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

White Elephant parties, Ugly sweater contests, holiday dinners, mad dashes to the mall and more! Yes, it’s that time of the year again and here at Yahoo! Mail we thought we’d help get you into the holiday spirit and make your holiday season a little less stressful.

We are introducing a few holiday themes that you can apply to your Yahoo! Mail account.  To update your theme, click on the “Options” button in the top left of your page and select “Themes”. Now, go right ahead and select the theme that best describes what the holiday means to you. I, for one, am leaning towards “Christmas gift” ;).

And, while you are at it, why not save time and trees by using our holiday stationery for your end of year notes to family and friends. Did you know that the amount of cards sold in the U.S. during the holiday season would fill a football field 10 stories high, and requires the harvesting of nearly 300,000 trees?

You can easily send holiday emails instead and infuse personality and warmth into them by simply clicking on the ”Stationery” button in the “Format” section of the compose tab to pick your favorite holiday stationery.

Happy holidays!

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Online account compromise occurs regularly and will probably continue in the foreseeable future. Often hackers employ botnets to hijack accounts from millions of unsuspecting consumers. In turn, these hijacked accounts are sold and used to initiate email scams, with messages seemingly sent from the legitimate account owners to their contacts. Scams can range from the less harmful “check this cool stuff” advertising spam to the more damaging “send money to help your friend” email. Worse still, the scam emails may contain malicious links that lead to the installation of malware on computers, which then makes the computers part of the ever-growing botnet networks.

To thwart account compromise, Yahoo! is introducing a stronger user authentication feature that aims to prevent account hijackers with a stolen password from accessing a person’s account. If you have a Yahoo! account, you can now further protect it by activating this new second sign-in verification feature from Yahoo! Account Info. As part of the process, you will be required to add a mobile phone number to your account and verify it via SMS.

Once the feature is turned on, any suspicious account sign-in attempt will be challenged by a second sign-in verification beyond the initial password validation. To confirm the legitimacy of the sign-in attempt, you or the hijacker will have to answer your account security question or enter a verification code that will be sent to your mobile phone. Presumably, only you, as the legitimate user, can sign in. Account hijackers will be blocked since they neither know your security answer nor possess your mobile phone. In short, this second sign-in verification step acts as an additional, stronger “beyond-the-password” challenge against any unauthorized access attempt. And our systems are also capable of other refinements to accomplish our ultimate goal: to block all account hijackers from accessing Yahoo! accounts

Given the complexity of behind-the-scenes working systems, we are offering this feature first to users residing in the United States, Canada, India, and the Philippines. We will be extending this feature gradually to all worldwide users by March 2012. As we continue to improve how to better prevent account compromise and keep you aware of any suspicious account activity, you can enact stronger protection on your account by turning on the second sign-in verification feature and by monitoring your recent sign-in activity.

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Yesterday Yahoo! announced a big milestone in the fight against spam – we were awarded a $610 million judgment against spammers responsible for creating a fake Yahoo! lottery email scheme. This scheme was perpetrated against email users and led them to believe that they were being offered a lottery prize from Yahoo!. You can read about the actual case and the judgment issued by a New York judge here.

As a leader in anti-spam protection, we are constantly looking at how we can win the war on spam, and take several different approaches to help keep our 300-million Yahoo! Mail users as safe as possible. On the technology front, we are continually updating our technology engine to stay one step ahead of spammers. In fact, Yahoo! Mail blocks more than 600 billion spam messages each and every month (that’s over 7.2 TRILLION spam messages we block each year.) And, since introducing an updated version of Yahoo! Mail in May this year, we’ve reduced the amount of spam reported by our Mail users by an additional 60%.

More importantly, the ruling shows that Yahoo! goes after spammers. In a big way. We initially started building this specific case back in 2008 and have diligently been pursuing it since then. Why? Because we are vigilant about protecting you, every other Yahoo! User and the online industry in general. We do not, nor will we in the future, hesitate to bring legal action against wrong doers who are engaging in fraudulent activities across our platforms.

Is the fight against spam over? Not by a long shot. Every day the spammers try to figure out how to stay one-step ahead of the good guys, and every day Yahoo! employs the latest technology we can to stop them.

But what we can say is that yesterday Yahoo! won a major round against spammers.

- The Yahoo Mail Team

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I am a firm believer in the old adage ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’. That is why my colleagues and I write a lot of posts around online security, phishing prevention and spam. We want everyone to know how to recognize and avoid phishing emails, as well as share tips for staying safe online.

But I also recognize that even the best of us can get caught off-guard sometimes. Whether it happens by mistake or a particularly well done forgery, someday you may find yourself in the situation that you account has been phished. If you don’t realize it right away, you’ll know it when your friends start asking why you sent them an email to a strange online shop or whether or not you really are stuck in Chicago without your wallet and are in need of money.

If you do ever find yourself the victim of a phishing attack and think your Yahoo account has been compromised, here are some things you can do to help get your account back online and in your control:

Change your password immediately. If you find that your account is sending spam, and you are still able to access your account, login to your Yahoo! account and change your password. That will prevent the fraudster from entering your account again. (Tip: Also check that we have the correct alternate contact email address for you on file.)

Use our automated account recovery tool. Sometimes the hacker who stole your information changes your password so that you can no longer access your account. If that’s the case, our account recovery tool can help restore access to your account and change your password at the same time. (Tip: You will have to answer your secret questions to complete the tool. If you forgot, or haven’t set your secret questions/answers, you can do that here then click the link ‘Update password-reset info’.)

Contact our Customer Care Team. If you can’t remember or are unable to provide the information needed by the account recovery tool, you can always contact our customer care team. Have a look at our account verification help pages, and then click the ‘Contact Us’ link. They will help get access to your account.

Remember, prevention is the best medicine. So arm yourself with the knowledge to stay safe online, and make sure you are prepared in case you ever do find yourself the victim of phishing. To simplify the process and quickly regain control of your Yahoo! account, make sure you always have a current alternate contact email address, and know the questions and answers to your secret questions. You can update your Yahoo! account recovery information by logging into your Yahoo! Account.

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Many of you may already be familiar with our Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger apps on mobile. Today, we are adding a new product to our mobile communications suite.

For those heavy texters out there, we are excited to introduce Hub, a fast and easy-to-use mobile messaging app that allows you to send text messages and have group conversations for free. Hub allows you to easily add participants to any conversation thread so it’s easy to switch from private messaging to a group conversation. Whether it is just keeping up with a close group of friends or making spontaneous plans, you no longer have to deal with scattered messages.

What’s more, Hub allows you to send messages to anyone without incurring any text messaging fees. Yes, you heard us right. There are no text messaging fees – messages are sent over WIFI or using your data connection – and Hub is device agnostic, which means you can communicate with anyone on any mobile device as long as you have their mobile phone numbers. Your friends are not required to download the app in order to reply to your messages although they are strongly encouraged to do so in order to enjoy the full feature set!

Key features of Hub include:

• Group Messaging: Enjoy group conversations with several friends at once
• Local and international SMS messages: Send text messages to other Hub users or any mobile phone for free†
• Privacy: Easily view and add participants to any conversation thread
• Message any phone: Your friends can reply with any SMS enabled mobile phone
• Instant notifications: Get push notifications for incoming messages so you never have to miss a conversation

Hub is currently in beta and is available for download on the Android Marketplace. We are extremely excited about this release and can’t wait for you to get started. Try Hub today and let us know what you think!

The Yahoo! Mail Team

Note: Hub requires Android OS 2.1+ and is currently available only to users with a US SIM card and a text plan.

†This feature is currently available when sending to numbers in Canada, Indonesia, India, Kuwait, Malaysia, Philippines, Pakistan, Thailand, United States and Vietnam. SMS recipients may be charged by their carriers.

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