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

It’s that time of year again, and I can’t believe that the holiday season is already upon us. I just finished writing my Christmas Cards (yes I still do sometimes put pen to paper), but if you’re more apt to send holiday wishes using email, why not try out the Christmas stationery in the all new mail.

I’ve blogged about how to use the Yahoo! Mail stationery before, so if you need a refresher course you can read that post here. If you want to add a little Christmas cheer to your email, why not try the “Christmas”, “Happy Holidays” or even the “Snow” stationery.

You can find those, and many more by under the ‘Holidays and Events’ section of the stationery feature. To find it, when you are composing an email, just click the link labeled ‘Featured’ and select the ‘Holidays and Events’ option.

Have a merry Christmas.
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail team

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As mentioned previously, the open applications in Yahoo ! Mail are available by invitation only. However, if you are interested in participating in the limited beta, please go here and sign up to be a beta tester. We will slowly be adding new users over the coming weeks and months. Thanks very much for your interest!

- The Yahoo ! Mail Team

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As you may have heard, we’ve been working on a new smarter inbox to help make your life easier. We’re happy to announce that today, some of you will begin to experience the smarter inbox, and we wanted to give everyone a chance to see what it looks like and what it can do.

The smarter inbox experience features a new Yahoo! Mail Welcome Page which surfaces messages, information and activity updates you care about most, as well as an updated inbox and folder view that filters messages from your personal connections.

The smarter Yahoo! Mail inbox also gives you immediate access to relevant third-party applications like Flickr, Flixster and Xoopit allowing you to do much more, and be more efficient, all from within your inbox. Take a look now and let us know what you think!

- Yahoo! Mail Team

Update: We are conducting a very limited beta test right now of the open applications in Yahoo! Mail. Only our power users, who were invited into the limited beta, can test out the new applications at beta.mail.yahoo.com. We will be extending this beta test to additional users over the coming months.

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Here something you might get a kick out of. And if you’ve got a minute or two to waste during the day, why not try this. Open up a new mail message in the new Yahoo! Mail Beta. Next to the subject field there’s the “Subject” button. Click it and see what happens. Click it again, and then again and again and again etc.

My favorite so far:

Got change for a £6 note?

Happy emailing!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Beta Team

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As Yahoo! Mail approaches its 10-year anniversary, I’m the lucky one who gets to announce that we will begin offering everyone unlimited email storage starting in May 2007. To mark the occasion, I checked in with David Nakayama, our group vice president of engineering, for some perspective on this milestone. In case that name doesn’t ring a bell, he’s the developer of RocketMail, one of the world’s first webmail products, which Yahoo! acquired and relaunched as Yahoo! Mail in 1997.

Dave reminisced: “I remember getting in a room to plan our RocketMail launch over a decade ago and worrying that our original plan of a 2MB quota wasn’t enough, and that we needed to be radical and DOUBLE the storage to 4MB per account! It’s ironic that I routinely send and receive individual mail attachments bigger than that now. Our total capacity for mail accounts back then was 200GB for all of our customers. At Yahoo!, we’re now receiving more inbound mail than that every 10 minutes.”

When Yahoo! Mail launched 10 years ago, users got a whopping 4MB of storage for their entire mailbox. Today, you would fill that up with a single picture from your weekend.

This got me thinking about how the storage capacity of other popular technology products has changed. A quick snapshot:

• 1997: Yahoo! Mail launches with 4MB of storage

• SanDisk introduces 2MB flash card for the Canon PowerShot.
• Compaq announces “high capacity memory upgrades” in four capacities, including 16MB, 32MB, 64MB, and 128MB capacities.
• Caleb introduces the Ultra High Density floppy disk drive that stores up to 144MB on a single disk.
• The first iPod is still a gleam in someone’s eye. It isn’t introduced until 2001 and comes with 5GB of storage.

• 2004/2005: Yahoo! Mail upgrades in 2004 to 100MB of storage, followed by a jump to 1GB in 2005

• Olympus upgrades to 1GB flash memory card.
• HP announces a 160GB storage upgrade for its Media Center PCs.
• Corsair in 2005 announces a USB flash drive with 4GB of storage.
• Apple announces the Fifth Generation iPod with 30GB capacity, and launches the newest 80GB iPod, which holds up to 100 hours of video, in 2006.

• 2007: Yahoo! Mail announces Unlimited Email Storage

• SanDisk launches 8GB flash card for photo storage
• Alienware introduces a desktop computer with 1 terabyte of storage

We’re psyched to be breaking new ground in the digital storage frontier by giving our users the freedom to never worry about deleting old messages again. And like any responsible webmail service, we have anti-abuse limits in place to protect our users. BTW: As much as we’d like to just flip a switch and “unlimit” everyone on the same day, we’ll be rolling this out over a few months to ensure a smooth transition — we know there’s virtually nothing more precious than your inbox.

We hope we’re setting a precedent for the future. Someday, can you imagine a hard drive that you can never fill? Never having to empty your photo card on your camera to get space back? Enough storage to fit the world’s music, and then some, on your iPod? Sounds like a future without limits.

Beats a slice of birthday cake, eh?
John Kremer, VP of Yahoo! Mail

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Do you send a lot of attachments with your email? Then here’s a quick tip that I know you’ll like. When you need to add an attachment (photos, documents, etc.) to an email message while using Yahoo! Mail Beta, do you normally add the attachment as the last step? For example, you write the whole message and then you add the attachment.

Well, why don’t you give this a try…
Try doing it the complete opposite way. Upload your attachments first before you write your message. Then, after you’re done attaching, write your email. Try it this way just once, and you’ll never go back to the old way.

Happy emailing!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Beta Team

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