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

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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You might have noticed that we unveiled our new global marketing campaign yesterday. It includes a new video ad – ‘Anthem’ – that features the many ways that Yahoo! connects our users to the people and things that matter most to them. At the heart of the campaign is YOU and how you use Yahoo! to make the Internet your own.

Of course, as a proud member of the great team at Yahoo! Mail, I think nowhere is the spirit of YOU more personified than with Yahoo! Mail. With our new Mail we are helping you connect, share and do more than ever before right from within your Inbox. Our most recent improvements help you:

• see emails and updates from the people that matter most
• attach and upload files and photos of up to 25MB
• do more with useful apps (like editing photos, sending invitations) right from your Inbox

And we will continue to innovate and enhance Yahoo! Mail to make sure that we provide you with the best Mail experience on the Internet.

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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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With the launch of the new and improved Yahoo! Mail a couple of weeks ago, we announced the upcoming addition of a set of apps to help you be more productive and do more within Mail. Well, today is the big day! We’ve added new apps and made improvements to ones you already know and love. And they can all be found right in the handy Applications box on the lower left-hand corner of your Yahoo! Mail inbox.

One of the additions to our app family is pingg Invitations. With pingg Invitations, you can choose from a wide selection of invites featuring a range of designs, including ones created by well known artists and photographers. Even more impressive are the super slick host management (party invite) tools and integration with Yahoo! Maps. If you’re a hostzilla like me, you want to find just the right invitation design for your occasion and keep your eye on invitees that check your invite, but don’t RSVP (party foul). pingg makes it so easy to plan with some serious style!

With the Attach Large Files app, we are once again answering the call of our users to allow sharing of larger files. The folks at drop.io have built this app to allow users to easily upload and share files up to 100MB. They’ve taken collaboration to the next level by adding the ability to comment on files, a number to leave a voicemail for more context and a conference call number if you need to discuss further in real-time. Sometimes asynchronous collaboration is just not enough, right?

Today we are also releasing the Evite app that we demo’ed a couple of weeks ago. Now you can plan events with your friends and family from right within Yahoo! Mail. Start an Evite, make a list of potential partygoers using your Yahoo! Contacts address book and add it to your Calendar.

Finally, we continue to enhance our existing apps by adding features users have been asking for – like the ability to share photo sets in the flickr app. So if you already use apps, go check out the changes!

We are truly excited about what the future holds and we can’t wait to add even more apps for you to choose from! Stay tuned for more apps to further enhance your email experience and make you even more productive within Yahoo! Mail!

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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!

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.

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.

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.

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Here is some great news for iPhone users who are running the latest iPhone software. Apple and Yahoo! have collaborated to bring you the ability to sync your Yahoo! Calendar with your iPhone Calendar. We’re using an open standard (CalDAV) that has been developed by the CalConnect group, which Yahoo! and Apple are members.

Setting up your calendar to sync with your iPhone couldn’t be easier. There is nothing to download, and in just a few simple steps on your iPhone, all of your events will be synced – over the air – without having to plug into your computer. Now, you really can have a mobile calendar.

What could be better you ask? You can also share your calendar with your friends and family. When you do that, you’ll get to see their events on your phone as well.

We have a help page dedicated to helping you set up your calendar to sync with your iPhone. You can find out how here: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/calendar/yahoocalendar/sync/sync-06.html

Before you get started, there are just a couple of pre-requisites to set up your calendar to sync. First, you have to be running the latest iPhone software (3.0 or higher). Second, by syncing with your iPhone, we will switch you over to the all new Yahoo! Calendar 2.0 (Beta). Find out more about the all-new Yahoo! Calendar.

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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…

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It seems like only yesterday when we first introduced applications in Yahoo! Mail. Well, starting today, we’re launching a handful of new and VERY cool apps in Yahoo! Mail — all focused on enabling you to do more, share more and save time in Mail.

Applications from PayPal, Zumo Drive, Picnik, OtherInbox and Photobucket cover the gamut on common tasks you handle online, from transferring money to photosharing to sending large files. We’ve reduced the number of times you have to visit multiple destinations on the Web to get things done. For example, the Zumo Drive application provides storage you can access right from inside your mailbox, giving users the ability to send large files as well as share and collaborate on documents and attachments right from their inbox. (But I digress, we’ll go into more detail on this new app and a few others in a second.)

If you already have access to the applications we launched in December, you’ll notice several of the apps the next time you log in, located along the left side of your inbox. If you haven’t already signed up to use the new applications, click here: http://overview.mail.yahoo.com/applications. The new applications are free and available to all US users of the new Yahoo! Mail. For those outside of the US, stay tuned as we will begin rolling out to select markets later this summer.

So without further ado, here is more in-depth look at some of the new apps available on Yahoo! Mail. And for those interested in a demo, check out this video where yours truly walks you through “A Day in the Life of a Yahoo! Mail app.”

Edit Photos by Picnik: This app allows you to crop, touch up, add effects and more to any of the photos that you have in your inbox or online. After you edit them you can email them to friends, save them to your computer, or post to Websites like Flickr and Picasa.

My Photos by Xoopit has continued improving their Mail experience; this app lets you organize and share all the photos in your Inbox from within one view, and they’ve added some features to let you upload new photos and shuffle amongst the treasures buried in your Unlimited Storage mailbox.

PayPal let’s you request and send money to almost anyone around the world right from Yahoo! Mail.

Share It by Zumo Drive allows you to send and share large attachments (up to 100MB) with your friends and family. With Share It, you can share large files like videos, photos, and even entire folders, and the recipients can collaborate and edit the documents with you.

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