Yahoo! Mail 2007: The Year that Was

As another year draws to a close, now may be a good time to reflect back on the year that was for Yahoo! Mail. I’ve only been here since July but exciting stuff has been happening all year. Here are some of the favorite highlights from folks all around the Yahoo! Mail team:

• Messenger and Mail…together at last! – The first really big news came in February, when we began rolling out an updated version of Yahoo! Mail Beta featuring integration with Yahoo! Messenger. The other Ryan K (Kennedy) provided a great screencast demonstration of the new feature.
• Infinity and beyond – Yahoo! Mail announces UNLIMITED STORAGE … email packrats around the world REJOICE!!!
• Big News for Yahoo! Mail – August featured a special delivery from the Mail team. The official rollout of the All-New Yahoo! Mail (translation: no more beta).
• Mail, Messenger, and now SMS … all in one place – One of the new features incorporated into the latest release of Yahoo! Mail is integrated Text/SMS Messaging. Now Mail users can easily send email, chat with a friend on Messenger, or send a text message to a friend’s phone, all from the comfort of their computer. Parents no longer have to try and type messages on their phones to communicate with kids. PARENTS REJOICE … but the kids still don’t consider them BFFs.
• Blocking out the eBay and PayPal Phish – Yahoo!, PayPal, and eBay announce that spammers will have a much tougher time reaching Yahoo! Mail users with fake eBay/PayPal phishing messages … thanks to a technology called DomainKeys. Spammers don’t rejoice.
• Yahoo! Mail Turns 10! – Many are shocked to learn that Yahoo! Mail celebrates its 10th Birthday in October. People aren’t shocked that Yahoo! Mail has been around that long … just that we are even that much older. I’m even more shocked that we didn’t get a mention during the 1997 episode of the I Love the 90′s marathon last week.
• Introducing the New & Improved Yahoo! Mail Security Site – Feeling that you just don’t know where to find the latest tips and tricks to protect yourself from fraudsters? Check out the New & Improved Yahoo! Mail Security Site (antispam.yahoo.com).
• Yahoo! Mail at 30,000 feet – JetBlue and Yahoo! announce the launch of a wi-fi enabled airplane dubbed BetaBlue. Users have even more ways to stay connected!

All in all it has been an exciting year for those of us on the Mail team, and we hope that it has been exciting for you too.

If you were already a Yahoo! Mail user, we would like to thank you for sticking with us. If you are a new user we want to thank you for coming aboard. Either way we are glad you’re here and hope you are looking forward to enjoying all of the new things that we will be working to bring you in 2008!

Ryan K.
Community Manager
Yahoo! Mail