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

Editor’s note: Our community plays a major role in shaping the future of Yahoo! Mail, and we love it when we receive your feedback and insights. Today, we would like to introduce you to one of Yahoo! Mail’s biggest and most extraordinary fans: Mohamed Elbahy. Learn how Yahoo! Mail helps him stay connected to the people he cares about the most. Mohamed loves Yahoo! Mail so much that he created a Facebook page for it, where he not only created fun content for the full site but also answered users’ technical questions about Yahoo! Mail. We’ve migrated all of the fans on Mohamed’s page to our official Facebook page and wanted to share our appreciation to Mohamed, and give you the opportunity to get to know him!

Yahoo!: Please tell us about a little bit about yourself.

Mohamed Elbahy: I’m an accountant at one of the leading food commodities in Egypt. I graduated from the Faculty of Commerce, am 22 years old, and I love my country because of its good weather and delightful people who are always smiling.

Q: When did you start using Yahoo! products?

Mohamed Elbahy: I’ve read a lot about Yahoo!, back to its beginnings in 1994 when it was a web directory. I found it an inspiring success story, and I learned the useful lesson of how to start small and expand until you become huge.

I’ve been using Yahoo! since 2000, I think, and Yahoo! Mail since its inbox storage limit was 3 MB. All my email and interactions with my friends abroad are through Yahoo! Mail. It plays a big role in my online social life.

Q: Tell us why you chose Yahoo! Mail as your primary email?

Mohamed Elbahy: I chose Yahoo! Mail because it has a very friendly user interface, a different way of displaying email, and a lot of innovative functions and features. Also, the new Yahoo! Mail has a sophisticated engine that differentiates between your emails and spam. And of course, the unlimited storage, as we say in Egypt, is the best of the best.

Q: What inspired you to create your own Facebook page for Yahoo! Mail?

Mohamed Elbahy: I decided to create a Facebook fan page for Yahoo! Mail just because I’m one of the millions of people who loves to use Yahoo! Mail. I think I was trying to share my technical knowledge with other fans, to find solutions for any problems that they run into, and gather some feedback to improve Yahoo! services.

Q: What has been your favorite Facebook post on Yahoo! Mail Page?

Example: I especially like the Question of the Week/Email Quiz/Poll days. I get to vote and interact without much work, learn something new about email, and discover how my opinion differs from the rest of Yahoo! Mail users.

Q: What kind of new products or features would you like to see Yahoo! Mail add?

Mohamed Elbahy: I think that Yahoo! has a great position in the history of email systems, it was one of the first free email providers here in the Middle East, and continues to be a loved brand. With fierce competitors like Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail, the challenge is not easy, but I am certain Yahoo! will continue to come up with strong and innovative features. I think it would be great if Yahoo! Mail could continue releasing new themes and introduce the ability to customize them. In addition, a great way to continue the Yahoo! Mail innovation is to work on mobile technology and how it relates to Mail.

Mohamed, we want to say a sincere ‘Shokra’ for being such a loyal Yahoo! Mail user.  We appreciate all of our fans and truly appreciate your participation in our community. If you are interested in becoming a guest blogger, please send us a tweet (@yahoomail)!

Sincerely,

The Yahoo! Mail Team

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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!

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iPad users, Yahoo! has great news for you. Today at Yahoo! Product Runway, we unveiled a new welcome page for Yahoo! Mail on your iPad, accessible when you log into your Yahoo! Mail account by going to http://mail.yahoo.com in your web browser.  Take a quick look at unread email from your contacts, enjoy personalized news articles, stay aware of weather and headlines from your neighborhood, enjoy interesting pictures from Flickr, and keep up to date with latest happenings in the world with the Trending Now video.

As the premier digital media company, Yahoo! is the only major email provider in the world that brings you rich content to enhance your mail experience on the iPad. Built robustly on cutting edge HTML5 web technology, the new welcome page is touch optimized, allowing you to swipe through the tiles so you can quickly get to the content you find most interesting. Simply tap on any story to view the full content on the associated Yahoo! website in a new window or tab.

Produced every morning, Mon-Fri, our Trending Now video will help you get up to speed on the biggest stories on the web in mere minutes.

Here at Yahoo!, we are reinventing email every day to help you keep in touch with your friends in a manner that is fast, easy to use, and fun. Yahoo! Mail already offers the Quick Reply feature that lets people instantly respond to messages from Facebook, unlimited email storage and enhanced spam protection.  And now, thanks to the rich content brought to you on the new Yahoo! Mail iPad welcome page, email is a chore, no more!

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As an Apple device user, you must have been thrilled to upgrade to iOS5 with so many features and applications. Well as a Yahoo! user on an Apple device (iPhone, iPOD touch, iPad) you have even greater reasons to be excited.

Many of you might be using Yahoo! Calendar to manage your To-Do list for your day-to-day or long term tasks. As an Apple device user on iOS5, it becomes even better as you can sync your To-Dos on Yahoo! Calendar with the ‘Reminder’ application on iOS5 devices. This new cool application called ‘Reminders,’ lets you keep a list of To-Dos based on data and/or location. So keep adding your To-Dos on your phone or on Yahoo! Calendar and they will automatically sync in both places.

With iOS5, setting up your Yahoo! account is super simple, and you can choose to sync as many as 5 key Yahoo! services. Set up your Yahoo! account on iOS5 with 3 easy steps:

Step 1: Add your Yahoo! Account.



Step 2: Select which Yahoo! services you want to sync.

Step 3: Enjoy syncing with Yahoo! on Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Reminders, and Notes!

So, why wait?  Start using these Yahoo! services on your Apple device today, and stay connected and organized always!

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Last week Jeff Bezos held a press event in NYC unveiling Amazon’s impressive new line-up of tablets.  Amazon introduced a refreshed line of black and white Kindles, but the biggest draw of the day by far was the long-awaited Amazon Kindle Fire – a full color Android tablet. The seven inch, 14.6 ounce tablet is powered by dual-core processors and has a rumored battery life of 7 hours. The best part? The Fire is going to cost $199. Officially not available until November 15, Amazon is currently taking orders for them.

Here at Yahoo!, we’re always excited when we see new devices that promise to offer a highly personalized consumer experience. And, based on some of our Yahoo! Search data – we think everyone else is pretty interested in the Fire too! Yahoo! searches for “Kindle Fire” were up 2,993% yesterday.

Once it’s shipping, users of the Amazon Fire tablet will be able to easily  set up Yahoo! Mail.  With Yahoo! Mail for Kindle Fire, you get the works: include photos as attachments, search for messages, create folders that keep you organized—stay on top of all your communications.

I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking I just might need to order myself a Kindle Fire…!

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I love to shop online.  It’s so much easier to click a few buttons vs dragging my kids into a store, so I do it a lot.   All this online shopping generates a lot of emails with important information about these purchases.  The problem is that it’s not always easy for me to go back and find a specific purchase, or track an item I’m waiting for.

Now Yahoo! Mail users can tame the explosion of ecommerce receipts in their email with one of the newest apps to join the family: All My Purchases by Project Slice. All My Purchases automatically pulls information from the electronic receipts in your inbox, from shipping notifications and tracking numbers to return policies and customer service information, and organizes it in one place for quick, easy reference. I love it because it can distinguish an email containing a receipt from all the other emails I get from merchants, making it really quick & easy to get the info I need in case I want to return something, or just to keep track of everything I bought.  And particularly interesting, to me at least, is that it tallies up al of your purchases so that you can see how many items and how much you’ve spent online.  Yikes!

Here’s how it works: Click the “All My Purchases” application in the Applications section of Yahoo! Mail (in the left hand column of your inbox). All My Purchases scans your inbox for email receipts and consolidates your shopping history from online merchants, from Amazon and eBay to LivingSocial and Groupon.

If you have orders en route, click the “Track It” button to see when your package was shipped and its estimated arrival date, complete with a map to track your order’s journey to your front door.  This is probably my favorite aspect of the app, because I don’t have to log into multiple websites to find out where all my packages from different retailers are; I can see all this right from my inbox.

And if you’re looking for something you bought a while back, or you’re not happy with a certain order, simply check your Purchase History to pull up your receipt as well as the merchant’s return policy and customer service information.  All My Purchases puts that information right at your fingertips so you don’t have to waste time digging through old emails.

With All My Purchases, the new Yahoo! Mail has become the email you’ll want to use to do all your online shopping.

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Opening chat conversations in a tab has been a top-requested feature for the new Yahoo! Mail. Tabs give the user more screen real estate for the actual conversation and also a way to organize and track open messages while facilitating multi-tasking (ever had to search for an email to refer to while composing another one?). It only seems natural to extend the tab metaphor to chat conversations too. Today, we are happy to announce that we are rolling out this feature to all our users. In fact, for users who will be opting-into the new Yahoo! Mail starting today, chat conversations will open in a tab by default. For those of you who are currently using the newest version of Yahoo! Mail and want to switch to chat conversations in a tab, read on for a quick walkthrough.

Two simple steps to enable chat conversations in a tab:

Step 1: Click on the options link at the top left of the Yahoo! Mail page and then click on “Messenger Options”.

Step 2: You will see the Messenger Options window pop-up as shown below. Now, click on the dropdown under “Conversation Window Management” and select “Tab” and click on OK. Voilà! All future chat conversations will open in a tab.

And, if you get a new IM while you are busy doing other stuff, you’ll see a nice little animation in the tab alerting you.

Tab management made easy

With chat now in it’s own tab, you are probably worried about how to effectively manage all tabs in Yahoo! Mail. No worries; we’ve now made tab management super easy with the new tab menu.

As you keep opening tabs in the new Yahoo! Mail, you will see a tab menu button show up on the far right of the tabs (the little down arrow in the screenshot below). Clicking on it will open a menu that will show you all the tabs you have open. Here’s a quick tour of some nifty things you can do from the menu:

1. Got your eye on a tab that you had forgotten about? Just, click on it to switch to that tab and finish what you started.
2. Old tabs cluttering your UI? You can now hover over the title in the menu to display the close button (the “x” icon in the menu below) and click on it to close the tab.
3. Want to start fresh and get rid of the clutter? The “Close All Message Tabs” item in the menu was designed to just do that. Click on it to get rid of all messages you were reading. Note that any unread IMs you have in tabs and any emails that you were writing will NOT be closed.
4. Confused about which tab is the active tab (tab in view)? Look for the little dot on the left of the tab name for the indication.

Hope you enjoy these features!

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We’ve reached two major milestones with over 500,000 fans on our Facebook page, which was the most explosive page on Facebook in June, and more than 100 million monthly active users in the newest version of Yahoo! Mail! Thanks to each and every one of you who made it happen! You are the reason that Yahoo! Mail is the #1 email provider in the US.  As you can imagine, building features for such a popular product can be challenging. If you are wondering how we manage to do it, here’s an inside view of how we use your feedback to build compelling features.

At Yahoo! Mail, we take pride in actively listening to and incorporating your feedback into the product. The “feedback loop” begins when you write to us about the things you love, the things that you would like us to change, or ideas you would like us to implement. You can do this by clicking on the “Send Feedback” link in the help drop down and sending us a line or two about the problem/issue/feature you want us to look into.

On any given day, we get upwards of 5,000 pieces of feedback. Manually going through each one is a daunting task for even the most industrious product manager. So, we redirect this feedback into a tool that helps us automatically recognize and categorize the important trends in your feedback. We monitor the tool for topics that bubble up and dig deeper into each of the big ones, reading your input and designing product features that are aimed at solving those issues for you. The engineering team then builds the requirements into actual features that are delivered to you on a regular cadence.

Bringing back stationery, implementing the “switch view” feature, and improving page load time are just a few examples of how we have improved the product based on your feedback.

One change that we made most recently was putting the message toolbar at the bottom of messages.  We heard a lot of feedback about how the toolbars at the bottom of the message list and at the bottom of long messages were missing and hindering productivity. Once we noticed a trend in our tool, we redesigned the feature and rolled it out to users in our next release. From a design perspective, we made sure that the toolbar shows up only on long messages that require scrolling so users can get maximum screen real estate for the actual message. We also made the toolbar appear consistently in all views (message list view, message view, folder view and so on), and allowed for the menu to pop up (versus down) when there is no space at the bottom of the page.

While creating intuitive products is fun, it’s always more fulfilling to see that our users notice these changes and appreciate it. And, here is what one of our users had to say when we rolled out the feature:

Pleasant surprise! @yahoomail has gone & added back the Mail action buttons at the bottom of long messages. Glad to know they are listening.

On that note, keep the feedback coming! We love delivering features that improve the Yahoo! Mail experience for our hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

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Have you ever received an email from a friend that was just downright spammy and wonder what possessed him or her to send it? Worse, have you received emails from concerned relatives and friends asking why you sent them emails pitching prescription drugs? If you’re familiar with either situation, then you know what happens when someone’s email account has been compromised and taken over by spammers.

Whether it be via malicious software being silently installed on users’ computers, unknowingly logging in through a phishing page, or the use of common or easy-to-crack passwords, we are seeing an increase in legitimate user accounts that are being accessed and exploited by spammers. While we have measures in place to detect and mitigate the damage, it’s still a daunting and disconcerting dilemma being faced–and collaboratively worked on–by email providers across the industry.

If you have (or know of someone who has) been a victim of such an account compromise, here are the 2 most important actions to secure the account:

1) Change your password immediately. If you have a Yahoo! account, you can change your password at https://edit.yahoo.com/config/change_pw.

If you can no longer access your account, you can get a new password at https://edit.yahoo.com/forgotroot/. If you still can’t access your account after going through the “Forgot Your Password” process, you may contact our Customer Care team for assistance at:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/security/general.html

Important: If you use the old password at other sites, we recommend you change it for those accounts as well. Furthermore, don’t revert to the old password at any time; that password can never be used safely again for any of your accounts.

2) Scan your computers for malicious software. If you have an anti-virus program installed, make sure to update it and then run a scan. Do this for both your personal and work computers. (You should be doing this periodically, by the way.)

If you don’t have an anti-virus program and are using a Windows computer, Microsoft provides a free, anti-virus program at:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security_essentials/default.aspx

For more tips and recommendations to keep your online experience safe, be sure to visit the Yahoo! Security Center.

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We’ve been listening to your feedback since the initial launch of Yahoo! Mail a few months back. One of the features you’ve asked for is a greater variety of themes. So, a bunch of Yahoos around the world answered the call and we’re pleased to let you know that today we have more than 50!

The additions include more colors as well as tons of image-based themes. Whether you’re a nature-lover, star-gazer, art aficionado, or simply a pattern-person, you’ll find something that fits your interest or mood.

You’ll find Themes in the Options menu in the top-left area of the page, then browse and pick a theme to express your personality with a customized Mail experience.

Let us know which themes you’d like to see next!

Sincerely yours,

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