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

I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving. I might have to loosen my belt one notch for a couple of days, or at least until next month when I make that New Year’s resolution to exercise. One thing I won’t have to worry about is what to do with all those holiday photos of friends, family and celebrations. Yahoo! Mail makes it easy to store, create and share all your photos right from your inbox.

Save more. With Yahoo! Mail you have unlimited storage. You never have to worry about having to delete photos because your mailbox is getting too full. Feel free to keep all those photos your friends and family send. Well, maybe you don’t need to keep that one of Uncle Joe napping on the La-Z-Boy.

Send more. Yahoo! Mail lets you send emails with up to 25 Megabyte attachments. You can send more photos at once. You can send 12 pics with just one email assuming that each photo is about 2 Megabytes. Just make sure your recipients can receive emails that big. If not, you should encourage them to switch to Yahoo! Mail.

Do more. With our Apps, you’re not limited to just sending and receiving photos in Yahoo! Mail. Be creative with your photos right from your inbox. Without a doubt, the Edit Photos application is my favorite app in Yahoo! Mail. The App created by Picnik helps you clean up your snapshots with the ability to crop, resize, and reduce red-eye. Once you’re done touching-up your photo, add effects, frames and text. Then, once your masterpiece is complete, easily save and share your photo.

You can even share your Flickr photos right from your Yahoo! Mailbox. Load up the Flickr App and you can view the photostream and photo sets of you and your friends. Plus, share your photos and photo sets with the click of a button. Congrats to the Flickr team for being first on Time’s list of the 50 Best Websites of 2009. Don’t have a Flickr account yet? Sign up to Flickr using your existing Yahoo! ID.

Yahoo! Mail makes it easy to be more productive and more social. And now that the holiday season has arrived, I know you’re going to really appreciate all those great photo sharing features.

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With more than 300 million Yahoo! Mail inboxes worldwide, we take our responsibility to keep you safe and your inbox free of spam, phishing and other online scams very seriously. Did you know that in 2008, Yahoo! blocked more than a billion spam messages each day?  And it doesn’t stop there. So far this year, we have reduced the amount of spam that comes to Yahoo! Mail inboxes by an additional 30 percent!

So how do we do it?  Our anti-spam efforts use a multi-faceted approach to protect your inbox including the use of enhanced technologies, industry collaboration, public policy efforts, and consumer awareness campaigns. Here’s a look at some of the latest advancements from the front lines of fighting spam:

Analytical analysis – Because spammers adjust their messages in subtle ways to evade detection, we’re using Hadoop, a supercomputer consisting of thousands of individual PCs, to look at hundreds of different elements in each message.  For example, Hadoop doesn’t just look for the word “viagra” or “v1agra” or “v.i.a.g.r.a.” to show up in the subject line, it also looks for extremely subtle signals like how many words are in the message, what time of day the message was sent, how different this message is from the last one we saw from that same sender, and so on.

The hunt is on – We welcome opportunities within both private and public sectors to eliminate spam and educate its users about phishing. For example, in 2008 we saw an increase in messages telling our users that they had “won” the Yahoo! Lottery.  Sadly, no such lottery has ever existed!  Yahoo! has formed a public-private coalition with Microsoft, the African Development Bank, and Western Union to allow victims of lottery scams to upload police reports that are used to track down these criminals and develop better ways of protecting people online, and filed a lawsuit directly targeting these criminal con-men.

Self defense – The old adage is true: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  Through ongoing consumer education and awareness, we are able to provide you with tips and strategies to identify spam, phishing and other online scams.  Speaking of, the holiday season and “Cyber Monday”—one of the busiest e-commerce days of the year—are right around the corner.  According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, Internet fraud surges around this time because more of us are shopping online. Be careful of those deals that sound too good to be true, because they almost always are.  For more advice, be sure to check out our top tips for staying safe online and spotting online scams.  Also, check out the sidebar below for specific tips for Cyber Monday.  With a sharp eye and a little education, you can better protect your wallet and your identity this holiday season!

With Yahoo! Mail touching over 50 percent of U.S. email users, your protection online and the prevention of spam are issues that are always top of mind.  Whether it be phishing scams, lottery scams, fund transfer scams or other crimes, rest assured that we are behind the scene working diligently to protect you and your inbox. 

Happy holidays from me and my team as we protect you from spam, one message at a time.

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Tips for a Safe and Productive Cyber Monday!
As I mentioned earlier, Cyber Monday is almost here.  So be sure to use the following tips when you’re receiving emails from vendors on deals and bargains or shopping online at Yahoo! Shopping or any other online shopping store for that perfect gift this holiday season:

Stay updated: Make sure your anti-virus software, internet browser, and operating system are all up-to-date, to protect your computer against viruses and fraudulent websites.

Know whom you’re buying from: Make sure you understand something about the company you are making a purchase from, and be familiar with their practices and policies. While there are many perfectly-reputable online merchants, there are also scammers out there, so be wary of deals that seem too good to be true. Check out their return policies, shipping procedures, and packaging timeframe. Be comfortable with the website and confident that you are going to be protected in the event an issue arises.

Keep your password to yourself: Most websites will require a log-in to make a purchase. Create a secure and unique password, with a combination of letters (uppercase and lowercase), numbers and symbols. If you need to, it’s much better to pick strong passwords and write them down in a secure location than to reuse the same, simple password on multiple sites.

Look for the padlock: When you’re entering sensitive data – such as passwords or credit card numbers – you should always look for the locked padlock symbol at the bottom of the screen or in the web address toolbar.  If the lock isn’t there, it means the site is not securing your information and the site should definitely not be trusted (unfortunately, just because the lock is there doesn’t mean the site is legit, but if it’s not there you know something’s up)

Use your better judgment: You know better! If that Cyber Monday deal sounds too good to be true, chances are that it is. The same can be said about e-mail. While our spam filters work hard to weed out the bad from the good, never click on links in unsolicited or untrusted messages; doing so exposes you to the fraud and also encourages spammers to send more spam.

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Multiple email accounts dragging you down? Do you have too many contact lists in too many places? Following in the footsteps of Craig Wright’s post about the great new features in Yahoo! Contacts, I want to add to his list. We have made it easy for you to import, manage and consolidate your different contact lists into your Yahoo! Contacts.

A simple, easy to use form walks you through the steps of importing the various contact lists you’ve created over the years directly into your Yahoo! Contacts. You can choose to import your address books from Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook and more.

You can find the contacts import tool in the ‘Options’ menu of the new Yahoo! Mail and on the Yahoo! Contacts welcome page. Or to get started right away click this link: http://overview.mail.yahoo.com/transfercontacts

Import contact lists from multiple providers in one go, or do one at a time. After a couple more clicks you’re done. And don’t worry if you have duplicate contacts. The ‘Clean up duplicates’ tool in Yahoo! Contacts makes it easy to combine any duplicate contact entries into one.

If you’re moving to Yahoo! Mail from another provider, you can even choose to send an email alert to the contacts that you are importing. Once the import process completes, your newly imported contacts are conveniently set up as a group. To view them, just open your contacts list in Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! Contacts. Click ‘View All Contacts’ and you’ll find them grouped by the email service.

The import contacts tool is an easy and effective way to combine your various address books into one, easily managed contact list. Just like Apps in Mail, this is another tool to help you be more productive, more social and stay better connected.

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Hi everyone, my name is Craig and I am the engineering manager for Yahoo! Contacts. We’ve undergone some major changes lately, as you may have noticed. Here’s a quick update on what we have been up to lately.

A major goal for Yahoo! Contacts was to unify the experience of managing your contacts across the Yahoo! network. Before we made this change, every time another Yahoo! product wanted to integrate some form of contacts management functionality, they would have to build their own version of an address book.

Another goal was to create a product that could slip seamlessly anywhere in the Yahoo! network. We launched the new Contacts inside of Yahoo! Profiles, and have since replaced the new Yahoo! Mail and Classic Yahoo! Mail address book with the new Yahoo! Contacts. This means that all of our users will gain the benefits of new features and bug fixes all at the same time.

New features within Yahoo! Contacts:
For example, one of the latest-and-greatest features available now: Clean-up Duplicates Tool. With this new feature, you can reduce all of the duplicate contacts with a push of the button.

Another example from our latest release is the large improvement in performance. We know that when it comes to contact management, you want to get in, take care of the task at hand, and get back to what you were doing. We have significantly reduced the amount of code it takes to load the app, which translates to a much faster start-up time.

Also included in this release is some visual enhancements based on your feedback. For starters, we’ve added themes! Now you add your personal touch to Contacts by skinning it with color themes available in Yahoo! Mail. We also heard feedback from users on small screens like Netbooks that it was difficult to use Contacts. We have removed an one ad to give you more space for address book content – check it out.

Finally I wanted to call out one of our most important new features. There is a new option on the Tools menu, “Send Feedback.” Sending us a quick note via the Send Feedback link is a great way to let us know what we are doing right or what we are doing wrong! We are getting some great insights from this feedback already and we deeply consider your ideas, suggestions, and pain-points for future improvements to the product.

Let us know what you think!

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Congratulations to our colleagues down the hall! They have officially taken the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger 10 out of beta and the general download is available from the Messenger site.

The latest version of Messenger adds a number of great features and enhancements. Here are the highlights:

• Hi-quality video calling – This has to be my favorite. Incredible quality video calls to friends and family right in the IM window.
• Yahoo Updates view of your contacts list – If your friends and family are sharing their status updates, you can view a live stream of what they’re up to on the ‘Y! Updates’ tab of the Messenger Window.
• Yahoo! Messenger in your language – Messenger users using the U.S. version can now choose from 16 different languages. Just choose a new language from the sign-in screen when you start messenger.

Don’t forget there are 29 local language versions available, so choose the version that’s right for you. You can download the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger here: http://messenger.yahoo.com/download/.

To find out more, and for a video tutorial, visit the Yahoo! Messenger blog.

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A few of you have been reporting that you are having issues with the spell-checker in the new version of Yahoo! Mail. I just want to let you know that we are aware of the issue and will have a fix out soon.

In the meantime, you can use the built-in spell checking functionality of some of today’s modern browsers. For example, the latest versions of Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari all have in-line spell checkers. If you don’t have one of those browsers installed or don’t want to install one, you can use classic Yahoo! Mail until we have rolled out the fix (from ‘Options’ click the ‘Switch to Yahoo! Mail Classic’ link).

You can read more on our help pages, or contact out customer care team.

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