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.

Surprise someone by paying for their morning coffee. Or drop off a warm coat at the homeless shelter. Then update your Yahoo! status to inspire your friends and family to do something good for someone else.

Through the end of the year, you will see a heart in your Yahoo! Mail status update box. Click on the heart to tell your friends and family what you are doing. Then click on the exclamation point to shuffle through ideas for random acts of kindness. And feel free to come up with your own random acts of kindness – we’re sure you have quite a few up your sleeve!

Once you’ve updated your status, check out what others are doing to spread kindness around the world at http://kindness.yahoo.com.

If you use the All New Yahoo! Mail:

1. From the Yahoo! Mailbox click on the Options menu
2. Choose Color and then select the color theme of your choice
3. That’s it you’re done!

If you use Classic Mail:

1. Click on the Options menu
2. Choose Mail Options

3. Choose Colors

4. Choose the theme of your choice

5. Click save and go back to your Yahoo! Mailbox.
6. Enjoy!!

The color themes in Yahoo! Mail and Contacts are a great way for you to personalize your Mailbox. I personally like ‘Lime Green’ but the feedback you’ve been sending tells me that ‘Bubblegum’ (’Pink’ in the UK) is very popular too. Whichever theme you choose, I’m sure you’ll find one that’s right for you.

Here is a list of the hidden emoticons (the ones you won’t find in the list in Mail). If you need to brush up on the usual suspects, you can find the complete list of emoticons here.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused. As always, please feel free to contact our customer care team if you are having issues with your email.

Save more. With Yahoo! Mail you have unlimited storage. You never have to worry about having to delete photos because your mailbox is getting too full. Feel free to keep all those photos your friends and family send. Well, maybe you don’t need to keep that one of Uncle Joe napping on the La-Z-Boy.

Send more. Yahoo! Mail lets you send emails with up to 25 Megabyte attachments. You can send more photos at once. You can send 12 pics with just one email assuming that each photo is about 2 Megabytes. Just make sure your recipients can receive emails that big. If not, you should encourage them to switch to Yahoo! Mail.

Do more. With our Apps, you’re not limited to just sending and receiving photos in Yahoo! Mail. Be creative with your photos right from your inbox. Without a doubt, the Edit Photos application is my favorite app in Yahoo! Mail. The App created by Picnik helps you clean up your snapshots with the ability to crop, resize, and reduce red-eye. Once you’re done touching-up your photo, add effects, frames and text. Then, once your masterpiece is complete, easily save and share your photo.

You can even share your Flickr photos right from your Yahoo! Mailbox. Load up the Flickr App and you can view the photostream and photo sets of you and your friends. Plus, share your photos and photo sets with the click of a button. Congrats to the Flickr team for being first on Time’s list of the 50 Best Websites of 2009. Don’t have a Flickr account yet? Sign up to Flickr using your existing Yahoo! ID.

Yahoo! Mail makes it easy to be more productive and more social. And now that the holiday season has arrived, I know you’re going to really appreciate all those great photo sharing features.

In the meantime, you can use the built-in spell checking functionality of some of today’s modern browsers. For example, the latest versions of Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari all have in-line spell checkers. If you don’t have one of those browsers installed or don’t want to install one, you can use classic Yahoo! Mail until we have rolled out the fix (from ‘Options’ click the ‘Switch to Yahoo! Mail Classic’ link).

You can read more on our help pages, or contact out customer care team.

The beginning of Heather’s segment includes a tour of our newly designed Homepage. But I’m probably a little biased in thinking the best part was when Heather and Martha opened up Yahoo! Mail to highlight some of the open and social features that help you to be more productive and stay better connected. I have to agree with Martha that Picnik is a really great Yahoo! Mail App.

Here’s a link to the videos available from the show on Friday. http://www.marthastewart.com/show/the-martha-stewart-show/the-tech-show. Heather’s segment is number 4.

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.