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

What a year it’s been for Yahoo! Mail. I can tell you that all of us on the Global Yahoo! Mail team have been working hard throughout 2009 to deliver you a more social and more productive Yahoo! Mail that lets you get the important things done quickly and easily. In short, we’re working to give you the best email experience on the Web. I think you’ll agree with me, all that hard work has paid off. We’ve delivered some pretty great things to your Yahoo! Mailbox (pun intended).

As is usual at this time of year, it’s time to take a look back and see what we’ve been able to accomplish in these short 12 months. Here are the highlights (in no particular order):

• To kick off 2009 we gave you a smarter, more social Mailbox. With the new welcome page “What’s New” in Yahoo! Mail you can now easily find the important mail from those who matter most. In addition you can now get updates from your connections. And from the Inbox you can filter your mail to see just the mail from your contacts or connections.
• We launched Yahoo! Messenger in Classic Mail. It seems like it’s been a part of the Classic Mail forever, but the ability to instantly chat with your friends and family in the classic version of Yahoo! Mail has only been around since the beginning of the year.
• We’ve added fantastic new Apps in Yahoo! Mail to let you be more productive right from your Inbox. (Of course we have to thank our Apps partners who also worked very hard to deliver you these great tools.) Apps like Edit Photos from Picnik let you easily share and edit photos right from within your Inbox. The ‘Attach Large Files’ from ZumoDrive lets you share up to 100MB files. Apps like Pingg and Evite allow you easily manage your social calendar.
• One of our goals is to help you do more with your photos in your Yahoo! Mailbox. We want to make photos an integral part of your Mail experience. Our acquisition of Xoopit will go a long way to make that a reality.
• In order to send all those photos (and other attachment types) we recently launched the ability for you to add attachments up to 25MB to a single email. That’s about 12 photos if your camera takes about 2MB photos. And to help you attach those files, we launched an enhanced attachment feature for the all-new version of Yahoo! Mail. It allows you drag and drop your attachments right into your email. Plus you can scale and rotate your photo attachments.
• We’ve also been working hard behind the scenes to improve the speed of Yahoo! Mail. In the US we have achieved more than a 16% improvement in performance over the year. And, Yahoo! Mail is the fastest Webmail in the UK (based on our tests using 3rd party tools). So, not only have we given you more tools to increase your productivity, we’ve made it even faster to get things done.
• Our friends on the Address book team recently launched the updated Yahoo! Contacts. It goes a long way to unify the Contacts experience across the Yahoo! network and fits seamlessly into the all-new Yahoo! Mail. Plus the new clean-up duplicates tool is a great way to clean up your list of contacts.
• Our ongoing efforts to reduce spam and helping you keep safe in Mail have seen our lowest level of spam in recent history. We told you back at the beginning of the year about some of what the anti-spam team has been working on in the background, and we hope you’re all seeing the continued improvement. Plus we are always committed to keeping you safer online through safety tips on this blog.
• Thanks to our colleagues on the Front Page team you can now preview your Inbox right from the Mail tab on the newly redesigned Yahoo! Homepage.
• Finally, we know that many of you are mobile with your mail. So we have to give a shout out and congratulations to the Mobile Team who just went GA with an updated Mobile mail experience. Just point your mobile browser over to m.yahoo.com/mail to have a look. I definitely give it two thumbs up, way up!

Wow! That’s a lot, and those are just the highlights! Rest assured, we are prepared to work even harder next year. We are aiming to give you a better photo sharing experience, more amazing third party Apps and an enhanced Yahoo! Calendar to name just a few.

So, from all of us on the Yahoo! Mail team, I want to wish you and everyone on your Yahoo! Contacts list a very happy holiday season and all the best for the New Year.

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In the spirit of the holidays, Yahoo! is encouraging our community to create a ripple of good around the world by doing random acts of kindness. You in?

Surprise someone by paying for their morning coffee. Or drop off a warm coat at the homeless shelter. Then update your Yahoo! status to inspire your friends and family to do something good for someone else.

Through the end of the year, you will see a heart in your Yahoo! Mail status update box. Click on the heart to tell your friends and family what you are doing. Then click on the exclamation point to shuffle through ideas for random acts of kindness. And feel free to come up with your own random acts of kindness – we’re sure you have quite a few up your sleeve!

Once you’ve updated your status, check out what others are doing to spread kindness around the world at http://kindness.yahoo.com.

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Hi everyone! My name is Ajay and I am a project manager for Yahoo! Mail and Contacts. Today, I’d like to show you how to add a splash of color to your Yahoo! Mailbox. These same themes are available in Yahoo! Mail and Contacts so you’ll be completely color coordinated! Here’s how to change the colors in your Yahoo! Mailbox:

If you use the All New Yahoo! Mail:

1. From the Yahoo! Mailbox click on the Options menu
2. Choose Color and then select the color theme of your choice
3. That’s it you’re done!

If you use Classic Mail:

1. Click on the Options menu
2. Choose Mail Options

3. Choose Colors

4. Choose the theme of your choice

5. Click save and go back to your Yahoo! Mailbox.
6. Enjoy!!

The color themes in Yahoo! Mail and Contacts are a great way for you to personalize your Mailbox. I personally like ‘Lime Green’ but the feedback you’ve been sending tells me that ‘Bubblegum’ (‘Pink’ in the UK) is very popular too. Whichever theme you choose, I’m sure you’ll find one that’s right for you.

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Smiley faces in emails? It’s definitely not on your list of favorites. A while back we took a poll and it ranked pretty high up on the list of email pet peeves. But when you’re chatting with your friends in Yahoo! Mail, then that’s another story.
Smilies and text speak are an integral part of chatting. If you’re tired of the usual and and , surprise your friends with some different emoticons. They’ll be ROTFL.

Here is a list of the hidden emoticons (the ones you won’t find in the list in Mail). If you need to brush up on the usual suspects, you can find the complete list of emoticons here.

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I’m happy to report that the issue with the spell checking function in the All-new Yahoo! Mail has been fixed. Misspelled words are now correctly replaced. This fixes the issue for all languages including Spanish, German, Italian and French.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused. As always, please feel free to contact our customer care team if you are having issues with your email.

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I get questions from users now and again, whether or not we sent an email asking for account information. The answer is always NO! (Sorry for shouting) We will never send you an email asking for your account information. This is something that I’ve written about before but it never hurts to post about it again.

Here is an example of a phishing email that I received recently:

We definitely did not send this email. This one, and others like it, all pretty much follow the same formula:

• They are sent from a strange email address (but sometimes masked to look genuine)
• They usually use a scare tactic
• They want you to reply with your account information
• They have bad grammatical errors and use crazy fonts and lots of logos.

The most important thing to know is we will never ask you for your password! Here are some other tips to protect you from phishing threats: Never click on links in emails that ask you to provide account information, go directly to the website and login from there, don’t believe every warning you read in an email. And finally, there is no Yahoo Lottery.

To coin a phrase from my all-time favorite daytime cartoon series G.I. Joe – “Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.”

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Apps in Mail let you do more, be more social and stay better connected. Our new My Social Networks App (available now to our UK users) makes it easy to do all three. We’ve teamed up with sobees, who developed the App, to let you keep up with Facebook, Twitter and MySpace right from inside your Yahoo! mailbox. Who better to tell you about it, than Francois Bochatay from the Sobees team? It is now my favorite App in mail. It’s brilliant, so keep reading.
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

We are really proud to announce that sobees is now available in Yahoo! Mail. This new application, called My Social Networks, is the one that was missing in your Inbox! As a social client application, it lets you stay up-to-date and interact with all your different communities (Facebook, Twitter and MySpace), just like sobees lite and sobees web do.

What are your friends doing right now? Did they share a picture? Are they enjoying a good meal in a restaurant close to you? Follow all the activities of your friends without leaving the comfort of your Inbox thanks to My Social Networks. In addition, the App also lets you search – in real time – all the messages people are sharing about your brand, your favorite sports team, a movie star, etc. You will be the first to know if anything that matters to you happens. My Social Networks also gives you the possibility to update your status on multiple social networks in one go.

The application would not have been complete without fully integrating with your Yahoo! Inbox. We have therefore developed some ‘Yahoo! Mail only’ features. Easily share, by email, any item you come across on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. We’ve given you the possibility to add Facebook events to your Yahoo! calendar with a single click. And, if you want to tell your friends what is on your mind while reading an email, just open the ‘Update Status’ pop-up window.

This integration has been a really exciting experience and we are happy to be working with the Yahoo! team. Our aim has always been to create an easy, intuitive application to help people make the most of their social networks.

My Social Networks is currently available for Yahoo! Mail UK users. However, it will be added to additional European countries very soon, so stay tuned!

Francois Bochatay – sobees

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