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

This week we have a guest blogger. So let me take a moment to introduce you to Rick Pal. Rick is the Senior Product Manager for our smarter, more social Yahoo! Mail. He’s got some exciting info to share about some changes to your smarter Inbox

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Hello everyone! As you may know, the Yahoo! Mail team has been pretty busy lately – adding Apps, strengthening our anti-spam, integrating IM into Classic Mail – and of course we’ve also been listening intently to you! Of course, not all of you have the new social features, but based on feedback from those that do, I’d like to talk about some upcoming changes we’re making.

You: Updates rock! Keep em coming.
Us: You might notice that your “Welcome” page in Yahoo! Mail has a new look and feel. For those using the social features in Yahoo! Mail, we’ve brought updates to the forefront and we now integrate non-Yahoo! sites directly in Updates — places you regularly visit such as YouTube, Blogger, Yelp, Picasa, and more. And there are many more Yahoo! sites now live, including Yahoo! Sport and Flickr. By adding more places to sites from which you can see Updates, we hope to make it easier for you to stay in the loop with the people that matter.

You: News over Connections Suggestions, please
Us: We’ve moved the entire connections module (invites, suggestions) to the right so you can continue to see the news and weather higher on the page.

You: I want to manage my connections inside of Mail
Us: We’re rolling out a brand new Address Book (what we’re now calling Yahoo! Contacts) that integrates contacts and connections (we’ll do a separate blog post on these features). The new Yahoo! Contacts will only be available to social users for now but it will be made available to all Mail users in the coming months. Stay tuned!

You: Holy Batman! I don’t want this thing!
Us: It is your Mail! Some of you just prefer the old welcome page and don’t want connections features. Here’s how to go back.

You: Holy Batman! I really want this thing!
Us: We are adding several new features that make it even easier to communicate and share before rolling it out to more users. Don’t have it yet? To get to the front of the line when we add more users, please create a profile.

Thanks again for all the helpful feedback.  And thank you for continuing to use Yahoo! Mail!

Rick Pal
Sr. Product Manager

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Seems like only yesterday Yahoo! Mail turned 10 years old. But as everyone knows online communication has been around for a little bit longer. The Yahoo! Mail team put together a video to celebrate 25 years of online communication.

For those of you, like me, who have been around long enough to remember all 25 years of it, this video will bring back some pretty good memories. For me it’s hanging out in my friend’s basement waiting the tape drive to load up the Olympic Decathlon game on his TRS-80 and playing Wizardry on my dad’s Apple IIe with that beautiful green screen (it’s still up there in his attic).

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Hello All – This week I want to take a moment to introduce you to Brandon Savage. Brandon is our Senior Product Manager for the Classic version of Yahoo! Mail. He’s got an exciting new feature to share with you. So take it away Brandon…

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I don’t know about you, but when I hear the word “classic,” I think of a cherry red ’57 Corvette zipping down an open freeway… and about Yahoo! Mail Classic, of course.

It was with that beautiful ’57 Corvette racing through our minds that we designed the newest feature to hit Yahoo! Mail Classic: integrated chat and mobile texting, courtesy of our friends at Yahoo! Messenger. Zippy, real-time communication, without having to leave your Yahoo! Mail Classic inbox. With the addition of chat and mobile text, you can now choose the best way to communicate with friends who are online or on the go. It’s already a popular feature in the new Yahoo! Mail, so popular, in fact, that it seemed only right to give our dedicated Classic Mail users a smarter, more social Webmail experience, too.

Imagine this: the next time you sit down to compose an email to your sister reminding her that Mom’s birthday is TODAY, and that Mom is expecting a phone call, like, NOW, you notice that she is online, too. Instead of email, why not try chatting in real-time?

Or, for all you parents out there, ever tried to get in touch with your child while they were hanging out with their friends? Never fear, Yahoo! Mail is here – just send a mobile text right to their cell phone!

How does it work, you ask? Well, when you sign into your Yahoo! Mail Classic account, your Chat & Mobile Text contact list will appear on the left of your screen (you can place it above or below your personal folders, whichever you prefer). If your status says “Offline,” just click on it and select “Available” to sign in (fair warning to Yahoo! Messenger users: signing in here will log you out elsewhere). Once you do, you’ll see a list of all of your Contacts who are online and available to chat. We also show you the names of any Contacts with mobile phone numbers, for mobile texting, of course. Just click on a name to start a conversation!

Easy, right? But don’t take my word for it, go ahead and take this exciting new feature for a spin by sending a chat or mobile text message of your own. Chat and mobile text is rolling out to all Yahoo! Mail Classic users over the next couple of months, so cool your engines and please be patient if you don’t see it right away. We’ll get to you soon, I promise. Improving a classic takes time!

Brandon Savage,
Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Mail Classic

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If I could earn a nickel for how many times I’ve heard people say “I get WAY too much email!” I could retire soon. :) I’ve seen studies that show that users get 30 emails a day on average. That’s a lot of email to go through each day!

Let’s face it – messages from some people are more important than those from others. We would all rather read an email from our best friend than view a “special offer” from a Web site we bought something on years ago. New features coming to both our Classic and New versions of Yahoo ! Mail will make it easier to give important people VIP treatment in your inbox.

Of course, not everyone can be a VIP, so you have to invite people to become a connection (what we call VIPs). To do this, you send them an invitation to connect (they don’t even have to be using Yahoo ! Mail) and once they accept, new features are unlocked that only connections get. For starters, we make it super simple to see messages from connections right when you sign in on the Welcome Page and right in your inbox.

We also help you see what they are up to on other Web sites, like Yahoo ! TV, Travel and Music. For example, when they review the latest episode of “House,” review their favorite beach in Kauai , or rate the newest song from U2, you get automatically updated. We are calling this next generation of Yahoo ! Mail the “smarter inbox.” This video that shows the new stuff in action:

Connections will get even more VIP treatment in your inbox in the coming months. For example, we will allow you to share enormous files over email with your connections, and we’ll remind you when their birthdays are coming up. Those are just a few things… more on those features later. Connections will also get benefits across all Yahoo!, not just in Yahoo ! Mail.

These features in Yahoo ! Mail are now rolling out to users in Australia and some in the US – but coming everywhere soon. Users with Yahoo! profile will get access first, so create a profile at profile.yahoo.com to get to the head of the line!

Rick Pal
Yahoo! Mail Product Guy

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As you may have heard, we’ve been working on a new smarter inbox to help make your life easier. We’re happy to announce that today, some of you will begin to experience the smarter inbox, and we wanted to give everyone a chance to see what it looks like and what it can do.

The smarter inbox experience features a new Yahoo! Mail Welcome Page which surfaces messages, information and activity updates you care about most, as well as an updated inbox and folder view that filters messages from your personal connections.

The smarter Yahoo! Mail inbox also gives you immediate access to relevant third-party applications like Flickr, Flixster and Xoopit allowing you to do much more, and be more efficient, all from within your inbox. Take a look now and let us know what you think!

- Yahoo! Mail Team

Update: We are conducting a very limited beta test right now of the open applications in Yahoo! Mail. Only our power users, who were invited into the limited beta, can test out the new applications at beta.mail.yahoo.com. We will be extending this beta test to additional users over the coming months.

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Due to an unplanned power equipment issue at one of Yahoo’s third-party co-location facilities, a small portion of Yahoo! services and features may be temporarily unavailable. Our provider is working expeditiously to complete the maintenance, which we expect to last a few hours.

What this specifically means for Mail users is that some of you will be unable to access your Yahoo! Mail for several hours this evening, and others will experience delays in email delivery.  Additionally, some users may notice that they are unable to login to the chat feature within the All-New Yahoo! Mail. Overall it is a very small percentage of users who are impacted, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating for those of you who are, and for that we are sorry.

Once the maintenance is complete, those users that have been affected will have full access to their email accounts. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience and will be working to resolve this as quickly as possible.

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As a kid I was always flummoxed by the idea that the word used to represent immobility was also used to describe the fancy paper used for messages that are inherently mobile.

Perhaps if I had paid more attention to the fact that they were spelled differently it might not have baffled me so. But in my defense…how often do you ever really write the word “stationery?”

I may have spent several occasions sitting stationary while writing on stationery…but I can’t recall a single time I wrote the word stationery (that was fun).

Anyway, it wasn’t too long ago that only Plus users could incorporate stationery into their Yahoo! Mail messages.

Well, not any more. Everyone using the All-New Yahoo! Mail not only has the option to add designs from one of 8 standard categories, but also from a featured section that surfaces several Liam related options that are sprinkled throughout the original categories.

Have a look the options, and if you have any questions you can check out the details in Yahoo! Help for guidance.

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Many of you have probably noticed that all around the Yahoo! network you are being greeted a little differently than you were before.  Gone is the Yahoo! ID (often shortened for space constraints) and it has been replaced with your first name.

It doesn’t stop there, because it is also home to a new menu that provides access to your Profile, Contacts, Applications, and Edit My Account options.

Sure the Contacts one isn’t that revolutionary if you are in your Mail account, but it will likely come in handy if you are out exploring another area of the Y! network.

All you need to do is mouse-over the area where your name is displayed (along with the arrow symbol) and the menu is revealed.

Just about everyone using Yahoo! Mail (Classic or the newer version) should already be seeing it there, as well as on your profiles pages, throughout  Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! News, and more.  Be sure to keep your eyes peeled.

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Hopefully you saw that the Calendar team already restored the ability for users to switch back from the beta, but I wanted to make sure the team isn’t stopping there.  The team recently released an update that addresses the most frequently reported issues and tunes up performance (think timezone problems and import URL specs…among other things).

They’re also already hard at work on the next batch of features, including the top-rated requests from users via the Yahoo Calendar Suggestion Board. So be sure to weigh in if you want to get your feature on the roadmap.

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Despite my earlier efforts to share these visionary suggestions with screenshots, it seems that people continue to rely heavily on search engines to get to their Yahoo! Mail account. Now if you simply like that process, more power to you. But if you would like something with fewer steps, do I have the video for you. Please excuse the stuffiness of the voice over. Not only was my voice born for print media, I was fighting off some seasonal allergies.

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