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 Frustration because the great Valentines Day deal email opened on Presidents Day is no longer valid.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.
I have had yahoo mail accounts in the past but mainly to use yahoo messenger, I’ll have to give the email portion a shot again.
I can no longer find the preview button on my taskbar and thus can’t get my email to do previews. Any idea what happened?!
Have used yahoo email for years and generally been reliable.
My biggest gripe has been a lack of IMAP for Yahoo email and has stopped me using more widely.
IMAP makes using the same email account on multiple computer practical and much easier than with POP access.
Some say, why dont you work online? That is good if you have 24 hour access to internet, but many places I work, that is not available.
Anyway, a suggestion for IMAP access for Yahoo email
Thank you for explaining the salient features of Yahoo! mail. I have a peculiar problem. At times I am unable to attach either documents or pictures to the email I am composing. Sometimes it does attach, and at other times it will not. Any suggestions or advice?
I’ve used Yahoo mail for years. It’s reliable and fast and has many great features. I didn’t think it could get any better but it just keeps improving.