What’s your favorite holiday theme?
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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Eyeing an Amazon Kindle Fire?
Last week Jeff Bezos held a press event in NYC unveiling Amazon’s impressive new line-up of tablets. Amazon introduced a refreshed line of black and white Kindles, but the biggest draw of the day by far was the long-awaited Amazon Kindle Fire – a full color Android tablet. The seven inch, 14.6 ounce tablet is powered by dual-core processors and has a rumored battery life of 7 hours. The best part? The Fire is going to cost $199. Officially not available until November 15, Amazon is currently taking orders for them.
Here at Yahoo!, we’re always excited when we see new devices that promise to offer a highly personalized consumer experience. And, based on some of our Yahoo! Search data – we think everyone else is pretty interested in the Fire too! Yahoo! searches for “Kindle Fire” were up 2,993% yesterday.
Once it’s shipping, users of the Amazon Fire tablet will be able to easily set up Yahoo! Mail. With Yahoo! Mail for Kindle Fire, you get the works: include photos as attachments, search for messages, create folders that keep you organized—stay on top of all your communications.
I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking I just might need to order myself a Kindle Fire…!
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Doing more with tabs in Yahoo! Mail
Opening chat conversations in a tab has been a top-requested feature for the new Yahoo! Mail. Tabs give the user more screen real estate for the actual conversation and also a way to organize and track open messages while facilitating multi-tasking (ever had to search for an email to refer to while composing another one?). It only seems natural to extend the tab metaphor to chat conversations too. Today, we are happy to announce that we are rolling out this feature to all our users. In fact, for users who will be opting-into the new Yahoo! Mail starting today, chat conversations will open in a tab by default. For those of you who are currently using the newest version of Yahoo! Mail and want to switch to chat conversations in a tab, read on for a quick walkthrough.
Two simple steps to enable chat conversations in a tab:
Step 1: Click on the options link at the top left of the Yahoo! Mail page and then click on “Messenger Options”.
Step 2: You will see the Messenger Options window pop-up as shown below. Now, click on the dropdown under “Conversation Window Management” and select “Tab” and click on OK. 
Voilà! All future chat conversations will open in a tab.
And, if you get a new IM while you are busy doing other stuff, you’ll see a nice little animation in the tab alerting you.
Tab management made easy
With chat now in it’s own tab, you are probably worried about how to effectively manage all tabs in Yahoo! Mail. No worries; we’ve now made tab management super easy with the new tab menu.
As you keep opening tabs in the new Yahoo! Mail, you will see a tab menu button show up on the far right of the tabs (the little down arrow in the screenshot below). Clicking on it will open a menu that will show you all the tabs you have open. Here’s a quick tour of some nifty things you can do from the menu:
- Got your eye on a tab that you had forgotten about? Just, click on it to switch to that tab and finish what you started.
- Old tabs cluttering your UI? You can now hover over the title in the menu to display the close button (the “x” icon in the menu below) and click on it to close the tab.
- Want to start fresh and get rid of the clutter? The “Close All Message Tabs” item in the menu was designed to just do that. Click on it to get rid of all messages you were reading. Note that any unread IMs you have in tabs and any emails that you were writing will NOT be closed.
- Confused about which tab is the active tab (tab in view)? Look for the little dot on the left of the tab name for the indication.
Hope you enjoy these features!
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Building Yahoo! Mail for the Millions
We’ve reached two major milestones with over 500,000 fans on our Facebook page, which was the most explosive page on Facebook in June, and more than 100 million monthly active users in the newest version of Yahoo! Mail! Thanks to each and every one of you who made it happen! You are the reason that Yahoo! Mail is the #1 email provider in the US. As you can imagine, building features for such a popular product can be challenging. If you are wondering how we manage to do it, here’s an inside view of how we use your feedback to build compelling features.
At Yahoo! Mail, we take pride in actively listening to and incorporating your feedback into the product. The “feedback loop” begins when you write to us about the things you love, the things that you would like us to change, or ideas you would like us to implement. You can do this by clicking on the “Send Feedback” link in the help drop down and sending us a line or two about the problem/issue/feature you want us to look into.
On any given day, we get upwards of 5,000 pieces of feedback. Manually going through each one is a daunting task for even the most industrious product manager. So, we redirect this feedback into a tool that helps us automatically recognize and categorize the important trends in your feedback. We monitor the tool for topics that bubble up and dig deeper into each of the big ones, reading your input and designing product features that are aimed at solving those issues for you. The engineering team then builds the requirements into actual features that are delivered to you on a regular cadence.
Bringing back stationery, implementing the “switch view” feature, and improving page load time are just a few examples of how we have improved the product based on your feedback.
One change that we made most recently was putting the message toolbar at the bottom of messages. We heard a lot of feedback about how the toolbars at the bottom of the message list and at the bottom of long messages were missing and hindering productivity. Once we noticed a trend in our tool, we redesigned the feature and rolled it out to users in our next release. From a design perspective, we made sure that the toolbar shows up only on long messages that require scrolling so users can get maximum screen real estate for the actual message. We also made the toolbar appear consistently in all views (message list view, message view, folder view and so on), and allowed for the menu to pop up (versus down) when there is no space at the bottom of the page.
While creating intuitive products is fun, it’s always more fulfilling to see that our users notice these changes and appreciate it. And, here is what one of our users had to say when we rolled out the feature:
On that note, keep the feedback coming! We love delivering features that improve the Yahoo! Mail experience for our hundreds of millions of users worldwide.
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