Yahoo! Mail Blog
The latest scoop on Yahoo! Mail product updates, new releases, bug fixes,

Last week I posted a little video tutorial showing how to use the Sign-in Seal to have more confidence that you are logging into authentic Yahoo! pages.Wouldn’t you know it they went and changed how it looks only days after I posted it! I also heard from a few people that the file wouldn’t play/load properly for them.

Both of those items would qualify as “my bad”, so I’m here to make sure that you guys know about the updated appearance … and hopefully offer an alternative that can help some of you overcome any tech problems that were going on.

If you look at the screenshot on the right you’ll see that the folded down corner has been replaced with a more prominent, yellow, box. Once you have set the Sign-in Seal it looks the same as before, with a custom picture of your choosing.

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I always like to end things on a high. That’s why I love being able to add a special signature at the end of my emails. Just a little something that’s all mine, with some contact details thrown in for good measure. You can do it too. Add a saying, a proverb, a phrase that sums you up. It’s up to you how you sign off.

It’s easy to do, just start by click on Options, then selecting Mail Options. Then from the list on the left click on Compose. In the centre of the page after “Signature:” select “Show a signature on all outgoing messages”. On the far right of the message window above the text area click either Plain Text (yawn) or Rich Text (cool and colourful stuff) before you start writing your signature in the text area. Finish off by clicking Save Changes.

There you go. Time for me to sign off.
Happy emailing!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

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After the rousing success of the first bit of reader polling, I couldn’t wait come back and find out more about all of you. I couldn’t help but notice that one of the reader comments suggested that Yahoo! should already know which version you use, or other things like browser and operating systems. But since my readership isn’t quite 250 million (at least not yet, anyway) it behooves me to see how all of you compare to the overall Yahoo! Mail user base.

Hopefully once I have a good grasp on who you are I can get into more product oriented questions … but until then please be patient. And for the record, I am only asking about age because so many reader comments reference “being old”. I think it would be nice to see what qualifies as “old”. Feel free to share your thoughts on how the poll questions could be better, or what you think future poll questions would be!

And if these don’t really work for you, stay tuned because soon I hope to find answers to the age old questions: “Paper or plastic?” and “Tastes great or less filling?”

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First off I want to thank everyone who responded to last weeks polls. It was very interesting to learn how our breakdown of New and Classic users is (almost 2:1 in favor of New mail), that the vast majority are using either IE or Firefox on Windows XP, and that we have such a passionate group of Linux users. I do apologize again to the Linux fans out there. As a longtime Mac user myself I should be more sensitive to users who stray from the majority . Thanks again for all of the great feedback, and I’ll be posting more polls soon!

For today’s post I wanted to accomplish a few things. Thank you for voting in the polls (check), refresh everyone on an important safety tip to foil fraudsters, and play with some fun software that I learned about at Blog World. Ok, that last one was really the one I was most excited about, but I’m glad I could fit in the other two. The Jing Project is the name of the site and it’s a great tool for grabbing visual content from your screen and sharing it with friends (it even features Flickr integration!).

Many of you have probably noticed that little folded down corner at the top right of the sign-in box. Well that is the Sign-In Seal, and this video will show you how it works. (more…)

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One of the other Community Managers around here recently turned me on to this great polling plugin that I can use on this blog … so partly because I love to try out new features, but also because I think it would be EXTREMELY helpful to know more about all of you and how you compare to the rest of the approximately 250 million Yahoo! Mail users, I’m kicking things off with three polls today. Feel free to share your thoughts on how the poll questions could be better, or what you think future poll questions would be!

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Hello blog readers! Last week I asked you to share your New Year’s Resolution with the blog, and the response was great. We selected some people to receive some shirts, and have already notified the lucky winners (so if you didn’t hear yet you’ll have to stay tuned for next time!).Without further ado, here are some of the resolutions submitted by my readers :

I have a new year’s resolution for me, and I have one for you, too, Ryan K. I do office work and a lot of filing, so my resolution is to never get a paper cut again! Or a cut from manila folders or the metal prongs on those manila folders. I have just had it with them!

My resolution for you, Ryan K, is to change the picture next to your name at the end of your blogs. It’s been great to associate a face with a name, but do you have any other expressions?

Comment by Glenda

Glenda’s right. We should all strive to eliminate unpleasant paper cuts from 2008 … so let’s all use less paper and rely even more on email! And about the picture, I’ll try a new one this time and dig through my pics to find one without my smirk.

There should be a way to “merge” 2 addresses together so that we can get rid of the other one.

Comment by Krishna

Well we do have something that can help with that. It’s still in beta, but it’s part of address.yahoo.com and is called Clean Up Duplicates. You can learn more about it here.

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It’s a new year and no doubt many of you resolved to make some changes in 2008. In fact some of you may still be adhering to those resolutions. I’m still going strong on my 2-3 liters of water per day, which has cut out a lot of unnecessary coffee and diet cola consumption. We probably all have something that we wanted to change this year, but what I want to know is what your Yahoo! Mail resolution would be for the year (if you didn’t already have one).

What would a Mail resolution be, you ask? Maybe you have vowed to clean up that address book and make sure it’s all current. Maybe you want to keep your inbox tidier (not that you have to with unlimited storage ). There could be some of you who even want to do less emailing. If that last one applies to you that is just crazy talk … shake it off and get back in the game! You don’t need to email less if you find ways to get more done in less time. That’s where those resolutions to clean up that address book or inbox come into play. And perhaps in the process we can identify some product changes that will help you with those resolutions!

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If you’ve been following the news flowing out of CES in Las Vegas, you’ve probably already heard that Chief Yahoo! Jerry Yang presented some glimpses of the possible future of Yahoo! The 45+ minute presentation leads with some interesting advancements in Yahoo! Mobile, but the real meat & potatoes portion (at least for Mail users) comes about 30 minutes in.

Jerry then gives a concept demo (translation: not an example of what the product will be, but more a look at the direction we are headed) that shows a very integrated type of next generation user experience built largely around Yahoo! Mail.

ZDNet’s Dan Farber gave a pretty detailed recap on his blog, and since I care about all of you so much (or because I never miss an opportunity to play with video software, you choose ) I went ahead and captured the Mail portion of the presentation in a separate video clip. It’s still a pretty huge file, so if you aren’t on a fast connection you may want check out a streaming version of the whole webcast (high, medium, low) and just eagerly await the Mail portion (starts at just about 29:30).

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Hello everyone and welcome to 2008! With the first post of the New Year I have something that I’m sure will be especially interesting to many of you. I tracked down resident “Spam Czar” Mark (he leads the team that is in charge of our anti-spam efforts) and he had some exciting news to share. Check it out! (Please note that Mark is not really a Czar, but he is looking for tips on where he can pick up his own ushanka for the winter .)

Ryan K.
Community Manager
Yahoo! Mail

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We know you hate receiving spam in your mailbox, and we’re working hard to help. While there may always be bad guys trying to get their messages through to you, at Yahoo! we’re tightening up on our spam controls in ’08, and in fact we’ve already begun rolling out a significant new defense system (and it’s only January 4th!).

One reprehensible tactic spammers use is hijacking thousands of innocent home computers and forcing them to send out spam messages in the background, often without the owners even knowing! Collectively, these “zombie” computers spew out millions of spam messages a day, and that’s something that has to stop.

Starting today, we will be taking the bold move of rejecting mail from these zombie computers, using information from a number of third-party companies and ISPs to help in the identification. When these unauthorized computers attempt a connection to our back-end mail servers, they’ll be politely informed that their unsolicited mail is not welcome at Yahoo!. (This change is on the back-end only; users connecting through the Classic or All-New Yahoo! Mail web interfaces will not be affected blocked by this change.)

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Wow, what a year!! I for one had a great 2007 and am certainly looking forward to 2008. Last year, I celebrated 8 years of marriage and because of my birthday this year I now put a 0 (zero) as the second digit. I’m not saying how old, let’s just say I’m older than 10 and younger than 100. 

For all of us here on the Yahoo! Mail team, this was a great year too. Some fantastic innovations came through; I thought I’d just recap some of the amazing things that we achieved.

Instant Chat within Mail – I announced this amazing feature in March with this post that gave you a sneak peek, told you how to turn it off in June, and then in October we integrated the ability to chat with Windows Live Messenger. To me, this is one of the greatest things to come along since sliced bread, and if you haven’t tried it yet I definitely encourage you to do so.

Unlimited Storage – What more is there to say? I told you that you no longer have to worry about being over the limit in March. But I thought it bears repeating, so here goes… With Yahoo Mail you get unlimited storage!! You never again have to worry about filling up your inbox to the limit.

The All-new Yahoo! Mail – On the surface, it doesn’t seem big. But dig a little deeper and this is huge. In September, we took the word “beta” off and now it’s just the all-new Yahoo! Mail. And shortly after that Yahoo! Mail turned 10 years old! (I’m still just a little bit older).

This Blog – I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my posts over the past year. I’ve tried to keep it fun, fresh and informative. This year, I changed the look, added a mail tips section here and here, and in the New Year, I hope to be able to post some tips from you the reader.

All-in-all, I think you have to admit, it’s been a pretty good year. Oh, and watch this space in 2008, there’s plenty more to come!!!

Happy emailing and Happy New Year!!!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

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