Phishers Beware, YMAP Is Here
Dig if you will this picture: You’re taking a leisurely walk around your neighborhood park on a sunny day, taking in the sun, the scenery, and the sanctity of the place you’ve come to call home. Suddenly, a masked intruder appears out of nowhere and tries to rob you. That would be a jolting and revolting experience, wouldn’t it?
To me, the online equivalent of such a criminal encounter is finding a phishing email in my mailbox. I deem my mailbox as the safe haven of my online experience. It’s where I communicate with family and friends, receive important messages from the companies I transact with, and, within Yahoo! Mail, where I chat with my Facebook buddies. That’s why we’re obsessed with keeping phishers out of your Yahoo! Mail.
On that note, I’m happy to announce the release of Yahoo! Mail Anti-Phishing Platform (YMAP), which further reinforces the trust and security of the Yahoo! Mail experience using existing email authentication technologies. It builds on the pilot anti-phishing program we ventured into with eBay/PayPal back in 2007, but this time we’re casting a wider net on the phishing problem.
So, what does this mean for you?
Put simply, we’re beefing up Yahoo! Mail’s SpamGuard by adding more security measures that make it much harder for phishers to get to your mailbox. We’ve teamed up with email authentication partners—namely, Authentication Metrics, eCert, Return Path, and Truedomain—to gain significant coverage to protect the prime targets of phishing attacks. Our partners work with top brands and email senders to audit, monitor, and protect email traffic using their domains. This collaboration enables us to apply policies to protect the authenticated emails using the domains of well-known online services–from popular social networks like Facebook to often-targeted institutions in the banking industry.
While this project is still in its early stages of deployment, we will be rolling it out aggressively during the coming months so that Yahoo! Mail users, along with the expanding list of companies participating in the program, are better protected from the perilous plague of phishing. It’s just another way we’re beating away bandits from your mailbox.
Chat with your Facebook friends on Yahoo! Mail Beta
Greetings, Yahoo! Mail Beta users!
Some exciting updates to Yahoo! Mail Beta that we’re in the middle of rolling out:
“Hello, my name is Stephanie and I’m a Facebook addict.”
To all you fellow Facebook addicts out there, you might already know that we provide Facebook integration in our downloadable Messenger client. Now you can chat with your Facebook friends in Yahoo! Mail too! On the left, you’ll see “Facebook Friends” under “Online Contacts”. If you click on the thunderbolt, you will be prompted to authenticate on Facebook Connect (if you haven’t already). Once you’ve authenticated, your online Facebook friends will appear below “Online Contacts” and you can chat freely. As if Facebook was not addictive enough on its own, right? ;)
Giving you more message space
We’ve been hearing a lot of feedback from you about how much space the purple header takes up and how it limits how much of the actual message content you can see at once. We still want to provide some room to showcase our existing and future themes at the top of the page, but now you can scroll the entire Yahoo! Mail page so you can see as much message content as possible. Just go to Options>Mail Options and select “Scroll content of the entire page”.
Along with the ability to scroll the entire page comes another way to view your inbox. For those of you who are coming to the Beta from our Yahoo! Mail Classic product, we now have a paginated Inbox list view that might look familiar to you. You can view 50 messages in your list and click to go to the next, previous, first or last pages. When you click on a message subject line, we’ll load that message in a full tab. You can change the number of messages per page by clicking on Options>Mail Options and then selecting from 50, 100 or 200 messages at a time. If you still prefer the preview pane mode, you can also change this setting by going to Options>Mail Options and selecting “Scroll each panel on the page individually”. Try it out and let us know what you think!
Access to your past IM conversations
I don’t know about you, but my friends are always, always sending me important links, dates, addresses and other tidbits of information via IM. If you’re anything like me, you’re always, always forgetting exactly what was said/shared. What restaurant were we supposed to meet at? Where is that hilarious link Mike sent me about iPhone autocorrect fails? I rely heavily on my archived messages on the Messenger client and am so excited that we now give you access to your past IMs in Yahoo! Mail Beta. Just click on “Conversations” on the left side just below “Inbox” and see all your past IM conversations from Yahoo! Mail Beta (and the latest downloadable Messenger client).
Known issues with Yahoo! Mail Beta
We’re still working hard to iron out all the kinks in Yahoo! Mail Beta and there are a couple of hairy bugs that you’ve been telling us about on our suggestion board, blog, etc.:
- Randomly getting logged out of Yahoo! Mail Beta – we just fixed this issue, so please let us know if you are still seeing it.
- Attachment upload/download slowness and failure issues – we are aware of these issues and we will release fixes as soon as we possibly can. We’ll keep you up to date on this blog and our suggestions board. Thanks for your patience!
Thanks again for using Yahoo! Mail Beta and keep giving us feedback! For those of you wanting to try out Yahoo! Mail Beta, please visit http://features.mail.yahoo.com .
Change Email for 270M People with Yahoo! Mail Applications
What do Yahoo! Mail and a chameleon have in common?
Both are changeable with separately mobile stereoscopic eyes and rapidly extruding tongues. Okay, scratch the eyes and tongue thing, but both are changeable.
Once upon a time, when you sent an email, its content was forever cast in stone. That meant a lost opportunity for senders and frustration for customers receiving your message. Lost opportunity because while your customer is lamenting the fact that they missed the V-day deal, they aren’t opening your Presidents Day message that contains a different discount they can use today. Frustration because the great Valentines Day deal email opened on Presidents Day is no longer valid.
What if the email message you sent could change like the stereoscopic-eyed chameleon? The Valentines Day message, if opened after V-day, could show information about a different, still redeemable discount. The one-day restaurant deal, when opened, could automatically let the customer know that the deal is expired and show a currently redeemable deal instead. These emails would be more effective for the sender and much more satisfying for the customer to receive.
Now, you can deliver dynamic, timely email messages just like this with the Yahoo! Mail Development Platform. The platform empowers you to create applications that can:
- Dynamically change how messages are rendered
- Inject javascript into an email to make it interactive
- Call external web services to expand or update an email’s content
- Launch an app-specific UI within the Yahoo! Mail chrome
- Create new ways to compose, read, and organize messages
There are a several ways a Yahoo! Mail user gets their hands on your app:
Contextually
Users experience your application as part of their regular mail flow. The email message comes in, your app is applied against it and voila, your recipient sees today’s deal not yesterday’s.
Via the application list
We list our applications on the lower left hand side of Yahoo! Mail. Installed applications that aren’t strictly contextual get an icon in the application list. Yahoo! Mail comes pre-installed with applications from Yahoo! and third-party developers that let you:
- Easily and securely send files up to 100MB per email.
- Organize messages — newsletters, coupons, promotions, receipts, etc into folders — leaving email from real people in your Inbox.
- Edit, enhance, organize, and share photos directly from within Yahoo! Mail.
Via the application gallery
Yahoo! Mail users can install applications that didn’t come preinstalled.
Got a big idea that could leverage Mail? Visit http://developer.yahoo.com/mailapplications/ to get started today or contact us at developer-questions@yahoo-inc.com.
