Yahoo! Mail Blog

By Vivek Sharma, GM, Yahoo! Mail & Messenger

The underlying premise of email is pretty simple. You read and send messages. It helps you stay connected with family, friends and people that matter to you.

Yet, somewhere along the way, email got a little complex. The number of features started to multiply and in many cases, they didn’t actually make you more productive.

Today, we’re taking a step towards bringing email back to its roots.

When it comes to email, you’ve told us you want three main things.

• You want it to be fast (We understand. We are busy too!)
• You want it to be easy.  (Molecular physics is hard. Email shouldn’t be.)
• You want it to be available anywhere you are. (Places to go, people to see. Can email come too?)

Yahoo! Mail has been redesigned with all this in mind and today we’re rolling out four products – an upgraded Web mail experience, new apps for iPhone/iPod touch and Windows 8, and an upgraded app for Android.

Fast

Our new, native apps have been built for speed. You can easily scan your inbox and quickly triage – starring important messages that need follow-up, filing messages to folders and deleting unimportant ones – all from the inbox. With infinite scroll, you can quickly find emails from last month or even, last year.

We’ve also reduced steps to save you time. When you log into Yahoo! Mail on the Web, it’ll take you directly to your inbox. We’ve tweaked the underlying performance so it’s faster to compose and read messages.  After you send a message, we now take you right back to the inbox. Collectively, that works out to 36 million minutes saved every day.

Improved mail search also helps you get things done faster. On the apps, you can search across your entire inbox. Web mail now has search auto-complete so you can quickly find the messages and people you’re looking for.

Easy

We’ve redesigned Yahoo! Mail so it’s easy for you to use. No frills. On Web mail, we’ve simplified and reduced the number of buttons – so you only see the ones you need.

Photos and attachments now appear at the top of your message. On iPhone and Android, you can easily attach photos directly from your camera roll, or take and send a photo from within Yahoo! Mail. There’s even a simple way to re-size photos, which is important if you’re keeping an eye on your data usage.

For Yahoo! Mail users on a Windows 8 device, we’ve created a familiar app that takes advantage of key Windows 8 features. Live Tiles show new messages arriving right from the Windows 8 Start screen. You can also use Yahoo! Mail in Snapped View or Fill View, keeping two apps open simultaneously to increase your productivity.

Anywhere.

Increasingly, we’re all on the go and email is one of the key ways we stay connected. No matter what platform you’re on, you’ll have a consistent Yahoo! Mail experience. For big screens, the experience is optimized for composing messages and managing your inbox. For small screens, we have focused on providing an experience that lets you easily monitor and triage.

We’re committed to bringing email back to its essence. This is just the beginning and we hope you love it. Please continue to help us improve Yahoo! Mail by giving us your feedback.