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

At Yahoo!, our goal is to help you stay in touch with the people who matter most in your life. Whether it’s on a PC, a smartphone, an iPad, or a TV, we want to bring you a Yahoo! communications experience that you can enjoy on any Internet-connected device. Today, I’m thrilled to share with you two announcements that bring this vision even closer.

The Best Yahoo! Communications Experience — for your Android Phone
First, we’re excited to unveil Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger apps for the Android operating system. These are the first Android applications that Yahoo! has ever released and we couldn’t be happier to be sharing them with you today. You can download them from the Android Market for phones that support Android OS 2.0+, such the popular Motorola Droid, the HTC Incredible and the Google Nexus One.

Yahoo! Mail and Messenger are available as separate streamlined apps, however they offer common features that will give you a better mobile communications experience that’s easy to use and immediately familiar. Both apps let you compose messages with rich text, express yourself through our many Yahoo! emoticons, access Yahoo! Address Book and phone contacts, as well as share photos that you’ve taken on your phone.

The Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger Android apps offer many of the core features that you find in their PC counterparts. In the Yahoo! Mail Android app, you can search for important messages with our Full Search and Smart Folders features and organize messages into the same personal folders you use on the PC. In Messenger you can set your Yahoo! Messenger status message, view the status messages of your buddy list contacts and chat with your MSN/Windows Live Messenger friends. For more details on the Messenger app, click here.

Give them a try today! You can download the Yahoo! Mail and Messenger apps from the Android Market.

For additional information, visit http://mobile.yahoo.com/mail/android.

The new HTML5 mobile Web Mail for iPhone and iPod Touch – A smarter, faster, and richer mobile mail experience
For our second announcement, we are upgrading our mobile Web mail experience with a faster, more feature-rich version. We wanted to give our nearly 300 million Yahoo! Mail users more options to access our service on the devices they love. The newest version of Yahoo! Mail, available today as an opt-in trial, has many of the features that you’ll find on our PC version and leverages the power of HTML5 to deliver an app-like experience never before seen on the mobile Web. It’s a mobile email experience that is:

• Faster and more reliable: If you’re offline, Yahoo! Mail uses local caching capabilities to help you access and search your messages even without an internet connection.
• Smart: You can find and organize your messages using Full Search, personal folders and Smart Folders with messages from your most important contacts and optimized views for photos and file attachments.
• Rich: View rich photo and video attachments in their full form, or as previews directly in the inbox view.
• Seamless & unified experience: Going forward, you’ll see a consistent look and feel, whether you’re on a smartphone or a PC.

During the trial period, our new mobile Web mail experience will be available in 28 languages across more than 200 countries. We’ve optimized it for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch running iOS 3.0+, with more mobile devices and platforms on the way.

The new HTML5 version of Yahoo! Mail is available as an opt-in beta, though we expect to upgrade everyone to this experience shortly. Get started by visiting http://y.ahoo.it/mailbeta on your phone’s browser, or by visiting http://m.yahoo.com/mail and tapping on ‘Preview the new Yahoo! Mail’.

We’re really excited about both our HTML5 Yahoo! Mail experience, and the awesome new Android applications, so give them a whirl and don’t forget to come back and let us know what you think!

Read more »

Yahoo! Mail is available anywhere on your mobile.
Pretty often in the morning, I’m getting off my flat without having checked my personal emails. So I’m quite happy to be able to connect to the internet on my mobile and check my emails while going to the office, in the tube (I get signal at Embankment station) or in the bus… Actually whenever I’ve got inactivity time (please avoid checking them on your racing bicycle at the traffic light stop, that’s dangerous! ok?). Whatever if you’re an email / iPhone addict like me or not, you’ll be pleased to check your Yahoo! Mail inbox on the go when you need it (as long as your mobile can connect to the internet).

Yahoo! will launch a new mobile experience pretty soon.
In order to improve your mobile experience with emails, we’re working on a brand new Yahoo! Mail experience for mobile phones. I’ll give you more details on this really soon. I just wanted to let you know that things are coming up.

What do you think this new Yahoo! Mail experience for mobile will be?

Gregory Talon
Product Manager – Yahoo! Mail

Read more »

The bracket is set. Sixteen teams are through to the elimination round, 16 teams are flying home. If you think the World Cup has been an emotional roller coaster, buckle your seat belts because over the next two weeks the battle for world soccer supremacy is guaranteed to bring more cheers and tears around the globe. Only one team will remain standing on July 11. Will it be yours?

Speaking from the perspective of a soccer fanatic, I’ve become increasingly reliant on Yahoo! Mail to express the joy and pain of watching my team fight through the World Cup. And through these first couple of weeks, I have discovered ways that Yahoo! Mail can help me deal with the emotional roller coaster of the World Cup. Here are 5 tips for how you can use Yahoo! Mail to help you through the elimination round:

1. Tell the world how you feel through your status message
Yahoo! Mail lets you post status updates that will appear on in places like Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Pulse. You also have the option to expand your reach by sending updates to your Facebook page through Yahoo! Mail. This is a good way to plan an event or poll your friends about the referee’s sanity. More importantly, it’s a way to find an audience as you scream in joy or despair.

2. Wear your colors
Got a Yahoo! Avatar? Dress up your virtual alter-ego with your team’s colors. Through our Yahoo! Avatars page you can choose from a collection of jerseys from teams that qualified for the next round, including England, Brazil, Argentina, USA, Netherlands, Germany, Portugal and France. Oh, wait… scratch France. Or you can hoist the trophy with the FIFA avatar.

3. Search for photos in the Flickr application
Yahoo! Mail gives you the breadth and depth of Flickr through an application that you can launch in your email experience. Flickr is a great tool for World Cup viewing because it gives me a way to soak in the spirit of the game from a fan’s perspective. With so many camera phones on hand inside and outside the stadium, there’s bound to be some photos of the game making their way into Flickr. If you find something you like, you can automatically embed it into your email message and send it around to your friends. Note– this feature is only available on the new Yahoo! Mail.

4. Keep up with news from the Today module
The What’s New page is the place for news and status updates in your Yahoo! Mail session. Check back for updates and post-game articles to dig deeper into the details of the game.

5. Send some personalized smack talk to a friend
My friend George is from Ghana, so I have already saved a draft email of some juicy smack talk once USA scores on Saturday. It reads, “Dear George, GOAAAAAAAAL!!!!!” Since I’ll be at a bar or a friend’s place during the game, I’ll be able to access my draft folder by logging in from my Motorola Droid or from a friend’s iPhone. Man, I hope I didn’t just jinx my team.

Enjoy the next two weeks. There will be plenty of surprises leading up to the final game on July 11. Hopefully this year there won’t be any head-butting.

Jim Hu
Product Marketing Manager
Yahoo! Mail

Read more »

The start of the world’s biggest sporting event – the FIFA World Cup — is just around the corner and the world is buzzing, rivalries are renewing, and even the smack talk has begun. Starting today on Yahoo! Mail, you can easily share your passion for your team. Go on, let your Yahoo! and Facebook friends know who you are rooting for!

Here’s how it works. Starting today, you will see a flag icon in the status area – the flag is based on the regional version and language of Yahoo! Mail that you use.

By clicking on the flag, Yahoo! Mail will auto-fill your status message with a short phrase of support for that country.

Like any status message, you can customize it to your liking – most importantly, you can change the country you are rooting for by clicking on the drop-down arrow next to the flag. Once you do so, you can see the full list of countries that are participating. Click on the country you support and a suggested status message will populate just like before.

Once you click Share, your message will be broadcast to people who view your Updates on Yahoo!. What’s even better is that you can also share your passion to your Facebook friends by clicking “Add Facebook” and linking your account (and there are many, many, many other benefits of linking your accounts). Sharing on Yahoo! and Facebook definitely gets the conversation going, even if everyone doesn’t always agree…

Share your passion for your team and don’t forget to check out the sweet smorgasbord of World Cup activities across Yahoo!, sure to satisfy even the most ardent of fans.

Who are you rooting for in South Africa?

Read more »