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

In case you missed it, Yahoo! Messenger for the iPhone is now available for download on from the iPhone App Store. I have to admit, I don’t have an iPhone – I’m a BlackBerry user – but I’ve seen it in action and it’s very, very cool. So cool, in fact, Apple have made it a featured application in the App Store in iTunes (scroll to the bottom of that page, if the link doesn’t take you there automagically).

The top features for the new Messenger version for the iPhone are:

• Instant Messaging (of course)
• Photo Sharing
• Stealth Settings
• Custom Status Messages
• And more…

If you’d like to see it in action, Sarah on the Messenger team has called out the top Messenger for iPhone features in more detail. And they have put together a short video of Messenger for the iPhone in action.

It’s almost enough for me to take the plunge and buy an iPhone, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while. But for the moment, I’m sticking with my Blackberry, which of course has its own BlackBerry Yahoo! Instant Messenger application. I use it all the time, and especially like the way I can have conversations appear my main BB message list. That way I can go back to my important emails while I wait for John to tell me where he wants to go for lunch.

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A short while ago, the Messenger team released an updated Yahoo! Messenger client for Mac. Don’t forget that they are still in the beta stage, but the team has been working hard fixing bugs and adding great new features. Here’s everytihing new that’s been built into the new Yahoo! Messenger for Mac:

• Performance and memory bug fixes
• Over three dozen bug fixes
• Clearer messaging when receiving anonymous messages from your Pingbox
• A new message style called ‘Kobi lite’
• If you want to cancel automatic sign-in when you launch Yahoo! Messenger for Mac, hold down the shift key
• When you report an IM as spam, it also adds the sender to your ignore list

Sounds great to me, even though I haven’t used a Mac since the Apple IIc (you might remember I mentioned it in my last post about 25 years of online communication). Maybe now is the time to make the change.

Download the new Yahoo! Messenger for Mac here.

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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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Once again we’d like to thank everyone who submitted questions, and who stopped by to participate, during last week’s Anti-Spam Workshop with Mark (transcript here).  We received a lot of great questions, and Mark enjoyed the opportunity to answer questions, as well as hear directly from the users. One of the more interesting questions lead to a stat that Mark had never shared with me … and totally blew me away.

dlippman: Why don’t emails with the word “Lottery” and a few other Spam characteristics automatically go into my Spam folder?

Mark: I really wish we could! Catching a specific word is really hard. On the one hand, there are the risks that we’ll catch something legitimate — “Campus housing lottery this Friday” — which is what we call a “false positive.” (A “false positive” is any time our filters mistakenly mark something as spam when it isn’t)

On the other hand, if we build a filter for one specific word, there are often about a bazillion other ways the bad guys can spell it and still get their point across. Did you know there were 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 ways to spell \/!@g.r.a? (check out http://cockeyed.com/lessons/viagra/viagra.html)

I actually had to look up what that number translates to (turns out it’s a quintillion) and who would have thought that the “little blue miracle” could be re-written that many ways.

Check out the complete transcript from the Workshop here.  We will be doing more of these Workshops over the next few months, so if you have any themes you would like to recommend please feel free to suggest them (comments or email).

Ryan Knight
Community Manager
Yahoo! Mail

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