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

As you know, we are always listening to your feedback. Many of you that have small computer screens have told us that you would like more space to read your emails. You spoke and we listened.

To give you more real estate to read your emails, we are adding a button just to the left of the advertisement in the All-New Yahoo! Mail. Clicking that button will hide the ad temporarily, while you read your email.

This is a handy tool, especially if you are using a computer with a smaller screen resolution like a small laptop or netbook. While it doesn’t permanently remove ads, it will give you more space while you read an email. Ads are what allow us to provide you Yahoo! Mail as a free service and hopefully they’re sometimes useful and interesting too. If you would like permanently disable ads you can sign up for Mail Plus which offers an ad-free experience and other enhanced features.

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Tired of spending countless hours on cleaning up those emails that have piled up over the years? Spring is just around the corner and you know what that means – spring cleaning. Don’t suffer from the stress and get a jump-start on spring cleaning with an organized Yahoo! Mail inbox.

We understand the drill. Make a New Years resolution, and then somehow, months go by, and it gets lost in the chaos of life. But if your resolution was to finally have an organized inbox free of all the clutter, then we can help you!

One of our Yahoo! Mail partners, OtherInbox, created the Automatic Organizer app found right in the handy Applications box on the lower left-hand corner of your inbox. This app allows you to keep your “clean inbox” resolution. Automatic Organizer prioritizes your Yahoo! inbox by automatically filing messages that aren’t from real people into pre-defined folders (Travel, Auto, Social Networking), while leaving you with a clean and clutter-free inbox manageable on your own schedule. Easy enough, right?

So try Automatic Organizer for free and feel good about spring cleaning for a change.

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I want to let you know about some changes coming to some of the menus in the All-New version of Yahoo! Mail. We’re moving a couple of options to new places and renaming others. It’s all to make them easier to find.

The Mail Menu items are being reorganized and grouped together under ‘Actions‘ and we’re adding a new menu item called ‘Show‘. Here is a detailed look:

The ‘Actions’ menu changes are as shown here

• ‘Select’ choices have been added to easily select all emails or just the ones that you can view in your Inbox.
• We’ve added ‘Sort by’ choices to give you better control on how you display the emails in your Inbox.
• ‘Print Message’ is changing to ‘Print Email…’
• ‘Filter Messages Like This…’ changes to ‘Filter Emails Like This…’
• ‘Full Header’ will now be ‘View Full Header’

We are also adding a ‘Show‘ menu that will allow you to view emails only from your Contacts or Connections. To view emails from your Connections, you will have to turn on the connection related features in Yahoo! Mail. You can find out how to do that in the next section.

There are also some changes to the ‘Options‘ Menu that is at the top right of your Inbox:

Here is everything you need to know about the new ‘Options‘ menu:

• We’ve added a menu item labeled ‘Show’ – here you can show or hide the preview pane, as well as some of the attribute columns of your email list (attachments, size and flag columns). Don’t forget that using the ‘v’ shortcut key also shows and hides the Preview Pane.
• ‘Mail Options‘ is changing to ‘More Options…‘ – this is where you can enable/disable the Connection related features, set up filters, turn on your Vacation response and more.
• ‘Add Application‘ is changing to ‘Add Application…‘ – this lets you add Apps like ‘Attach Large Files’, ‘Edit Photos’ and many others.
• ‘Mail Plus’ changes to ‘Mail Plus…’ and allows you to enjoy the benefits of Yahoo! Mail Plus
• ‘Switch to Yahoo! Mail Classic’ is now just ‘Mail Classic…’ and lets you switch back to the Classic version of Yahoo! Mail

While that might seem like a lot, it’s actually organizing items so that they are much easier to find. And don’t forget about all the great keyboard shortcuts you can use in the All-New Yahoo! Mail. Some of these menu items can be done with one keystroke. Give it a try… Go to your Inbox and hit the ‘v’ key. Voila, you get the preview pane!

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I have some really exciting changes to share about the all-new Yahoo! Calendar that are based on the feedback you’ve been sharing with us. Your top request on our Yahoo! Calendar suggestion board was to make the Calendar open as a tab in the All-New version of Yahoo! Mail. Well, your wish is our command, and over the coming weeks we will begin to roll this change out to everyone.

You can see what it looks like below, but first I want to show some changes that are coming very soon. In fact, you may have already noticed the change in your calendar. The left hand column with the month, search and the calendar list is now an expandable tab just underneath the ‘Today’ button. Now, when you click the calendar icon, the tab expands to show the search and all of your calendars.

One of the main reasons behind this change is to free up some space so the calendar will fit nicely and neatly inside a tab in the All-New Yahoo! Mail. Now when you need to go to your calendar you’ll never need to leave your Inbox. Here’s what it will look like when it’s open in Yahoo! Mail:

Of course that’s not the only reason to use love the new Yahoo! Calendar. Here are some other reasons to love it:

• Calendar sharing
• Syncing your calendar with your iPhone or iPod touch over the air
• Multiple calendars (or layers) that you can hide or display
• A new search tool that lets you search your Calendar and Notepad
• A handy ‘right click’ menu to quickly add events and more

So when’s all this happening? The change with the expandable tab is rolling out now and you should be seeing it in the next few days. Adding the Calendar to a tab in the All-New mail will be coming soon after. You have to be using the All New Calender to get all these great features, so if you have not already switched to the new Yahoo! Calendar, you can do that here: http://switch.calendar.yahoo.com

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It seems like only yesterday we launched the smarter and more social features in Yahoo! Mail. With the new welcome page – ‘What’s New’ – you can now easily find the important mail from those who matter most. In addition, you can now get updates from people you’re close to. And from the Inbox and folders, you can filter your mail to see just the mail from your contacts or connections.

I know that for some of you the new smarter and more social features haven’t been turned on yet. So I wanted to let you know that, shortly, these great new features will be added to everyone’s ‘What’s New’ page. So let me take this opportunity to guide you through the upcoming changes.

We are adding two new sections (they are highlighted in red) that will be above the Today section:

• Recent Unread Emails from Contacts (or Connections): This section shows you the most recent emails that you’ve received from the people in your contacts list. You can also change this to show the new emails from the people that you are connected to by clicking the down arrow. If you click on one of the emails listed you will open that email.
• Updates: This section shows you what your connections are doing on the places that they regularly visit. You can get updates from sites like Twitter, Blogger, Yelp, YouTube and many more. You can also share what you are doing by managing your updates. If you would rather see news at the top just click that down arrow to the right and the Updates section will move below the Today section.

From reading your feedback, I know that those who have these features really like them. However, if you would rather turn off these features, you can. Just click the ‘Options’ link at the top right of your Inbox and then ‘Mail Options’. Un-tick the checkbox labeled ‘Enable Connection-related features’ and then ‘Save Changes’. The next time you login to Mail you will only see the Today section.

The changes are rolling out over the next few months to both the Classic and All-New versions of Yahoo! Mail, so you may not get the new ‘What’s New’ page for a little while. If you don’t have it and would like to try it out, just create a profile, and you’ll get the new features.

Happy New Year!

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What a year it’s been for Yahoo! Mail. I can tell you that all of us on the Global Yahoo! Mail team have been working hard throughout 2009 to deliver you a more social and more productive Yahoo! Mail that lets you get the important things done quickly and easily. In short, we’re working to give you the best email experience on the Web. I think you’ll agree with me, all that hard work has paid off. We’ve delivered some pretty great things to your Yahoo! Mailbox (pun intended).

As is usual at this time of year, it’s time to take a look back and see what we’ve been able to accomplish in these short 12 months. Here are the highlights (in no particular order):

• To kick off 2009 we gave you a smarter, more social Mailbox. With the new welcome page “What’s New” in Yahoo! Mail you can now easily find the important mail from those who matter most. In addition you can now get updates from your connections. And from the Inbox you can filter your mail to see just the mail from your contacts or connections.
• We launched Yahoo! Messenger in Classic Mail. It seems like it’s been a part of the Classic Mail forever, but the ability to instantly chat with your friends and family in the classic version of Yahoo! Mail has only been around since the beginning of the year.
• We’ve added fantastic new Apps in Yahoo! Mail to let you be more productive right from your Inbox. (Of course we have to thank our Apps partners who also worked very hard to deliver you these great tools.) Apps like Edit Photos from Picnik let you easily share and edit photos right from within your Inbox. The ‘Attach Large Files’ from ZumoDrive lets you share up to 100MB files. Apps like Pingg and Evite allow you easily manage your social calendar.
• One of our goals is to help you do more with your photos in your Yahoo! Mailbox. We want to make photos an integral part of your Mail experience. Our acquisition of Xoopit will go a long way to make that a reality.
• In order to send all those photos (and other attachment types) we recently launched the ability for you to add attachments up to 25MB to a single email. That’s about 12 photos if your camera takes about 2MB photos. And to help you attach those files, we launched an enhanced attachment feature for the all-new version of Yahoo! Mail. It allows you drag and drop your attachments right into your email. Plus you can scale and rotate your photo attachments.
• We’ve also been working hard behind the scenes to improve the speed of Yahoo! Mail. In the US we have achieved more than a 16% improvement in performance over the year. And, Yahoo! Mail is the fastest Webmail in the UK (based on our tests using 3rd party tools). So, not only have we given you more tools to increase your productivity, we’ve made it even faster to get things done.
• Our friends on the Address book team recently launched the updated Yahoo! Contacts. It goes a long way to unify the Contacts experience across the Yahoo! network and fits seamlessly into the all-new Yahoo! Mail. Plus the new clean-up duplicates tool is a great way to clean up your list of contacts.
• Our ongoing efforts to reduce spam and helping you keep safe in Mail have seen our lowest level of spam in recent history. We told you back at the beginning of the year about some of what the anti-spam team has been working on in the background, and we hope you’re all seeing the continued improvement. Plus we are always committed to keeping you safer online through safety tips on this blog.
• Thanks to our colleagues on the Front Page team you can now preview your Inbox right from the Mail tab on the newly redesigned Yahoo! Homepage.
• Finally, we know that many of you are mobile with your mail. So we have to give a shout out and congratulations to the Mobile Team who just went GA with an updated Mobile mail experience. Just point your mobile browser over to m.yahoo.com/mail to have a look. I definitely give it two thumbs up, way up!

Wow! That’s a lot, and those are just the highlights! Rest assured, we are prepared to work even harder next year. We are aiming to give you a better photo sharing experience, more amazing third party Apps and an enhanced Yahoo! Calendar to name just a few.

So, from all of us on the Yahoo! Mail team, I want to wish you and everyone on your Yahoo! Contacts list a very happy holiday season and all the best for the New Year.

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Today’s post comes from reader suggestion (who will have to remain anonymous, because I seem to have misplaced his email, ping, message from Facebook, LinkedIn etc.), who reminded me that, ‘with all of the fantastic new updates we’ve been releasing lately, like the new social features and Apps in Yahoo! Mail, we sometimes overlook the great features that have been around for ages.’ Features which make Yahoo! Mail the best (not just my opinion) email service around. One such feature is the ability to add an extra mail address to your Yahoo! Mail account.

You’ve got questions, I’ve got answers…

What is it?
An extra mail address is a second Yahoo! email address that is linked to your existing Yahoo! Mail account. It’s another email address, just like your primary one, that you can use to send and receive mail from, while using the exact same Inbox you’re used to. You can even make it the default address that you send email from if you want.

Why do I want one?
I can think of a number of things that you could use the extra mail address for. Here’s just a couple:

• Let’s say you’re looking for a new job. If you originally signed up for a mail address like barry_manilow_fan@yahoo.com, you might think twice about putting that at the top of your resume. You can create an extra mail address that is more appropriate for a job search or other business correspondence.
• Maybe you just want to have a second email address. There’s a great deal of convenience in being able to check for new mail without having to login and out of two separate accounts.

Sounds good, how do I get one?
It’s easy to set up and start using. From your Yahoo! Mail account click ‘Options’ then ‘Mail Options’ in the upper-right part of your Mailbox. From the Mail Options screen click ‘Accounts’ then ‘Add or edit an Account’. At the bottom of the new window click the ‘Get Started’ link under ‘Extra Mail Address’.

That sounds easy, but I’m still not sure. What else?

• You can easily send from this extra email address by selecting it from the pull-down menu when you compose a new message.
• You can sign in to your Yahoo! Mail (or anywhere else on Yahoo!) using the extra email address with your existing password.
• You can even make the extra email address the default for sending new mail. Just set it as the default in the ‘Mail Accounts’ section of Mail Options.

I really hope you try out this feature. If you get stuck, or want to find out more information about extra email addresses in Yahoo! Mail, take a look at our help pages.

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It’s a big day for apps in Yahoo! Mail. We first got the low-down on the pingg Invitations app, then the Attach Large Files app, now we have Gabe Huerta from the Evite team to introduce us to the new Evite app that lets you create, send and manage invitations.
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

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Evite is coming together with Yahoo! Mail to make getting friends together even easier! With the Evite application, Yahoo! Mail users can send friends an invitation without having to leave their Yahoo! Inbox.

Yahoo! Mail users will get access to Evite’s exclusive invitation designs, perfect for any and every type of event. Not only is an Evite invitation more festive than just sending an email, users can manage all their friends’ RSVPs in one place without having to juggle dozens of emails.

The Evite application also helps users keep track of all their Evite events with a simple upcoming events tracker right in the application, as well as adding Evite events to their Yahoo! Calendar. Enjoy!

- Gabe Huerta, Evite

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From an Invitation app we go to large file attachments… For this post we have Scott Schwanbeck from the drop.io team. He’s going to tell you all about the Attach Large Files app his company developed for Yahoo! Mail. It let’s you send up to 100MB and rich media files with your Yahoo! emails.
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

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Today, we’re pleased to announce that people using Yahoo! Mail now have the ability to attach up to 100MB of files to each email using drop.io’s new Attach Large Files application. Best of all, it only takes one click and there is no sign-up or registration!

Drop.io is the simplest way to privately share exactly what you want with whom you want online – all in real-time and across all platforms (web, mobile and more).
Our application makes it easier to share groups of photos, documents, movies and more, by combining the power of drop.io as a robust media & file sharing platform with Yahoo! Mail, one of the world’s most popular email services.

People can access the Attach Large Files app from the Applications Box in the lower left-hand corner of their Yahoo! Mail inbox and using the app is simple:

1. Click “Attach Large Files” — this brings you to the drop.io welcome page
2. Next click “Select Files” — add as many files from your computer as you want up to 100MB. You’ll recognize drop.io’s distinct upload interface that displays the queued files, their file size and allows you to cancel any of them either before or during upload.
3. Next click “Upload and Compose Email” – users are brought to a new email, populated with thumbnails and links to view and download the attachments.

When your recipient opens the email, they have the option to click to view and download individual files, or the whole group.

The application allows people to save previously sent groups of attached files that can later be viewed or resent. It also integrates several useful drop.io functions like voicemail and conference calling.

The Attach Large Files app was built entirely on drop.io’s robust and open API. We are excited to see our API continue to be used as a springboard for other platforms to leverage drop.io’s powerful, real-time file sharing, collaboration and conversion engine to help power content sharing in the context of communication platforms.

Please check out our video screencast for more details about how the app works.

We hope you enjoy sharing more files using Yahoo! Mail and the drop.io app.

-Scott Schwanbeck, drop.io

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As you know from our earlier post, today we’re launching some great new apps in Yahoo! Mail. And who better to tell you about them than the folks who created the app. Let me take a moment to introduce you to Lorien Gabel, the co-Founder & CEO of pingg. He’s going to tell you all about the great new pingg Invitations app his company developed that let’s you easily create, send and manage stylish invitations right from Yahoo! Mail.
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

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Please excuse us while we celebrate a little; we’re a company that’s all about parties and entertaining, so it’s one of the things we do best. Today marks an important and exciting opportunity for us here at pingg. Today’s celebration is all about appreciation for our friends at Yahoo! Mail, who are rolling out the pingg Invitations app, allowing people to plan events with pingg right within Yahoo! Mail. Online invitations are incredibly popular, with at least five million events planned online each month, by our estimate. By all accounts an impressive figure, online invitations will only continue to grow as people look for stylish, eco-conscious and economical ways to entertain and communicate.

Since our launch in March of 2008, we’ve been offering a more stylish way to send and manage online invitations. Our gallery features beautiful, exclusive images contributed by renowned artists and style icons such as Martha Stewart, celebrity, fashion & nightlife photographer Patrick McMullan and groundbreaking graffiti artist Erni Vales, as well as up-and-coming illustrators and painters like Jessica Gonacha and Ashley Mills. We’ve always focused on design and aesthetics for modern hosts who are excited by the idea of being able to send stylish invitations online.

To find the pingg Invitations app, simply log into Yahoo! Mail and click the pingg Invitations icon in your new Applications Box on the left-side column. Once you get started, here are some of the specific activities you select from – all around making the invite process that much easier:

• Choose from pingg’s complete gallery of images, including artwork from our unique Designer Series, to create, personalize and send invitations right from your Yahoo! Mail inbox
• Monitor RSVPs, guest comments and status updates for all of your events in once place via the comprehensive dashboard
• Modify your invitation or send e-mail messages to individual guests with one click; set up reminder messages and thank you notes
• Get tips and other great content from friends of pingg like Martha Stewart, giggle.com, Notes On A Party and Sugar Network to help you entertain in style
• Grab contacts from your Yahoo! Mail address book
• Add events to your Yahoo! Calendar from within the app
• Add a map from Yahoo! Maps

Here is a look at how the pingg Invitations app will work for folks on Yahoo! Mail. We think it’s quite a nice fit.

Over the past year and a half as we’ve established our place within the entertaining industry, we’ve found countless reasons to celebrate and working with Yahoo! Mail is another great excuse to get the champagne flowing again. We are truly flattered to be working with a company who clearly sees the merit in collaborating with smaller, innovative start-ups like ourselves to provide their audience with the best tools for the things they love to do online.

So whether it’s for a milestone birthday, a Tuesday night dinner party, a client-appreciation event or an exotic destination wedding, we invite you to celebrate with pingg, too. That’s certainly what we’ll be doing; that and making sure your invitations are always well sent.

-Lorien Gabel, Co-Founder & CEO, pingg

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