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

We’ve been listening to your feedback over these past months since the all-new mail came out of beta. One of the features that you asked for was a way to download multiple attachments at once. Well, we heard you loud and clear.

So, over the next few days we will be rolling this feature out. Here is a screenshot of how it will look in your message. So when you receive a message that contains more than one attachment, you’ll see this:

All you have to do is click “Download All” to get all at once!

(Note: Occasionally, you may not see the Download All link above a message with multiple attachments. Sometimes the manner in which an individual file is named prevents it from being grouped together with other files. In these cases, you’ll need to download attachments the old way, one by one.)

As with many of our enhancements to mail, not everyone gets the new feature at once. So if you don’t see the “Download All” link, be patient, everyone will have this feature soon.

** Please note… The download all feature will download all the files into one compressed (.zip) file which then needs to be unzipped in order to view all the files. Windows XP and Vista both deal with .zip files as part of the operating system. If you are having trouble with the “download all” feature, you may need to install Winzip or another file compression software.

Happy emailing!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

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With the NBA All-Star game drifting into our collective rearview mirrors, and the Baseball season yet to begin, I thought now would be a fitting time to offer up something to satisfy some of those online ballot box stuffing urges: the 2008 Webware 100.

If you aren’t familiar with the Webware 100, here’s a little description from their site:

This is our yearly awards program where Webware users vote for their favorite Web 2.0 apps. In the 2007 Webware 100, there were more than 480,000 votes cast. And this year we have an even stronger lineup of finalists, so we expect very active voting.

Webware

And it just so happens that Yahoo! is nominated in quite a few categories, so have a look, vote for Yahoo! products, and tell your friends to vote for us too!

Ryan K. Community Manager Yahoo! Mail

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***UPDATED INSTRUCTIONS BELOW***

Over the past few weeks some of our POP users have experienced varying delays when sending Yahoo! Mail messages via email clients (such as Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, etc.). We understand that this has been frustrating, and sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

Recently we began experiencing an unexpected increase in traffic through the servers we have dedicated for POP/SMTP messages. When we first became aware that some users were having their messages delayed because of this we examined the issue, and the initial solution appeared to have the problem under control. However we soon learned that more needed to be done to ensure the levels of service we strive to provide.

As a result we spent the last several days not only upgrading hardware resources for our SMTP servers, but also restructuring the way the bandwidth of these servers is allocated. We are confident that this solution will not only resolve the immediate problems, but also ensure that the systems are even more reliable in the future.

UPDATED: 2/25 – ACTION REQUIRED
It looks like it wasn’t clear where to look or what needed to be updated, so hopefully this will call it out a little better. Most users will need to update the settings in their email client. You’ll need to login to your Yahoo! Mail account and visit the Options area to see your personal settings. We are also updating Help pages, but the best way to get the updated information is from within your account.

• Login to Yahoo! Mail
• Click on the Mail Options link
• Click on “POP & Forwarding”
  
• Click on “Set up or edit POP & Forwarding”
• Click on “POP Settings” or “View POP Settings”
• Review the settings provided and update your email client to match

Sorry for any confusion!
End 1st Update———

UPDATED: 2/26 – ACTION REQUIRED
It’s still looking my instructions aren’t as clear (or as thorough) as I thought. Fortunately, the Help pages are all updated and provide EXCELLENT step-by-step instructions.

Please click on the following links if you need detailed help for either of the following email clients:

• Microsoft Outlook 2002 (XP) and 2003
• Microsoft Outlook 2007

As I’ve also noted in the comments section, some users have found that it worked best when they removed the Yahoo! account from Outlook, and that added it in as a new POP account (rather than updating the existing settings).
End 2nd Update ———

To ensure that your email client is properly configured to access the correct SMTP server you will need to login to the Mail Options of your Yahoo! Mail web account and review the updated settings provided in the POP Access Settings area.

Not everyone’s settings will need to be updated, but these settings could vary by region, so make sure you review and go with what is listed for your own account. Fortunately this is something that you would have done when you originally set up your email client, so it should be a pretty straightforward change.

Thank you again for your patience and for continuing to be a Yahoo! Mail customer.

Regards,

Ryan K. Community Manager Yahoo! Mail

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Today, I thought I’d share a personal experience on how something that’s so second nature to me, is perceived so differently through the eyes of someone else. To encourage you to read this post, I’ve put a tip at the end.

Here’s the scenario: I was setting up a new Yahoo! Mail account for my mum the other day. I KNOW!! She doesn’t already use Yahoo! Mail?!?! Well the answer is no. In fact, she doesn’t really use the Internet at all, until now. My dad got her a new laptop for Christmas and she’s just getting around to using it now.

At the moment, she’s just going to use it for email, and maybe some Web surfing. She wants to be in touch with her book-group and another group she meets up with. So while setting up the account, it got me to thinking what’s the easiest way for my mum to logon to her new email account? And as I was saying, “Click this picture, also known as an icon ;) (BTW – I like Vista for the option to have those huge icons), then go to bookmarks, then click on this one that’s called Yahoo Mail, and then login.” I was thinking there’s got to be easier way, and then I was thinking how do other people logon to their mail?

So I asked around the team, and what I’ve found a large percentage of users do… They open an Internet browser, and then search for Yahoo Mail, and then click the Yahoo Mail search result. I’m going to assume that it’s mostly Internet explorer for the browser and mostly some other search engine I’m not going to name ;). But then that’s probably what my mum would do too, whereas I would never think to do that. But since my mum doesn’t know what a URL is or what http:// stands for, it makes more sense to me now. I’ve been immersed in this stuff for so long now, what seems second nature to me is completely foreign to someone like my mum.

So the next time the next you’re trying to explain something to someone, think about whether or not my Mum would understand it.

So here’s the tip, which is my solution to the “easier way” from above and how my mum gets to her mail each day. I put a shortcut on her desktop that goes directly to Yahoo! Mail. Here’s one way that you can do it for your mum (although I know that there’s a number of ways to do it):

- All you need to do is click and drag this link – Login to Yahoo Mail – onto your mum’s desktop.
- Make sure her desktop is clutter free so that it’s easy to see the shortcut, and if you have Window’s Vista you can turn on those really huge icons, which my mum really likes.
- The shortcut icon you get may look like one of the two shortcuts above. I thought that it has to do with which browser you have set to be the default browser, but my tests have proved inconclusive.

Now this tip is not meant for my mum, it’s meant for people like me who want to help their friends and family get the most out of their Internet experience. But I promise, mum, I’ll get working on some tips just for you!!

Happy emailing!!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

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It’s been just over a week, and the submission Form for User Tips is already working great. Several of you have already sent in your expert tips, and now I’m going through the initial submissions. I might be reaching out to some of you for clarification, so be on the lookout.

Our first User Tip comes to us courtesy of Mel, and is relevant to both Classic and New Mail users. Congrats to Mel, who should be on the lookout for an email addressing a reward!

After you’ve marked several hundred messages as spam and have a lengthy blocked address list that needs to be weeded out to make room for more blocked addresses, review the list and make note of the domains that recur frequently in your list.

Remove all of the blocked addresses that are included in those frequently occurring domains. Now that you’ve done that, add those domain names to your blocked address list and you won’t be getting anymore spam from those domains and you have lots more room for more blocked addresses.

Mel H.

So if you see 10 different addresses that share the same domain, you can just block the domain and free up 9 slots in your available blocked addresses. Thanks again to Mel for the tip.

I’m always looking for more, but don’t forget … this form is for USER TIPS only. Please no Customer Care requests and no product feedback. There’s plenty of room for suggestions in the Comments section .

Ryan K. Community Manager Yahoo! Mail

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There have been a handful of comments across recent posts describing SMTP delays that some users have been experiencing when sending messages.

(Added 2/20 – 12:15PM)
If you aren’t familiar with SMTP, it’s an email protocol that would come into play for folks sending Yahoo! mail via Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc. If you are accessing your mail through the web interface this does not apply to you.
(end update)

I wanted to let everyone know that we are aware of the issue and our engineering team is working to resolve it as quickly as possible.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and appreciate your patience.

Regards,

Ryan K. Community Manager Yahoo! Mail

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Quite often in this blog, I like to offer some tips and suggestions about how to get the most out of mail. So for today’s tip, I’m offering an alternative to checking your mail from an internet browser, plus a whole host of other fun and useful applications.

I wanted to introduce you to the Yahoo! Widget Engine (I’ve been using it since it was called Konfabulator). For those of you who don’t know what a widget is, it’s a small little program on your computer to complete a specified task. There’s an introductory video that explains it better than I can. Of course, I’m sure that you Mac (and now Windows Visa) users know what widgets are already.

After you download and install the widget engine, within the suite of incredibly useful widgets that comes with the application is the Yahoo! Mail Checker. With that widget you can have a notification of when you receive your Yahoo! Mail and you don’t even have to open a browser to find it.

Unfortunately, the Yahoo! Mail Checker is on the second page of the dock. So one really useful suggestion I have is to right click on the widgets that you don’t think you’ll need and delete them from the dock. Keep doing that until the Yahoo! Mail Checker is on the first page of the widget dock (for example, I don’t need the CPU monitor). If anyone on the widget team is reading this, maybe you can let us reorder the default order of the widgets that get installed.

Now that you have the Widget engine installed, I hope you have fun playing around and finding out all the useful widgets that are out there. My all-time personal favorite is widescapeWeather for its simplicity and functionality (exactly what a widget is supposed to be).

Happy emailing!!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

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Before I go any further … of course that pun was intended! In keeping with a decidedly Apple theme this week, I thought this would be a good opportunity to probe some of you Apple focused readers.Since its launch last summer, much has been made of the iPhone’s Mail and Web browsing functions. While the device does offer an internet that “is not watered down”, many users still like having a streamlined version of their favorite sites. On the other hand some folks strenuously object to streamlining, believing that it is in fact a watering down of the internet.

I’ve enabled a somewhat streamlined version of the blog that will automatically load if you are on an iPhone, but I’m also interested in creating an even more iPhone styled version (like Macworld’s special iPhone Central site) that would be an optional interface. Take a look at the currently enabled version and let me know what you think.

Additionally, some users prefer to check Y!Mail through the browser interface, rather than the iPhone’s Mail application, and it would be very useful to get a feel for how many prefer each option.

In the interest of serving my readers, I want to make sure that I know about what you prefer. This brings me to the latest polling questions!

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EDIT: The surgery was successful, and thanks to all of your suggestions (and some serious pain killers), I’m well on my way to recovery. Hooray!! :)

I ask this question to my fellow team members almost every day. Usually, they’re not very helpful because they bring their own lunch or they suggest things that are much too healthy. I’m a junk food kind of person ;-).

But tomorrow – yes Valentines day – I’m getting all of my wisdom teeth extracted. OUCH!! So I’m asking you for suggestions of what I can have for lunch after I get them out.

I’ve already got bananas and mashed potatoes on my list, so I’m hoping you can come up with some good suggetions.

Wish me luck, and I’ll see you all next week, minus 4 of my teeth :-(

Happy emailing!!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

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There’s a very good chance that many of you have already noticed, but just in case you haven’t, I’m here with some delightful news for my fellow Mac users. Yahoo! Mail, a key starting point for millions of people around the world, is now fully accessible from Safari 3.0 on the Mac!

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