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

Multiple email accounts dragging you down? Do you have too many contact lists in too many places? Following in the footsteps of Craig Wilson’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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