Archive for October, 2010

Yahoo! Mail Beta Rolls Out Worldwide

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

If you follow our blog, you’ve heard about Yahoo! Mail Beta and seen a sneak peak of the new product. Today, you will get the chance to try it yourself. I’m pleased to announce the release of Yahoo! Mail Beta, which delivers a faster, safer and more social email experience. Let me give you a tour of what’s new in the product.

Speed thrills
A faster email experience is at the core of Yahoo! Mail Beta. We built the product from the ground up to be fast so you can be more productive. In fact, Yahoo! Mail Beta is more than two-times faster than previous versions of Yahoo! Mail. You can learn more about how we enhanced the performance of Yahoo! Mail Beta at the YDN Blog.

Be gone, spammer!
Spam can be distracting, irritating and downright dangerous. We block more than 130 billion spam messages every month to deliver you a safer place to email. And, our focus on battling spam has earned us the highest marks among our competitors, as noted in a 2010 study by the prestigious Fraunhofer Institute.

Yahoo! Mail everywhere
If you use Yahoo! Mail on the iPhone, iPad or an Android device, the look and feel of Yahoo! Mail Beta will be familiar. We designed Yahoo! Mail Beta to be sleek, elegant and consistent across devices.

Beyond email
There are many ways to connect with the people that matter to you. That’s why we invited Twitter into our social stream. Now you can read your friends’ tweets, retweet or compose your own 140-character message alongside Facebook posts and Yahoo! status updates all from the What’s New page. In addition, we made our IM and SMS features more productive because you can organize your conversations in separate tabs, switch between text and chat conversations and dock the conversation window when you are multi-tasking.

Photos and videos
Email is a great place to share private photos and videos with friends and family. Now you can browse rich slideshows from Flickr or Picasa links and watch video clips from Flickr and YouTube right from your email.

Find stuff faster
We’re using Yahoo!’s wealth of search science and technology to make email search faster. A new left-hand column helps you navigate, sort and narrow your search results by sender, attachment file, date or folder location.

We’re just getting started
As you can imagine, we have big plans for Yahoo! Mail Beta. Our engineers designed Yahoo! Mail Beta in a way that lets us make changes fast, so stay tuned as we release new enhancements over the coming months.

Now it’s your turn to try Yahoo! Mail Beta. You can switch back to your original Yahoo! Mail any time. And, please note that Yahoo! Mail Beta will not be immediately available for Yahoo! Small Business users or users on some older browsers and operating systems.

We want to know all about your experience and we hope you will tell us what you think by leaving us a comment. Check back to the Yahoo! Mail Blog for more updates.

Picture 10

David McDowell
Sr. Director of Product Management
Yahoo! Mail

Posted in General, Yahoo! Mail | 48 Comments »

Innovating Around Boundaries

Friday, October 8th, 2010

In life and at work we encounter boundaries that challenge our ability to reach our potential. But the right combination of innovative thinking, teamwork, and passion are keys to crossing any chasm.

Last week I had the honor to speak at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, an annual conference that brings together lady geeks to share, educate, and connect. My talk, titled “Crossing Boundaries to Build and Sustain a Massive Web Mail Service”, illustrated examples of crossing boundaries by highlighting the shifts that the Yahoo! Mail team has made to evolve our product. In fact, the new Yahoo! Mail Beta, which is slated to launch soon, is the output of these efforts. Let me tell you what I mean by offering examples of five boundaries that the Yahoo! Mail team overcame to deliver a better experience to our users:

Performance boundaries
The need for speed has forced us to evolve our thinking about Yahoo! Mail’s architecture. The earliest versions of Yahoo! Mail emphasized server-side processing where most of the computing involved in managing your email occurred on servers in data centers far away from your computer. Today’s Yahoo! Mail puts almost all the heavy lifting of computing using Javascript in the user’s Web browser. By mixing the best of both approaches, the upcoming Yahoo! Mail beta will use a smarter combination of server-side and client-side computing to make the experience even faster and more responsive.

Geographic boundaries
We have millions of users around the globe, and maintaining a product that scales to this footprint is a challenge. Not only is performance affected by where we put servers, deployment locations are usually subject to local regulations and market conditions that oftentimes complicate things. We’ve taken many approaches to improve performance by maximizing the use of edge serving to optimize traffic routing, local cache serving, and specialized heavy bandwidth servers. That results in a better experience whether you access Yahoo! Mail in South Dakota or South Africa.

Localized boundaries
The diversity of our user base means we need to consider an even greater diversity of usage habits and tastes. We have localized Yahoo! Mail in 40 different languages and we simultaneously ship our product to all markets. Our engineering teams use a global approach to how we design, customize, test, deploy, and maintain our product. We have to coordinate with many people in-country who play roles in translation, marketing, QA, customer care, and operations to make this happen in a nimble fashion.

Design boundaries
Design makes a huge difference, especially as it translates into engineering. We’re constantly updating and evolving our product based on what we learn from user feedback and testing. Our software development infrastructure and processes incorporate design with Agile in mind. We’ve built a development framework allowing user experience designers to update Yahoo! Mail’s HTML and CSS code jointly with engineering. This blurs the boundary between design and engineering, allowing both teams the flexibility to iterate the look and feel of the product throughout all phases of development.

Organizational boundaries
Building Yahoo! Mail Beta was a testament to the strong partnership between engineering, design, and product management. Each role must bring its own specialization to the table while understanding the big picture. Collaboration across companies, organizations, job functions, and teammates is the key to success in building high quality and massively scalable products.

Putting this all together enabled us to deliver great things in Yahoo! Mail Beta. We have improved the way we engineer the product by constantly iterating, crossing boundaries, and learning new ways of working. We can’t wait for you to check out the result of our efforts when we unveil Yahoo! Mail Beta to you in the near future.

Also, a special thanks to all the women who approached me afterward my talk. I was really inspired by your curiosity, passion, and unique perspectives.

Julia Lee
Senior Director of Engineering
Yahoo!

Posted in General | 3 Comments »