Featured « Yahoo! Mail Blog

Archive for the ‘Featured’ Category

Refreshed Yahoo! Calendar

Wednesday, August 1st, 2012

Today we are launching two new features on Yahoo! Calendar that make using the Calendar an easier and more seamless part of your Yahoo! Mail experience.

1. Yahoo! Calendar as a tab in Yahoo! Mail:

Currently, users access the Calendar by clicking on the Calendar link under the “Applications” section in the left panel. The Calendar would then open in a new browser window/tab.
To simplify the process (who wants more tabs open on their browser!?), we’re now making Calendar a permanent tab within Yahoo! Mail. So, as soon as you login to your Yahoo! Mail account, you will see a ‘Calendar’ tab right next to the ‘Contacts’ tab. This tab will remain there even as you navigate around to other tabs within Yahoo! Mail.

When you’re inside the ‘Calendar’ tab, you’ll be able to search for events/tasks on your calendar.
Additionally, you will be able to access ‘Calendar Options’ under the ‘Options’ menu in the header. Options include the ability to share a calendar (like with your spouse to make it easier to align busy family schedules!) or import holiday calendars from around the world.

2. Sending RSVP response for Calendar invites from within Yahoo! Mail:

Now, when you receive a calendar invite from your friends, you can easily respond to the event organizer with ‘Attending’/’Not Attending’/’Maybe’, add comments and have the event added to your own Yahoo! Calendar.

You can also quickly check your availability by navigating to the day’s calendar through the ‘Check Availability’ button. When you respond, you can also set a reminder for yourself so that you don’t miss out on fun events like ‘Make your own pizza party’.

When you open an invitation that has already been updated or cancelled, you’ll see an indicator telling you that ‘This event is out of date’ or ‘This event has been cancelled’.
Best part is the invitation feature works for calendar invites sent by organizers using any calendar client like Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal, Windows Live Calendar, Thunderbird and of course Yahoo! Calendar.

These features have begun to roll out to all of our global users. Try out these new additions to Yahoo! Calendar and check back often! We’ve got more features coming later this year.

Ashish Parnami

Sr. Product Manager

Yahoo! Mail & Calendar

Posted in Address Book & Calendar, Featured, General, New Stuff, Tips & Tutorials, Yahoo! Mail | Comments Off

Finding Your Photos is now a Snap! — Introducing the new Photos App in Yahoo! Mail

Thursday, June 21st, 2012

If you’re like me, you send and receive a LOT of photos in Yahoo! Mail. From baby pictures, to soccer photos, to what-happens-in-Vegas-stays-in-Vegas shenanigans, my Yahoo! Mail contains a treasure trove of memories. The problem is, those memories are buried deep within my mailbox. Ask me to retrieve those great photos Grandma sent when the twins were 3 (or was that 4?) and I’m likely to throw my hands up in dismay.

No longer. Now, Yahoo! Mail makes it super simple to find and share those treasures with our new Photos app. The Photos app aggregates all of the photos in your inbox that you’ve ever sent or received during the entire life of your email account. You can see thumbnails of all the photos and filter by date, sender, folder and size.

Check it out and you’ll quickly see how easy and fun it is to use! Take a walk down memory lane—relive that family reunion from 2010, the trip to Mexico or your nephew’s graduation from just last week! The Photos app defaults to showing the most recent photos first, but to surface your older photos just select “Sort by: Oldest.”

When you’re ready to share, you can either send your photos as an attachment in Yahoo! Mail, or you can post your own photos to Flickr and share from there. Not a Flickr user? No problem, we let you create an account seamlessly from within Yahoo! Mail. If you’re an existing Flickr user, your Flickr account can easily be connected to your Yahoo! Mail inbox. Now you can see your entire Flickr photostream in Yahoo! Mail. Remember that photo you uploaded to Flickr from your iPhone yesterday? There it is, in your Yahoo! Mail.

See how the Photos application works in this video.

Key features of the new Photos application includes:

Skip searching: Easily find all of your photos in one place
Share in seconds: Email your photos with one click or upload to Flickr
Find the associated email: Locate the photo (or attachment) and the email it was originally sent with
Sort easily: Easily sort and filter photos and attachments by sender, date, size or file type

The Photos app can be found in the lower-left side of Yahoo! Mail in the Applications area. To learn more, please visit our help page. Enjoy!

Miriam Geller

Director of Product Management

Yahoo! Mail

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

Reply to All or Reply to Sender? You Decide

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

Have you ever been in the middle of a ‘Reply to All’ and realized that the message you’re writing has become too personal for all the recipients and should really just be going to the sender alone? Or how about the opposite – you’re replying to just the sender and it dawns on you that you want this message to go to all the other recipients too?

If so, you’ll be happy to hear that Yahoo! Mail now provides you with a button in the compose header that helps in both of these scenarios! You’ll no longer need to cut/copy the text of your draft into another message or manually add/remove recipients. If you’re already doing a ‘Reply to Sender’, simply press the ‘Reply to All’ button to add the additional recipients of the original mail to your current message. Similarly, the ‘Reply to Sender’ button will remove all recipients other than the original message’s sender.

The button is available next to the “TO” field in a compose when performing either the ‘Reply to All’ or ‘Reply to Sender’ action, provided there is more than one recipient that’s not you.

Sweet, huh?

We’re always working on ways to increase Yahoo! Mail’s usability and performance, as well as your productivity and efficiency. I hope you enjoy the new feature!

Stay tuned for more, and thanks for using Yahoo! Mail!

Jeff Ludden

Sr Software Engineer

Yahoo! Mail

Posted in Featured, General | Comments Off

It’s official. No one fights spam harder, smarter, or better than Yahoo! Mail.

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

Independent empirical studies done by the prestigious Fraunhofer Institute show that Yahoo! Mail is #1 in blocking malware and spam from reaching mailboxes.

We, at Yahoo! are proud about putting technology to work for our users. Under the hood, a complex system of spam filters is combing every mail coming into the system for spam signals and automatically detecting the spammers’ next steps. Every spam report counts and tells a little more about how to counteract unwanted email.

Spammers use every trick in the book to distribute millions of spam and scam emails every day – but with Yahoo! Mail, most of these messages are stopped even before they get to our users. In fact, unlike our competitors’ antispam systems, our filters flag or block greater than 99% of spam. With nearly 300 million Yahoo! Mail users worldwide, we are blocking over 120 billion spam messages every month. That’s an average of 400 blocked spam messages per Yahoo! Mail inbox per month.

And we are not the only ones who have noticed our spam-reduction efforts.

The Fraunhofer Institute, an independent research firm, found that Yahoo! Mail users saw the least amount of spam out of the five providers tested, with nearly 40% less spam than Hotmail and 55% less spam than Gmail – meaning Gmail users in the study saw more than twice as much spam as Yahoo! Mail users.

While it’s great to lead the industry with our efforts, it is just as important for us to work together to win the war against spam. As we push forward with our collaboration with anti-spam industry partners, and advance our technology efforts, we’ll continue to arm you with tools, tips and strategies to keep your inbox away from spam, phishing and online scams.

And, as always, keep reporting spam so we can make our engines work even harder to keep your inbox clean.

vishr

Posted in Anti-Spam, Featured, Security | 7 Comments »

Facebook Meets Yahoo! Contacts (Part II)

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

Lots of Yahoo! Mail users are Facebook users. If you follow this blog, you know that we’ve been trying to help you get more out of both services, from updating your Facebook status from Yahoo! Mail to importing your Facebook friend’s email addresses in Yahoo! Contacts. Today I’d like to tell you about a new feature that populates your contact’s details page with information from Facebook – all without you barely lifting a finger!

To activate any Facebook-related feature, you first must link your Facebook account by clicking on “Add to Facebook” in the status section of Yahoo! Mail (if you’ve linked before, you are already good to go).

After you sign in with Facebook, presto! Your Yahoo! Contacts now gets filled with information from Facebook to make it even more useful. (Plus you get all the new features we’ve launched recently – and continue to launch – in Yahoo! Mail).

Specifically, for any contact that uses Facebook, you will now see public details about them automatically added from Facebook. For example, you’ll see their Facebook photo and any information they have chosen to share publicly – like current location and work history. Your Yahoo! Contacts just populated itself!

For contacts that you are also connected with on Facebook, you get to see even more about them including their birthday, email address if you don’t have it, and even their most recent status message – right from their contact details page.

Now your Yahoo! Contacts becomes much richer – effortlessly – by supplementing details you’ve added with information automatically from Facebook (and don’t worry, we will never overwrite Facebook details with anything you’ve added). It’s just our way of helping you stay connected to the people who matter the most to you.

Again, to get started, simply link your account and you’ll be on your way to a better Yahoo! Contacts in no time! As always, please let us know what you think and thank you in advance for your feedback.

Posted in Address Book & Calendar, Featured, New Stuff | 2 Comments »

Facebook Friends: Meet Yahoo! Contacts

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

You might have heard that Yahoo! announced plans in December to integrate Facebook Connect across a variety of our popular sites and services. While we’re still early in the partnership, we wanted to let you know about one new thing you can do with Facebook that we are rolling out over the next few days.

In addition to importing your contacts from sites like Gmail and Windows Live Hotmail, starting this week you can now easily add your Facebook friends’ email addresses to your Yahoo! Contacts list. This will make it easy to communicate and share with the people you care about – wherever you are in Yahoo!. So when you are on Yahoo! Sports and you want to email your old high school buddy that great article on the Winter Olympics, his email address is just a click away. Or maybe you want to forward your cousin your airplane reservations on Yahoo! Mail, but you’ve never emailed him before. Now you can type the first few letters of his name in Yahoo! Mail and – presto! – his email address from his Facebook profile will appear in your email.

Importing from Facebook is super simple. To get started, just go to the Import Contacts landing page and select Facebook (and as you can tell from screenshot below, it is also easy to import email addresses from other services).

Next, enter your Facebook username and password in the Facebook login window that opens.

After you click login, we will authorize your account and begin importing, which may take a minute or two depending on your Internet speed and how many Facebook friends you have.

That’s it! Your Facebook friends’ email addresses will be added to your Yahoo! Contacts. You will see which contacts and email addresses were imported and who you already had contact information for (don’t worry, we won’t create duplicates).

We hope this feature makes it even easier to stay connected to the people who matter the most to you. And this is just one of the first steps you’ll see us take to help people interact with Facebook users all across Yahoo!. Stay tuned here and elsewhere on Yahoo! for more ways to use Facebook and Yahoo! together.

Posted in Address Book & Calendar, Featured, New Stuff | 63 Comments »

Send Really Big Attachments with Yahoo! Mail

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Every now and again the need arises to send big files as attachments. Normally they never exceed 25 Megabytes, so you’re covered with Yahoo! Mail. But even in the case where you have one file, or even a bunch of files over 25 Megabytes, with the ‘Attach Large Files’ app by drop.io in the all-new Yahoo! Mail, you can attach files up to 100 Megabytes. So now there’s a way to share those home videos, large presentations and all your photos at once.

You can find the Attach Large Files app in the Applications section underneath your folders. (If you don’t see it listed, you can add it to your list by clicking the plus sign.) To get started just click on the ‘Attach Large Files’ app.

After you agree and then click to get started, you can right away begin using the app to attach and send up to 100 Megabyte attachments. It doesn’t have to be just one file, you can upload multiple attachments in a single go. Just keep selecting all the files that you want to attach and when you’re ready, click the ‘Upload and Compose Email’. The app will tell you how much more space you have available. It’s that simple.

Once the files have finished uploading, the Attach Large Files app will open up a new message with the files already attached. The files will be available for downloading for 30 days after you send them, and your upload history is saved so you can resend again if you like. And you don’t have to worry whether or not your recipient’s Inbox can handle these attachments because the attachment is stored over at our app partner drop.io.

It really couldn’t be easier. The only thing to note is for people that like to write emails in ‘Plain Text’. With ‘Attach Large Files’, you have to compose your emails in ‘Rich Text’, but the App will prompt you to change to ‘Rich Text’ if you are not already doing that.

Posted in Featured, New Stuff, Tips & Tutorials | 2 Comments »

Clean Up Your Contact List with a Click

Friday, January 15th, 2010

Recently, we introduced a quick and easy way to consolidate all your different contacts lists into your Yahoo! Contacts. Whether you’ve imported the various address books that you’ve accumulated over the years or have a really big contact list, you may now find yourself with a few duplicate entries. If so, no problem, now it’s easier than ever to merge duplicate entries into one.

To get started, when you first open Yahoo! Contacts, just click the link to ‘Fix duplicate entries’. (There is also a link in the ‘Tools’ button at the top of your contacts window.)

The tool will scan your contacts list and present you with the duplicate entries that were found. To combine the duplicates into one, just click the button ‘Merge all EXACT’ and then ‘Yes’ to confirm.

OK, so it’s actually two clicks, but it really couldn’t be any easier to clean up your contacts list. If you would rather review each duplicate separately, just click the ‘Next’ button instead. A wizard will guide you through the process of merging each duplicate entry.

If you made a resolution to organize and clean up your address book for 2010 and were dreading doing it, now there is no excuse not to. What may have taken hours will now take just a couple of minutes.

Posted in Address Book & Calendar, Featured, New Stuff | 1 Comment »

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 »

Yahoo! Mail Blog