messages.
• Folder Renaming – Rename and delete your personal folders directly within the folder view.
• More Intuitive Names – References to “Address Book” have been changed to “Contacts”, and your “Bulk” folder will instead be called “Spam” (since that’s what it is).

All in all there a lot of changes, so you should take a look at the “What’s different…” page to see everything.

***UPDATE: Some comments I’m getting suggest people think we are forcing people to change to the New Mail (formerly known as “Beta”) but this actually about giving those people who prefer Classic some of the features and changes that have been requested. ***

Ryan K.
Community Manager
Yahoo! Mail