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Goaaaal! Share Your Passion For Your Team From Yahoo! Mail

Saturday, June 5th, 2010

The start of the world’s biggest sporting event – the FIFA World Cup — is just around the corner and the world is buzzing, rivalries are renewing, and even the smack talk has begun. Starting today on Yahoo! Mail, you can easily share your passion for your team. Go on, let your Yahoo! and Facebook friends know who you are rooting for!

Here’s how it works. Starting today, you will see a flag icon in the status area – the flag is based on the regional version and language of Yahoo! Mail that you use.

worldcup1

By clicking on the flag, Yahoo! Mail will auto-fill your status message with a short phrase of support for that country.

worldcup2

Like any status message, you can customize it to your liking – most importantly, you can change the country you are rooting for by clicking on the drop-down arrow next to the flag. Once you do so, you can see the full list of countries that are participating. Click on the country you support and a suggested status message will populate just like before.

worldcup3

Once you click Share, your message will be broadcast to people who view your Updates on Yahoo!. What’s even better is that you can also share your passion to your Facebook friends by clicking “Add Facebook” and linking your account (and there are many, many, many other benefits of linking your accounts). Sharing on Yahoo! and Facebook definitely gets the conversation going, even if everyone doesn’t always agree…

worldcup4

Share your passion for your team and don’t forget to check out the sweet smorgasbord of World Cup activities across Yahoo!, sure to satisfy even the most ardent of fans.

Who are you rooting for in South Africa?

Picture 10

Rick Pal
Sr. Product Manager
Yahoo! Mail

Posted in All-New Mail, Classic Mail, General | No Comments »

The Future…Powered by Yahoo! Mail

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

At Yahoo! Mail, we’re big supporters of open source software. To help fuel the next batch of innovative Internet inventions, we’ve just expanded and refreshed the programming tools we offer developers to build enhancements for your mailbox.

With the new interface (described in all its technical glory over on our Developer Network), trusted companies can now build features that help you do more with the messages in your Yahoo! Mail account, and do so in a way that keeps you in control.

Here’s how it works:
Say a company builds a tool that sends users a text message alert whenever their boss e-mails them. With the new tools we’re announcing, Yahoo! Mail users who are interested in this service can securely grant access to that company without sharing their password (which would be a definite no-no); because they don’t have to share their password, they can also easily revoke access if they change their mind. We’ve even added the ability to limit whether the company can view whole messages or just selected bits like the Subject line.

With these enhancements, it’s easier than ever for companies to build new features, and we’re all excited to see what new inventions they’ll build with this service. Developers, start your engines!

– MarkR

Posted in All-New Mail, Classic Mail, General | 2 Comments »

What’s New? – Changes to Your Welcome Page

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

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:

whats_new
  • 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!

Posted in All-New Mail, Classic Mail, New Stuff | 4 Comments »

Yahoo! Mail – The Year in Review

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

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.

Posted in All-New Mail, Classic Mail, Featured, General | 2 Comments »

Add an Extra Address to your Yahoo! Mail

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

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.

Posted in All-New Mail, Classic Mail, Featured, Tips & Tutorials | 3 Comments »

An Enhanced Yahoo! Mail for Everyone!

Monday, August 24th, 2009

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 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!

Welcome Page

Here’s what we are rolling out starting today:

A Streamlined Design:
First, we’ve swept away some of the ‘clutter’ to give you more space for what matters most to you. 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.
Evite App
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.

A Better Way to Attach and Share Photos:
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.
Enhanced Attachments
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.

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.

John Kremer

Posted in All-New Mail, Classic Mail, Featured, New Stuff | 13 Comments »

Keep in touch with those who matter most… all within your Yahoo! Mail inbox

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

On top of the new contacts filter we introduced last week, we’ve been hard at work building new social and interactive features within Yahoo! Mail. As you might recall, we first started introducing these features back in December, and based on your feedback have continued to make enhancements throughout the year. Now we’re excited to share the latest social features coming to your Inbox, all focused on giving you a better email experience and making it even easier to keep in touch with those who matter most. Some highlights:

  • Updates, Updates, Updates! You told us that you really like Yahoo! Updates, so we’ve added even more of your favorite sites. For example, when you update your Twitter (commonly known as ‘Tweets’) or write an answer on Yahoo! Answers, people you choose to share this with get updated. You also stay in the loop when others do the same. Of course, you can control which updates you share with folks by going to your Yahoo! Profile and selecting ‘manage my updates‘

    My personal favorite: now when you send an email to someone, you can see their latest Updates right on your Message Sent confirmation page.

  • What’s The Status? The new Yahoo! status message located right at the top of the What’s New’ page of your Yahoo! Mail is an easy way to keep friends and family in the know with what you are doing, feeling, or thinking about. Yep, this is the same status message that appears on your Yahoo! Profile. We have just made it readily available for updating right in your Inbox. And if you are running out of things to say (as if that is ever possible) you can select from a list of handy, sometimes zany suggestions (what we call ‘status-o-matique’). Just click on the inconspicuous ‘exclamation mark’ located in the status message box. :-)

    And stay tuned, you will start to see your friends’ status messages show up in additional places across Yahoo! as we incorporate Yahoo! Updates into more Yahoo! sites.

  • News in Mail: Better than ever! We heard you loud and clear. You missed the tabbed format of news, so we’ve brought it back. To make it more interesting, we added a new category – Yahoo! Buzz – so you can see what current events people find most remarkable and have recently ‘buzzed’ up. For added good measure, some of you told us that you’d prefer to see the News above the Updates section. Now you can! At the bottom of your Updates section, simply click on the ‘More Actions’ menu and choose ‘Move Updates below Today section’. The News will then always appear above Updates when you log in.


These features are available for both Classic and new Yahoo! Mail users in the US and Australia starting today. If you already have created a Yahoo! Profile, you will automatically see the new features the next time you login to Yahoo! Mail. If you haven’t, simply click on profiles.yahoo.com, quickly create a profile, and presto, you will see these features in your inbox. And for those in other countries, stay tuned, as we’ll roll out these features to many of you shortly.

Of course, these features are best seen in action, and that’s why we reached out to a Yahoo! Mail user named Grady who will give you the scoop on all the new stuff. Take it away, Grady…

Posted in All-New Mail, Classic Mail, Featured, New Stuff | 10 Comments »

Important Emails Always Win in Yahoo! Mail

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

These days many of you are engaged in an epic battle… separating the important emails from everything else. You get a lot of emails, some good (from friends, family, even favorite interests that you’ve added to your Address Book), and a lot of not-so-important emails (special offers, newsletters, emails you rarely read). All this has made your Inbox more work than fun. Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply snap your fingers and poof! – your Inbox magically transformed to only show the important emails?

Well, we’re not magicians on the Mail team but we are rolling out a new feature that lets you filter your Inbox (or any folder) to just show the emails from senders you’ve added to your Address Book – with just the simple click of a button! It is a crazy easy way to let the “good guys” (important emails) win! Let me show you how it works.

Step 1: Go to your Inbox or any folder. Above the list of emails, you’ll see links to View from All, Contacts, or Connections.

Click on Contacts:

Like magic, your Inbox (or any folder) transforms to only show emails from Contacts you’ve currently added to your Address Book! No work required (who says all things good in life have to be difficult)? Now you can easily see just the emails from your friends, family, and favorite interests (I love U2 and added them to my Address Book) right up front, minus the noise and clutter. Of course, you can always create filters if you want even more control.

Please check it out and let us what you think! Thank you very much for continuing to use Yahoo! Mail.

PS: This feature will roll out in the next few weeks to both Classic and the new Yahoo! Mail users who have the Smarter Inbox features enabled. To get these new features, first create a Profile at profiles.yahoo.com and then log back into Yahoo! Mail. Only users in the US and Australia can get it now, but users from many more countries will be eligible soon.

Posted in All-New Mail, Anti-Spam, Classic Mail, Featured, New Stuff | 8 Comments »

Search in Yahoo! Mail – A Powerful Tool

Friday, May 29th, 2009

With Yahoo! Mail offering unlimited storage, I find myself using the delete button less and less these days. And with the ability to move messages to folders with one keystroke (in the all-new version of Mail), it’s more important than ever to be able to easily and quickly find messages.

Simple Searching
With just a simple keyword search, like “orders”, we give you the option to filter search results by a whole host of options. Whether you want to narrow your results by Date, Folder, Sender etc. they are all listed for you in a very nice, clickable, list (right-hand side in the new Mail, left-hand side of Classic Mail). But that just scratches the surface of what you can do.

Shortcuts
For the more advanced searchers of the world (plus those who prefer typing to clicking), you can filter your searches from directly within the search box. Think of the filters as little search shortcuts for your Mailbox.

Let’s take a look at an example:
Say you want to find all of your emails in your Mailbox with the subject pictures?
- In the search box, type: subject:pictures

But you have a ton of emails with pictures. You want to find that fantastic picture from Dave and you remember he called it cool.
- In the search box, type: subject:”cool picture” from:dave

On the other hand, if lot’s of people send you cool pics, but you’ve never really liked the ones that Dave sends you, you can hide Dave’s messages from the search results using the ‘-’ (dash) to omit his results
- In the search box, type: subject:”cool pictures” –from:dave

Attachments
Did you know that you can search for different types of attachments using search in Yahoo! Mail? And even better, you can search INSIDE attachments. Yes, that’s right, I said inside. I know what you’re saying – “That’s not possible from a web mail provider.” Well it is possible, and you can do search inside Word documents, Excel and PDFs with Yahoo! Mail. I’m not aware of any other free Web mail provider that does that!

Let’s use one of those shortcuts.
- In the search box, type: from:dave attachment:”restaurant list”

Why do I care about this? Well, since Dave sends so many emails with attachments to me, being able to search inside attachments I can find the document he sent me with his restaurant recommendations. And we even give a little preview and highlight the part of the document with the search terms.

More with Attachments
There are plenty of other things you can do with the attachment shortcuts. You are able to search for an attachment name, type and number of attachments. Want to see a list of boarding pass PDFs you have received from American after checking in?
- In the search box, type: from:american attachmenttype:pdf

Further reading
If any of this is slightly confusing or you want to learn more, we’ve created some tutorials. Tutorial topics include: Quick Searches, Searching for Messages, Narrowing Search Results. And there is a complete list of these Yahoo Mail search shortcuts in our help pages.

Now if only I could find my car keys…

Posted in All-New Mail, Classic Mail, Tips & Tutorials | 2 Comments »

Not up for a chat?

Friday, March 6th, 2009

Back in January, Brandon Savage told you about the great new feature that integrates real-time Chat & Mobile Text from directly within Yahoo! Mail Classic. Back in January it was a sneak peak, but now more and more of you are now able to use this great feature.

What if I don’t feel like Chatting?
I’ve been reading and listening to all of your comments, and a common question is, “How can I turn chat off?” The answer of course is, “Easily”. Here’s how…

All you have to do is click the drop-down box and select “Sign out of Chat”. Once you do this you will be signed out of Yahoo! Chat and Mobile Text. That’s it – you’re done. And, the next time you sign into mail, we’ll remember your status and you won’t be logged back into Chat until you set your status back to “Available”.

What else can I do?
Don’t forget to check out the ‘Settings’ menu too.

From the settings menu, you can customize some of the Chat & Mobile Text features to suit your preferences. You can change whether a sound should be played when you get a new Chat. And you can even move it down so that it sits underneath your folders, if you’d like your folders to appear above the chat module.

I encourage everyone to try out this terrific new feature of Yahoo! Mail Classic. It’s already a very popular feature in the All-new Yahoo! Mail. I’m sure that once you start using it, you’ll ask yourself how you lived without it before.

Posted in Classic Mail, General, Tips & Tutorials | 1 Comment »

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