Yahoo! Mail Blog
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I’m a foodie, and I love to immerse myself in anything food-related. Some of my favorite activities have included attending chocolate salons and shows, taking cooking classes in Vietnam, and picking cherries and peaches from local California farms. Over the years, my Yahoo! Mail has played a vital role in helping me grow as a chef because it makes the best recipe box. It stores recipes that I’ve found and personalized, it’s easily searchable, and it is the best way for me to share recipes with friends. Let me explain.

Store
I like to experiment with new recipes, and my email makes a perfect recipe box. Last week I had a craving for noodles in an Asian peanut sauce, and after some digging online I found a recipe that resembled what I remember my mother making from my childhood. The reviews were favorable, so I copied and pasted the recipe into an email, made direct edits based on the reviews I read from other home cooks (in the case of the peanut sauce, it was to go light on the honey and to add cayenne pepper for extra kick), and then sent it to myself. This unintended editing feature is something I actually really appreciate about storing recipes in email because personalizing recipes is important to me.

Search
Email is where I store almost every recipe that I have tried, liked, or aspire to try in the future. Searching through my recipe folder in my email is super-easy and fast, and it’s especially useful at 6 pm when I’m about to make dinner. When I’m at the grocery store trying to remember ingredients for my corn chowder, or at the farmer’s market with 4 pounds of gorgeous tomatoes wondering what else I need to make bruschetta, I’ll also use my iPhone to search for recipes that I saved years ago.

Share
Recipes are not only meant to be cooked, they are meant to be shared. Probably half of the recipes in my email folder have come from friends or people I met at potlucks/BBQs and other events. In a way, email has become my personal log of the people and events connected with a recipe. These days, I’m discovering new recipes and food ideas through my friends’ Facebook updates, often right inside Yahoo!Mail. Just the other day my friend updated her status asking for summer recipes that don’t require a grill. In the process of contributing my own favorites, I picked up a few ideas from her friends that I became excited to try. Into my email recipe box they went.

These are some ideas about how to use email to make your pursuit of culinary joy easier. Fellow aspiring chefs: Tell us how email has improved what comes out of your kitchen. Better yet, feel free to share your favorite recipes too! I’m always looking for new ideas.

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Hey fans of ABC’s The Bachelorette, did you watch Jimmy Kimmel Live on Monday, July 19? Bachelorette Ali Fedotwosky gave Jimmy a recap of the night’s episode through a Yahoo! Messenger video call. We wanted to give some love to our communications comrades over in Messenger. Way to go!

Here’s the clip:

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Got an appointment or a hot date you can’t miss? Want to turn your iPhone into your personal assistant? For those of you who own an iPhone 3GS or below, and run iOS4, you can sync the appointments on your Yahoo! Calendar to the calendar on your iPhone in a few easy steps. Once activated, you’ll be able to add or find your appointments whether you’re running around with your iPhone, or if you’re visiting Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! Calendar on your PC. Here’s what you need to do:

If you’re an existing user:
Settings->Mail/Contacts/Calendar->Your Mail Account

If you’re using Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! Calendar for the first time:
Settings->Mail/Contacts/Calendar->Add Account->Yahoo->Enter your account info and click next.

For iPhone 4 users, you won’t need to do anything because the new phone software will automatically activate your Yahoo! Calendar once you sync your Yahoo! Mail. You can also sync your contacts to Yahoo! by using the CardDAV protocol. Visit this page to learn how to set this up.

Going forward, you’ll see more ways to access Yahoo! Mail features on all types of mobile devices, such as the iPhone and Android phones, to help organize your life. In fact, we’ve seen tremendous growth after we activated Calendar sync for the iPhone 4. Since the iPhone 4 launched in June, many users have jumped on board and activated their Yahoo! accounts on the new phone, and we expect more to follow:

Try it out, and tell us what you think.

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Our Yahoo! Mail team is committed to providing a best-in-class mail experience to our users. Sending, receiving and attaching your files and photos should always work flawlessly, and almost all of the time it does. But when you have over 300 million mailboxes, every once in a while something might not work quite right. So what do you do if you ever experience an issue with your Yahoo! Mail account?

Well, if you are a Yahoo! Mail user in the UK, you can now get instant support from our top-class customer care team. We are now offering Live Chat Support to all of our Yahoo! Mail users in the UK and Ireland. Just visit our help pages and click on ‘Contact Us’. You will see an opt ion to chat with us live now. Just click that button and you will be connected directly to one of our chat support agents.

Live chat support is available 8am-8pm / 7 days a week, and is just one click away. We are excited to offer you this service, which I think you’ll find is unique among our competitors.

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Yesterday we made some big announcements. We launched our first-ever Yahoo! Mail and Messenger Android apps and unveiled a redesigned version of Yahoo! Mail optimized for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Today I wanted to share with you some thoughts from the people who brought these products to life. Check out this latest episode of Yahoo! News Bytes featuring our very own Lee Parry. Enjoy the video!

Jim Hu
Product Marketing Manager
Yahoo! Mail

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