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

I just wanted to let you know that the maintenance is now complete and all Yahoo! Mail services are working normally.

If you are still experiencing difficulties, you can contact our customer care here: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/classic/forms_index.html

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I want to give a quick heads up that we are conducting maintenance this coming weekend that might impact some of you. The maintenance is part of our ongoing efforts to give you the best Mail service possible.

Beginning the evening of March 13 (Pacific time), you may experience problems accessing your Yahoo! Mail account. If you are one of the few affected, have no fear. It should be available again the morning of March 14. Apologies for any inconvenience this causes you.

As always, please feel free to contact customer care for any concerns or issues. They can be reached via this link: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/classic/forms_index.html

Thanks for your patience.

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Back in January, Brandon Savage told you about the great new feature that integrates real-time Chat & Mobile Text from directly within Yahoo! Mail Classic. Back in January it was a sneak peak, but now more and more of you are now able to use this great feature.

What if I don’t feel like Chatting?
I’ve been reading and listening to all of your comments, and a common question is, “How can I turn chat off?” The answer of course is, “Easily”. Here’s how…

All you have to do is click the drop-down box and select “Sign out of Chat”. Once you do this you will be signed out of Yahoo! Chat and Mobile Text. That’s it – you’re done. And, the next time you sign into mail, we’ll remember your status and you won’t be logged back into Chat until you set your status back to “Available”.

What else can I do?
Don’t forget to check out the ‘Settings’ menu too.

From the settings menu, you can customize some of the Chat & Mobile Text features to suit your preferences. You can change whether a sound should be played when you get a new Chat. And you can even move it down so that it sits underneath your folders, if you’d like your folders to appear above the chat module.

I encourage everyone to try out this terrific new feature of Yahoo! Mail Classic. It’s already a very popular feature in the All-new Yahoo! Mail. I’m sure that once you start using it, you’ll ask yourself how you lived without it before.

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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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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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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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This month in the UK, the Office of Fair Trade is promoting their annual Scams Awareness Month. In support of their efforts, I’ve posted some scam avoidance tips on the UK Mail Blog. Since they apply just as much across the pond as they do State-side, I wanted to share them with you too. The first step in helping you to stay scam-free is to recognize the types of scams that are out there. Here are the three most common types that come in email form (which I’m sure some of you have seen before):

1. Phishing scams – These are email scams that claim to be from an organization, like a bank, and they ask you click on a link which takes you to a Website that looks real but is, in fact, fake. When you log in with your account details and password on this fake site, the bad guys gain access to your private information.
2. Lottery Scams – These are emails that tell you have won a local or foreign lottery and to get the money you have to pay processing fees and send personal details.
3. Advance fee or fund transfer schemes – These are also called Nigerian ‘419’ scams where you receive an email, often times from someone claiming to be in Africa or Asia, and claiming that they have access to huge sums of cash but need your help getting it out of the country. In this scam, the criminal offers to send you a check for $100,000 and you send him back a personal check for $90,000 and keep the difference. The scam is, of course, that the initial check is bogus but may take several weeks to clear, by which point the criminal is long gone with your money.

You know what? Your bank will NEVER ask you for a password in an email, you have NOT won the lottery and all you end up with for those huge sums is a ZERO balance in your bank account. I’ve been collaborating with our Spam Czar, Mark, and we’ve come up with these tips to help you avoid the scammers:

1. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is – If someone stopped you on the street and said he needed your help smuggling millions of dollars out of the country, you’d be pretty suspicious. We recommend the same type of skepticism when you’re online. If you didn’t enter that Sweepstakes or Lottery, there’s no way that you won. Be extra suspicious if someone offers to send you money up front — as honest as I’m sure you are, that wealthy prince who offers to buy your iPod for 10 times its value isn’t as gullible as he seems.
2. Check the FROM line – One big giveaway is when a seemingly official message originates from a generic e-mail address. If your bank has something to say to you, it won’t come from “security_services_293@freemail.com,” and when the IRS discovers a tax error in your favor, they won’t write to you from a personal account like “charlotte.magnolia@internetonline.gr” Check the return address and make sure it looks legit (including looking for spelling errors!)
3. Beware if someone requests personal information or any payment over e-mail – Yahoo! and other respected Internet companies will never request your username or password over e-mail, and neither will your bank, credit card company, or insurance agency. If a message is asking you to e-mail your sensitive information, that’s an immediate red flag. Likewise, legitimate companies will not request money up front for you to claim a prize you’ve won.

For good measure I’m including some of the choicest scam emails we’ve seen in the recent past. By arming with yourselves with the knowledge of what scams are out there and how to avoid them, you’ll be much safer online. As always, if you do see one of these scams, please do your part and click the “Spam” button inside Yahoo! Mail – it’s the single strongest way to let us know so that we can block these terrible messages.

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Just a few months back we told you about the launch of an updated version of the Yahoo! Calendar. The all-new Yahoo! Calendar Beta offers a host of great features like open standards (iCalendar), personalization with Flickr and drag-and-drop functionality to name just a few.

Since launching the public beta back in October, the Calendar team has been working hard behind the scenes to add more of the fantastically fabulous features (how’s that for alliteration) that you’ve been asking for. So it is with great pleasure that I can tell you they’ve just released some really exciting new stuff for you to enjoy:

• New Search: You can now search both Calendar and Notepad based on words in your event titles or notes.
• To-Do Lists: Now you can have multiple to-do lists (i.e. Personal, Work, etc.), and you can share to-do lists just like you can share your calendar. And if you don’t like to-do lists, you can hide them (just click and drag the to-do list to close it).
• Print: There’s a new print button that allows you to print your Month, Week or Day view.
• Right-click: A new right-click shortcut menu lets you add and view events, plus more. Give it a try!

Sounds pretty good, right? I especially like the new right-click menu to easily add an event to my calendar. If you haven’t tried the All-new Calendar Beta yet, maybe now is the time. You can move yourself over to the new calendar by following this link: http://switch.calendar.yahoo.com/. (Just a quick note: if you want to switch back, the new stuff you add won’t come back with you.)

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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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I think, by now, you are all familiar with Mark, our resident anti-spam czar. If not, Mark has graced this blog a number of times before. Most recently he conducted an anti-spam workshop in addition to letting us know how we’re cracking down Lottery scams on our corporate Yodel blog. Today, he’s back with more great news on how he and his team are working to keep you safer for 2009. So without further ado, here’s Mark….

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At Yahoo!, we take spam seriously. And as I’ve told you before, we’ve got some of the smartest computer scientists in the world working to ensure Yahoo! Mail users receive all the mail they want…and none that they don’t. It’s a huge challenge and the bad guys are always out there trying to make a buck with their scams, but we’re committed to helping keep you safer online.

One way we’re turning up the heat on the spammers is by utilizing even more state-of-the-art technology. Recently, Yahoo!’s anti-spam team has been using a “supercomputer” consisting of thousands of individual PCs — part of our open source Hadoop project — to help detect spammers. We’re teamed up with several top universities on this research, looking for more ways to find and block the bad guys even faster, before they can do their damage.

We’re also out there working with partners big and small to help reduce spam across the Internet. We’ve seen some promising early results from one such company, a startup named Abaca, and our hopes are high that together we can block even more of these messages by looking at spammers’ behavior in addition to the contents of their spammy messages.

Closely related to all of this is that we need to ensure the right messages still get through, that we don’t throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. With the help of our friends at Return Path, we’re relaunching our Complaint Feedback Loop for commercial e-mail companies. With the CFL, legitimate companies receive notification when users mark a message as “spam,” and those companies can then use that feedback to help them fix the problems on their end. For example, a company may have used a confusing subject line, or accidentally sent to the wrong mailing list; with the CFL, we can get that information to them so they can quickly correct the problem.

As always, I’ll close with a reminder that, if Yahoo! Mail does let something slip through into the wrong folder — either allowing spam into your inbox or mistakenly putting a good message in your Spam folder — please use the “Spam” and “Not Spam” buttons to let us know. Clicking those buttons sends an immediate and powerful signal to our systems (and to me :) so that we can quickly try to correct the problem. It’s the best way for us to get better, and to continue keeping your e-mail experience great!

Mark Risher,
Anti-Spam Czar

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