An Enhanced Yahoo! Mail for Everyone!
- Posted August 25th, 2009 at 1:40 am by JohnK
- Categories: Yahoo! Mail UK
Over the past nine months, we’ve made some significant updates to Yahoo! Mail, making it more productive, more social and helping people stay better connected to the those who matter most – but we only provided access to these new capabilities to a small group of you as we ramped up the features. Today, I’m excited to say we are bringing new and dynamic social functionality, third-party apps, enhanced photo sharing plus many more new features to all of your inboxes worldwide…yep, all 300 million of you!
Here’s what we are rolling out starting today:
A Streamlined & Faster Design:
First, we’ve swept away some of the ‘clutter’ to give you more space for what matters most to you.
You’ll experience that this new version is really the fastest Yahoo! Mail yet.
You’ve been asking for this for a while so we made the font size bigger. It’s now more easy to read and clearer.
A Better Way to Attach and Share Photos (now up to 25Mb per email):
We recognize that sharing photos is a big part of what you do in Mail. So we’re introducing a better way for you to attach photos (and other files of course). With our new attachment feature, you will be able to drag and drop photos into your emails, upload multiple attachments and even upload whole folders at once. You will also be able to view thumbnails and rotate your photo attachments before sending them to your friends and family.
In addition to this, we’ve increased the attachment limit from 10MB to 25MB. Now you can share more of your photos at once. Coupled with unlimited storage, this means you never have to worry about where to keep your photos. You can keep them in your Yahoo! Mail for as long as you like.
A Useful Applications Gallery:
You’ll notice that we’ve moved your Calendar and Notepad apps into a new area called Applications, beneath your folders. The Applications box also includes the third-party apps, like Edit Photos by Picnik, PayPal, My Photos by Xoopit and Big Sender by Zumo Drive, that we started testing back in December. These apps allow you to organize and share photos, be more creative and be more productive. Next month, we’ll be adding more apps including a new app from Evite to let you plan, create, and keep track of parties and events.
You may also notice, we’ve removed the ads from the left hand column of the new Mail. This gives you increased space to view and manage all of your folders and applications.
More Social Features:
Users of both Classic Yahoo! Mail and the New Mail interfaces can take advantage of the new social features on the updated ‘What’s New’ page. And with hundreds of millions of people starting to participate in this social email experience, it can really get interesting. You can now stay up-to-date on what friends and family are doing online, and view the most recent emails from your contacts. Soon you’ll even have the ability to receive birthday reminders.
We’ve been listening to your feedback and know that you love the updates on the ‘What’s new’ page. Of course you have complete control to choose what to share by managing your updates.
Now for the Timeline
As with all of our releases we want to make sure that people around the globe continue to have a reliable Mail experience, so we will gradually roll out features out over time. The first users will start seeing these new features today and we will continue to roll them out to all of our Mail users over the coming months.
For more information and to read about other exciting changes at Yahoo! check out these posts from Yodel Anecdotal and our colleagues on the Search Team and the Messenger Team.
Xoopit + Yahoo! Mail Phenomenal Photo Sharing
You might recall that last December we launched a number of apps in Yahoo! Mail, including one called My Photos from Xoopit. Since that time, My Photos has been by far the most popular app in Yahoo! Mail and we’ve heard from many of you that you don’t know how you lived without it! With that in mind, we recently announced we are acquiring Xoopit, and are excited about integrating Xoopit’s platform technology into Yahoo! Mail for even better photo sharing and photo discovery.
Xoopit will bring to Yahoo! Mail the powerful indexing you need to make sense of the hundreds or thousands of photos contained in your unlimited storage inbox and enhanced photo sharing capabilities to get photos out to your friends, family and contacts.
We’ll provide more info about how photo sharing in Yahoo! Mail will improve in the coming months. In the meantime, if you want to try out Xoopit and the MyPhotos application click here: http://overview.mail.yahoo.com/applications to sign up.
For more information about Xoopit and Yahoo! Mail, be sure to check out the Yodel Anedotal post. Please join me in welcoming Xoopit to Yahoo!
Yahoo! Mail Turns 10!!
A while back we posted about introducing unlimited storage to everyone. We also mentioned that we were fast approaching our 10 year anniversary. That day has come! On October 8, 2007, Yahoo! Mail officially turned 10. The VP of mail, John Kremer, published the message below on the corporate blog. It definitely makes for some good reading and a bit of nostalgia.
Happy emailing!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team
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Happy 10th Birthday, Yahoo! Mail
Today marks a special milestone for Yahoo!. Ten years ago today, Yahoo! Mail was born. It’s hard to imagine that just a decade ago, the idea of free email accessible from anywhere was a novelty.
Think of how far we’ve come since then. Web mail now is one of the most popular ways to stay in touch. It’s brought families closer together, let travelers send regards from the road, and made the concept of change-of-address notices virtually obsolete.
Ten years ago, Yahoo! Mail launched with just 3 megabytes of storage and the only images you were likely to receive were ASCII Art. Today, JPEGs are by far the most popular attachment type in Yahoo! Mail. Ten years ago mobile phones were bulky, expensive luxuries that were basically used for one thing: to make important phone calls. These days, everyone from students to busy parents and grandparents use their cell phones to check email on the go. And ten years ago, many people didn’t “get” Web mail or why they would need an address that wasn’t tethered to their ISP. Now many use it as their primary personal mail address.
Since we’re feeling nostalgic, we’ve put together some email milestones from the last decade:
- October 1997: Yahoo! Mail launches following our acquisition of Four 11, creators of RocketMail.
- December 1998: The movie You’ve Got Mail debuts.
- March 1999: CNN’s Ten Commandments of Email cites that Americans sent 2.1 billion emails daily (vs. 196 billion per day this year).
- December 1999: Yahoo! Mail launches Spamguard to detect spam and banish it to a separate folder.
- January 2000: Web mail survives Y2K.
- November 2001: Pope John Paul II is the first pontiff to send an email apology.
- March 2002: It’s reported internationally that email outpaces snail mail as the preferred method for residential communication.
- December 2003: Congress passes the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 to regulate the sending of commercial email.
- July 2004: Yahoo! acquires Oddpost, bringing AJAX to Yahoo! and inspiring Yahoo! Mail’s most significant upgrade ever.
- June 2005: Broadway’s “Spamalot” wins Tony Award for Best Musical.
- March 2006: IDG study shows that Americans sent 11.8 billion photos via email in 2005, compared with 2.6 billion in 2000. By 2009, this number is projected to 25.7 billion images.
- March 2007: Yahoo! Mail announces free, unlimited e-mail storage for all users.
- August 2007: According to Comscore , the worldwide Web mail market counts approximately 543 million people, with Yahoo! Mail alone representing 255 million.
It’s funny to reflect that when Rocketmail first started, many users chose to list their email addresses in a public directory because they wanted everyone to know how to contact them. Fast-forward to a world where we invest a huge amount of time and diligence protecting our users from spam (now estimated to represent more than 70% of all email) and phishing attacks.
So what about you? We put together a brief survey to find out how your email habits have evolved over the past 10 years. Please share your thoughts with us (or leave them as comments), and we’ll be sure to report back on our findings later this month.
Until then, happy emailing!
John Kremer
Vice President, Yahoo! Mail