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

If you use Facebook, Yahoo! Mail is getting better for you! As you may have heard, Yahoo! is putting a big focus on bringing you more social features, and this evening Yahoo! Mail is rolling out another handy way to connect with your friends. In select markets, we’re adding the ability to update your Facebook status right from Yahoo! Mail and see your friends’ Facebook profile photos when they email you. This quickly follows the feature we added last month that lets you easily import your Facebook friends’ email addresses to Yahoo! Contacts.

To turn on these features, first link your Yahoo! and Facebook accounts by clicking on the “Add to Facebook” link in the status section on the What’s New page in Yahoo! Mail.

After you log in with your Facebook credentials, you are good to go! Here’s what you’ll be able to do right from Yahoo! Mail:

Update your Facebook Status: Simply start typing what’s on your mind in the status box, and then choose where you want to share it – Yahoo!, Facebook or both.

Now hit “Share” and it gets posted where you want, including Facebook!

See Facebook profile photos when people email you: With this feature, you will see people’s Facebook profile photos – if available – anytime someone emails you.  In addition, by clicking on the profile image, you will go right to that person’s Facebook page.

Now, whether you want to send an email, SMS, IM, or update your Yahoo! or Facebook status, you can do it all from your Yahoo! Mail inbox. This integration of Facebook is just the start of how we plan to make it easier to do more right from Yahoo! Mail. Watch this space for more ways you can bridge your social worlds and Yahoo! Mail in the weeks and months ahead!

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Have you ever lost track of a friend because she moved and forgot to let you know her new address and phone number? When you’ve changed your contact information, did you remember to let all of your friends and colleagues know?

Wouldn’t it be great if you had an address book that updated itself — that always had the most up-to-date information for the people who matter most to you?

In the latest version of Yahoo! Contacts – in addition to making it simple to import email addresses from your Facebook friends – we have rolled out an “auto-updating” Address Book! Let’s take that friend who moved away and didn’t share her new phone number. In the old days, you might have lost touch with her. But now, when your friend updates her Yahoo! contact details and chooses to share the information, your Yahoo! Contacts gets automatically updated. Here’s how it works:

Let’s turn my example around, and make sure your friends always have the most up-to-date information for you! Just go to Yahoo! Contacts and click on the Share my info link under the Popular Tools.

Clicking on the link will show all the contact information that Yahoo! has for you.

If everything looks good, just click Start Sharing and this information will be shared with all the people you’ve chosen to share it with (such as your Connections). If you are like me, much of the information shown will likely come from when you registered for Yahoo! In other words – it’s ancient! To update your information just click Edit to go to your account information page. From there you can easily update your contact details and choose who you want to share it with. Remember, you have complete control over what you share.

Now here’s the fun part: your friends get your latest contact information without having to lift a finger! First, they will get a Yahoo! Update notifying them that your contact information has changed. Next, when they go to look you up in Yahoo! Contacts, they will see the contact information you gave them access to and the last time it was updated (don’t worry, none of the information you have for them will ever be over-written). Here’s what you’re friends will see:

Hopefully this feature helps you never lose touch with the people who matter most.

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As you know, we are always listening to your feedback. Many of you that have small computer screens have told us that you would like more space to read your emails. You spoke and we listened.

To give you more real estate to read your emails, we are adding a button just to the left of the advertisement in the All-New Yahoo! Mail. Clicking that button will hide the ad temporarily, while you read your email.

This is a handy tool, especially if you are using a computer with a smaller screen resolution like a small laptop or netbook. While it doesn’t permanently remove ads, it will give you more space while you read an email. Ads are what allow us to provide you Yahoo! Mail as a free service and hopefully they’re sometimes useful and interesting too. If you would like permanently disable ads you can sign up for Mail Plus which offers an ad-free experience and other enhanced features.

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Tired of spending countless hours on cleaning up those emails that have piled up over the years? Spring is just around the corner and you know what that means – spring cleaning. Don’t suffer from the stress and get a jump-start on spring cleaning with an organized Yahoo! Mail inbox.

We understand the drill. Make a New Years resolution, and then somehow, months go by, and it gets lost in the chaos of life. But if your resolution was to finally have an organized inbox free of all the clutter, then we can help you!

One of our Yahoo! Mail partners, OtherInbox, created the Automatic Organizer app found right in the handy Applications box on the lower left-hand corner of your inbox. This app allows you to keep your “clean inbox” resolution. Automatic Organizer prioritizes your Yahoo! inbox by automatically filing messages that aren’t from real people into pre-defined folders (Travel, Auto, Social Networking), while leaving you with a clean and clutter-free inbox manageable on your own schedule. Easy enough, right?

So try Automatic Organizer for free and feel good about spring cleaning for a change.

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I want to let you know about some changes coming to some of the menus in the All-New version of Yahoo! Mail. We’re moving a couple of options to new places and renaming others. It’s all to make them easier to find.

The Mail Menu items are being reorganized and grouped together under ‘Actions‘ and we’re adding a new menu item called ‘Show‘. Here is a detailed look:

The ‘Actions’ menu changes are as shown here

• ‘Select’ choices have been added to easily select all emails or just the ones that you can view in your Inbox.
• We’ve added ‘Sort by’ choices to give you better control on how you display the emails in your Inbox.
• ‘Print Message’ is changing to ‘Print Email…’
• ‘Filter Messages Like This…’ changes to ‘Filter Emails Like This…’
• ‘Full Header’ will now be ‘View Full Header’

We are also adding a ‘Show‘ menu that will allow you to view emails only from your Contacts or Connections. To view emails from your Connections, you will have to turn on the connection related features in Yahoo! Mail. You can find out how to do that in the next section.

There are also some changes to the ‘Options‘ Menu that is at the top right of your Inbox:

Here is everything you need to know about the new ‘Options‘ menu:

• We’ve added a menu item labeled ‘Show’ – here you can show or hide the preview pane, as well as some of the attribute columns of your email list (attachments, size and flag columns). Don’t forget that using the ‘v’ shortcut key also shows and hides the Preview Pane.
• ‘Mail Options‘ is changing to ‘More Options…‘ – this is where you can enable/disable the Connection related features, set up filters, turn on your Vacation response and more.
• ‘Add Application‘ is changing to ‘Add Application…‘ – this lets you add Apps like ‘Attach Large Files’, ‘Edit Photos’ and many others.
• ‘Mail Plus’ changes to ‘Mail Plus…’ and allows you to enjoy the benefits of Yahoo! Mail Plus
• ‘Switch to Yahoo! Mail Classic’ is now just ‘Mail Classic…’ and lets you switch back to the Classic version of Yahoo! Mail

While that might seem like a lot, it’s actually organizing items so that they are much easier to find. And don’t forget about all the great keyboard shortcuts you can use in the All-New Yahoo! Mail. Some of these menu items can be done with one keystroke. Give it a try… Go to your Inbox and hit the ‘v’ key. Voila, you get the preview pane!

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You might have heard that Yahoo! announced plans in December to integrate Facebook Connect across a variety of our popular sites and services. While we’re still early in the partnership, we wanted to let you know about one new thing you can do with Facebook that we are rolling out over the next few days.

In addition to importing your contacts from sites like Gmail and Windows Live Hotmail, starting this week you can now easily add your Facebook friends’ email addresses to your Yahoo! Contacts list. This will make it easy to communicate and share with the people you care about – wherever you are in Yahoo!. So when you are on Yahoo! Sports and you want to email your old high school buddy that great article on the Winter Olympics, his email address is just a click away. Or maybe you want to forward your cousin your airplane reservations on Yahoo! Mail, but you’ve never emailed him before. Now you can type the first few letters of his name in Yahoo! Mail and – presto! – his email address from his Facebook profile will appear in your email.

Importing from Facebook is super simple. To get started, just go to the Import Contacts landing page and select Facebook (and as you can tell from screenshot below, it is also easy to import email addresses from other services).

Next, enter your Facebook username and password in the Facebook login window that opens.

After you click login, we will authorize your account and begin importing, which may take a minute or two depending on your Internet speed and how many Facebook friends you have.

That’s it! Your Facebook friends’ email addresses will be added to your Yahoo! Contacts. You will see which contacts and email addresses were imported and who you already had contact information for (don’t worry, we won’t create duplicates).

We hope this feature makes it even easier to stay connected to the people who matter the most to you. And this is just one of the first steps you’ll see us take to help people interact with Facebook users all across Yahoo!. Stay tuned here and elsewhere on Yahoo! for more ways to use Facebook and Yahoo! together.

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