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

Here is some great news for iPhone users who are running the latest iPhone software. Apple and Yahoo! have collaborated to bring you the ability to sync your Yahoo! Calendar with your iPhone Calendar. We’re using an open standard (CalDAV) that has been developed by the CalConnect group, which Yahoo! and Apple are members.

Setting up your calendar to sync with your iPhone couldn’t be easier. There is nothing to download, and in just a few simple steps on your iPhone, all of your events will be synced – over the air – without having to plug into your computer. Now, you really can have a mobile calendar.

What could be better you ask? You can also share your calendar with your friends and family. When you do that, you’ll get to see their events on your phone as well.

We have a help page dedicated to helping you set up your calendar to sync with your iPhone. You can find out how here: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/calendar/yahoocalendar/sync/sync-06.html

Before you get started, there are just a couple of pre-requisites to set up your calendar to sync. First, you have to be running the latest iPhone software (3.0 or higher). Second, by syncing with your iPhone, we will switch you over to the all new Yahoo! Calendar 2.0 (Beta). Find out more about the all-new Yahoo! Calendar.

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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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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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As you may have heard, we’ve been working on a new smarter inbox to help make your life easier. We’re happy to announce that today, some of you will begin to experience the smarter inbox, and we wanted to give everyone a chance to see what it looks like and what it can do.

The smarter inbox experience features a new Yahoo! Mail Welcome Page which surfaces messages, information and activity updates you care about most, as well as an updated inbox and folder view that filters messages from your personal connections.

The smarter Yahoo! Mail inbox also gives you immediate access to relevant third-party applications like Flickr, Flixster and Xoopit allowing you to do much more, and be more efficient, all from within your inbox. Take a look now and let us know what you think!

- Yahoo! Mail Team

Update: We are conducting a very limited beta test right now of the open applications in Yahoo! Mail. Only our power users, who were invited into the limited beta, can test out the new applications at beta.mail.yahoo.com. We will be extending this beta test to additional users over the coming months.

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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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Despite my earlier efforts to share these visionary suggestions with screenshots, it seems that people continue to rely heavily on search engines to get to their Yahoo! Mail account. Now if you simply like that process, more power to you. But if you would like something with fewer steps, do I have the video for you. Please excuse the stuffiness of the voice over. Not only was my voice born for print media, I was fighting off some seasonal allergies.

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I was chatting with a buddy from Customer Experience the other day (everybody say hi to Carl. He is not only tasked with finding ways to make your Customer Care experience more pleasant, but he also reads this blog from time to time), and I learned about some of the common questions agents are getting.

Now it’s not all that noteworthy that there are common questions, but what people may not know is that when we identify these common questions we try to update the Help Center.  This means if you didn’t find the answer to a question before, that doesn’t mean that it won’t be there in the future.  It’s kind of organic that way.

Anyway, one of the more recent additions to the Tutorials area just so happens to address not one, but TWO of the common questions he was telling me about.  This tutorial offers a thorough run through of the different ways you can customize the All-New Yahoo! Mail.

Included in the Customizing Yahoo! Mail tutorial are step by step instructions for changing the content on your Home tab, changing the color of the interface, and more.  But the one that caught my eye was changing your personal information.  It turns out that two very common questions are about changing your password and changing your password and changing your name.  It also turns out that we have a great tutorial with step by step instructions.

Just below your Yahoo! ID, and above your Home tab, are links for Sign Out, My Account, and Mail Classic (for switching back to Classic).

Clicking My Account takes you to the Yahoo! Account information page, which covers your info across all of the Yahoo! Network.  Keep in mind that the password update, accessed by the Change Password link near the top of the page, is a system wide change, meaning you will now be using that password for all things Yahoo!

Another common question people have involves changing your name.  Whether it’s because of marriage, because of divorce, because you resent your parents, or just messed up during registration, people keep wanting to update that name.

Well you can also update your name from the same page, but we’ve found that in some cases people just want to update their name within Mail.  Maybe you want your full name on your Yahoo! account, but want a nickname or short name within Mail.  Well on the same page you’ll find a tutorial with steps to update your Mail name on an account by account basis.

There you have it.  Changing account information is easy if you know where to look for the directions.

BTW … our Tutorials team is always looking to make them better, so after checking them out please be sure to answer the “Was this helpful?” and provide any feedback you can!

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There was some big news yesterday from our Mobile team.  Yahoo! oneConnect was released for the iPhone!  For those of you who aren’t familiar with oneConnect, it is designed to help you communicate with not only your Yahoo! friends, but also the friends you have on social networks like Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Youtube, Bebo, Dopplr, Friendster and Twitter.

It makes it easy to pull up anyone from your contacts and quickly call, email, instant message, or text/SMS with them…all from the same place.  You can also get status updates from what your friends have been doing on your favorite social networks.  If you look at the example picture to the right you can see hat you can select which contact channels appear for each of your Favorite contacts.

With a quick tap I can send an instant message or initiate an email to my first contact (note the “Available” status).  I can also see that my friend Thien is offline, but since I have his mobile number it defaults to SMS.  I also have 3 different email addresses on file for him, but have chosen to only display the one I use most.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, I’m going to repost this awesome rundown of oneConnect’s top features (courtesy of the Messenger blog):

Full address book
oneConnect integrates contacts from your Yahoo! Address Book, iPhone, and many social networks. To add social networks to your oneConnect, tap on the “Settings” icon at the bottom, then hit “My Accounts”. Once you’ve added a social network account, oneConnect will import all your contacts. Tap on the “Contacts” icon in the bottom bar to access them.

Send and receive instant messages, SMS, or initiate an Email,
Once you sign in with your Yahoo! ID, your entire Yahoo! Messenger contact list will appear. Just tap on the “Message” icon in the bottom bar, then tap the “+” in the upper right corner to start a new IM (or start one from a friend’s listing under “Contacts”).

You can insert your favorite emoticons into your conversation and you’ll see your Avatar or display image as well as your friend’s.  (note: if email is more your style you can easily initiate an email message, and the TO: field  populates itself).

When you’re messaging, you’ll notice a “Y!” icon to the left of the text box. Tap on that and it changes to an SMS icon. When you want to send a SMS message, make sure the SMS icon appears there and just start typing. Note that you must have the mobile phone number for your friend already entered into their contact info. To go back to sending IMs, tap on the icon again to bring up the Y! icon.

Updates from your friends (Pulse)
In addition to IMs and SMS text messages, you can keep up with what your friends are doing on your favorite social networks. Tap on the Pulse icon to see a running list of updates from your friends. See the latest photos from your Flickr friends (note the recent Flickr update from lifecasting star iJustine), get status updates from your Facebook contacts, or see what your Twitter buddies have to say. You can even select which types of updates you want to view.

You can also update your own status on your social networks from oneConnect. When you’re in the Pulse area, tap the “My Status” button in the upper right corner. Enter a new status message and it gets sent out too all of your networks at once.

Yahoo! oneConnect is available for free from the Yahoo! Mobile website. To install it, click the “Get Yahoo! oneConnect” button on the page to access the oneConnect listing in the App Store on iTunes (or click here to launch it immediately in iTunes). It works on all versions of the iPhone.

Try it out and let us know what you think here on the blog or on the oneConnect Suggestion Board.

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