A great way to track and organize things I buy online
I love to shop online. It’s so much easier to click a few buttons vs dragging my kids into a store, so I do it a lot. All this online shopping generates a lot of emails with important information about these purchases. The problem is that it’s not always easy for me to go back and find a specific purchase, or track an item I’m waiting for.
Now Yahoo! Mail users can tame the explosion of ecommerce receipts in their email with one of the newest apps to join the family: All My Purchases by Project Slice. All My Purchases automatically pulls information from the electronic receipts in your inbox, from shipping notifications and tracking numbers to return policies and customer service information, and organizes it in one place for quick, easy reference. I love it because it can distinguish an email containing a receipt from all the other emails I get from merchants, making it really quick & easy to get the info I need in case I want to return something, or just to keep track of everything I bought. And particularly interesting, to me at least, is that it tallies up al of your purchases so that you can see how many items and how much you’ve spent online. Yikes!
Here’s how it works: Click the “All My Purchases” application in the Applications section of Yahoo! Mail (in the left hand column of your inbox). All My Purchases scans your inbox for email receipts and consolidates your shopping history from online merchants, from Amazon and eBay to LivingSocial and Groupon.
If you have orders en route, click the “Track It” button to see when your package was shipped and its estimated arrival date, complete with a map to track your order’s journey to your front door. This is probably my favorite aspect of the app, because I don’t have to log into multiple websites to find out where all my packages from different retailers are; I can see all this right from my inbox.
And if you’re looking for something you bought a while back, or you’re not happy with a certain order, simply check your Purchase History to pull up your receipt as well as the merchant’s return policy and customer service information. All My Purchases puts that information right at your fingertips so you don’t have to waste time digging through old emails.
With All My Purchases, the new Yahoo! Mail has become the email you’ll want to use to do all your online shopping.
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Unsubscribing is easier than ever with Unsubscriber
Over the years, I’ve signed up for many emails to keep up to date on everything from tech trends, to travel tips, to pet grooming and more. Today, I only look at a fraction of these emails that continue to come into my inbox. Even though I no longer have a pet, for instance, I just haven’t taken the time to unsubscribe.
Unsubscribing from unwanted email is now as easy as moving a message to a folder, with the new Unsubscriber app from OtherInbox. To use Unsubscriber, simply click on the Unsubscriber app in the lower left hand side of your Yahoo Mail. Then click to “Create my Unsubscribe Folder” and an unsubscribe folder will automatically appear in your folder list. From there, just drag unwanted emails into that folder and OtherInbox will work to unsubscribe you from those email lists. Even if you can’t be safely unsubscribed, the emails will continue to automatically be moved into the unsubscribe folder so you never have to see those emails again. Try it today!
New Reply Bar: Instantly Respond to Facebook Notifications and Email Messages
Yahoo! Mail now provides a new way to quickly reply to messages from your friends and social network. The reply bar appears at the bottom of your email messages and lets you easily reply to the sender or a group.
I’ve been using the reply bar for a few months now, prior to us turning it on for you. One thing I’ve noticed with my own usage is that it has really increased my engagement with my social network and speeded up my response time to personal messages.
I get a lot of Facebook and Yahoo Groups email notifications about activity happening in my social network. I had been in the habit of reading my Facebook notifications and then making a mental note to respond later. I did that because I didn’t want to take the time switch outside of my email, go to Facebook, wait for a page to launch, and then, after context switching over to Facebook to reply, having to then switch back to Yahoo mail. It was too distracting for me so my interactions suffered.
Now, I simply click into the reply bar at the bottom of my message, type my message, click send and I’m done. Now on to my next message. It’s simple and fast.
Stationery Is Back!
With the latest release of Yahoo! Mail Beta, one new feature that is now included is the ability to add stationery (background colors and image templates) to your messages. Stationery is a feature that existed in the previous version of Yahoo! Mail. Since the release of Yahoo! Mail Beta, we have gotten feedback from customers asking us to bring this feature back. We listened and are happy to report that with the help of a 3rd party developer and our Yahoo! Mail Development Platform, we were able to do just that.
To use Stationery, go to the Applications area of Yahoo! Mail and click on the application named “Stationery.”
Once you click on Stationery you can then choose the background you wish to use in your message. Select from the drop-down menu and click on the background image of choice.
After clicking the background image, a new message window is launched. From there, simply type your message and send it along with your favorite background applied.
Have fun giving your messages more flair with Yahoo! Mail Beta.
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.
My Own Handwriting Via My Cool Fonts
In the age of extreme personalization, the fonts used in email messages remain pretty standard. Helvetica, Times New Roman, Ariel, Verdana, and maybe when you’re feeling wild and crazy, a little Bookman Old Style.
Now Yahoo! Mail users can easily add some unique FONTastic spice to your email messages with the newest app to join Yahoo! Mail: My Cool Fonts by Fontself. Last year we introduced the feature to many countries where Yahoo! Mail is available. Now we’re extending this to our users in the U.S., and we’re adding greater functionality for everyone.
With My Cool Fonts you can express yourself with cool, fun fonts like Valentine, Magic, and even Middle Earth. And if that weren’t enough, the icing on the cake is that I can create a font with my own handwriting that is available for me to use via Yahoo! Mail.
To use My Cool Fonts, simply click on My Cool Fonts application on the lower left hand side of Yahoo! Mail to launch the application. Select your font and type your message in the window shown.
Once your message is typed, click to “Create email” and a compose window will be opened with your message, ready to be sent to anyone you choose.
To create and use your own font, just click on the “Create a New Font” button within the My Cool Fonts app. You’ll be taken to the My Cool Fonts website where you’ll be instructed on how to create your font for use within Yahoo! Mail. In this example, you’re seeing a message using a font I created with my own handwriting called “My 1st Font.”
With My Cool Fonts and Yahoo! Mail, you can express yourself in ways never before possible. Check it out today.
Attach Up to 100MB with YouSendIt
I love my pocket-sized Flip Video and my tiny digital camera. Recently, I brought the cameras to my kids’ first time on ice skates and captured their elegant moves and occasional gaffes in HD brilliance. But when I wanted to share the clip with my family and friends, I realized that sending them a 78MB video memory would be a challenge. Yahoo! Mail allows me to attach up to 25MB in each email, and usually that’s plenty. This task, however, required more.
Thanks to the new “Attach Large Files” application on Yahoo! Mail, anyone can easily upload and send files of up to 100MB from their Yahoo! Mail accounts. The application, developed by YouSendIt, the global leader in secure digital content delivery, leverages the Yahoo! Mail Application Platform to enable this capability.
You can access the YouSendIt app by clicking on the “Attach Large Files” paper airplane icon in the Applications area of Yahoo! Mail.
From there, click on the “select files” button to attach files into your message. YouSendIt uploads those files and then opens an email compose window that includes a link to the file for download.
Send the email to whomever you choose (here it comes, Mom). The recipient can click on the “download” button within your message to retrieve your files. All files sent through YouSendIt are encrypted and then scanned by the system for viruses, so they will arrive safely. YouSendIt will first go live to users in the U.S., and in the coming weeks our international users will get access.
So go ahead— SuperSize your messages.
Too Many Mailing Lists? Unsubscribe with Ease
On Cyber Monday, my inbox took me on a walk down memory lane. PETCO sent me a great deal on cat food even though my cat Buck died 4 years ago. Rick Steves sent me some European Backroads holiday travel tips even though I’d be crazy to take my 5-year-old twins on a trek through France.
Meanwhile, all of my important emails were buried under a pile of old mailing lists that I never got around to unsubscribing. I wanted to get off those lists, but I didn’t have the time to open each email, find the links, and make sure that I wasn’t accidentally handing my email address to spammers.
With Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Mail Application developer OtherInbox (OIB), there is now an easy way to tackle this problem. Using OIB’s Automatic Organizer application (which you can find in the lower left hand corner of your Yahoo! Mail), you can now easily and safely unsubscribe from those unwanted (although once desirable) mailing lists. Here’s how:
1) Click on Automatic Organizer application and follow the sign up prompts
Automatic Organizer helps clear your inbox by putting the commercial email and social networking messages you actually DO want into appropriately labeled folders like OIB shopping, finance, and news. Now those messages are organized in category-specific folders, rather than scattered throughout your inbox.
2) Create another folder called “OIB Unsubscribe”
When you drag any emails (like from PETCO) into that folder, you will be unsubscribed from that list.
That’s it! Automatic Organizer takes it from there. Behind the scenes, OIB will safely unsubscribe you from that list by working with global email compliance company Lashback. Until you get off the list, all emails from PETCO will go directly into that folder.
With this application and others that are available in Yahoo! Mail, we’re working with the developer community to make your Yahoo! Mail experience the best it can be. Give it a try, and tell us about your experience.
