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

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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No, I’m not talking about a fresh set of rims for your lowriding hooptie.  News around the water cooler (as well as on our very own front page), is that our friends from just up the road have rolled out a new browser option called Chrome.  Not sure I know what went into the name choice, but at this point I’m going to assume that they are just huge Masta Ace fans and particularly loved his works from the mid 90′s.  I always felt that Ace peaked with “Born to Roll”, but that may not translate as well into a web product.

Anyway, what this means to YMail users is there is another browser being thrown into the compatibility pool.  The good news is that the Chrome development team has leveraged the open source project known as Webkit, which is also the underlying framework that Apple used for the Safari browser.  Since we have built the All-New Mail to work well with Safari (and it’s underlying Webkit framework) this first release of Chrome so far seems to provide a fairly consistent experience for Windows users (currently not available for Mac or Linux).

That being said, we still have a lot of testing to do before we can guarantee that the user experience will be consistent and reliable.  In the meantime users can always use one of the three, fully supported, browser options for both versions of YMail: Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

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In our ongoing efforts to help users connect, I thought it would be fun to let all the Windows and Mac users out there know that you now have something in common.  You can both use the All-New Yahoo! Mail in the Safari browser.

That’s right, the All-New Mail is now fully compatible with the latest Mac and Windows versions of the Safari browser.  It’s actually been rolling out over the last few weeks, so many of you have probably already noticed.

Our guys have worked very closely with folks from Apple to ensure that Safari users on both sides of the OS war can enjoy a great experience in Safari. (Unfortunately for me this work hasn’t netted me any Apple swag, but oh well.  I guess it’s probably more important to actually work on compatibility anyway.)

This also means that if you are someone who has straddled that fence because your work machine and home machine ran different systems (as I did for far too long), you have another browser option that will provide a consistent experience on both machines.

There it is…one more thing for Mac and PC users to agree on.  A great experience with YMail in Safari.

The Yahoo! Mail team…bringing users together.

Ryan Knight
Community Manager
Yahoo! Mail

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For everyone out there who has been longing for an easier way to set Yahoo! Mail as your default email client I have some delightful news. With the much ballyhooed recent debut of Firefox 3, as well as some recent updates to All-New Mail, it’s never been easier.

Some of our savvier Windows users have been able to follow a rather simple (but somewhat tedious) process for some time now, and our Mac users have been totally left out (the sad price we pay for being tragically hip), but now everyone can join in on the fun with just a couple steps.

One of the big additions to FF3 is the Applications section of the Options/Preferences menu. There you can designate how just about any type of link will behave when you click on it. Just look for “mailto” under Content Type and select “Use Yahoo! Mail”.

The list of content types is pretty long, so they’ve also provided a handy Search field to narrow your results.

Now if you happen to be a bit phobic when it comes to digging around your Options/Preferences, All-New Mail has an awesome alternative.

Recently added to the Options drop-down is an entry for “Set Y! Mail as my default webmail”. Doing so will switch your “mailto” action from whatever it was to “Always Ask”.

The next time you click on a “mailto” link you will get a handy pop-up asking you to pick your email client, and giving you the choice to make that selection permanent. Settings changed and you never had to navigate your Options/Prefs.

If you haven’t tried Firefox 3 you can download it from the Mozilla website.  Most of you should already see that new choice in your Options menu, but if not you should have it in the next week or so.

Ryan Knight
Community Manager
Yahoo! Mail

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The response was great from last week’s post about new features in All-New Mail, and it’s awesome to see how many of you are excited by the “Auto-Save” and “Download All” additions. As shocking as it might be, however, I managed to forget what might be the single greatest enhancement in the history of Yahoo! Mail.

***Drumroll please***

If you are using the All-New Mail you can now access the blog from a link within the Help dropdown! Of course if you are reading this you already know how to get to this blog, but now users will have another way to access the blog from right within Mail (along with the existing RSS Feed option).

Hopefully this will not only make it easier for some of you existing readers to find your way back to the blog, but should help expose it to even more people who didn’t even know it was here.

And while we’re on the topic of ways to access the blog, I thought I’d include some information for iPhone/iPod Touch users. If you add the YMail blog to the Home Screen you will see that we have provided a button icon to replace the screenshot you would otherwise get. I’m sure that sounds small, but I know that button icons are a big deal to a lot of iPhone enthusiasts. So add the blog to your Home Screen and visit from there as often as you like … with only one touch from your fingertip.

Speaking of iPhone, I’ve got something else you might like … but has nothing to do with Yahoo! It looks like the feature was included in the 1.1.1 release of the software, but you can now bring up the iPod controls, even when the phone is locked, by simply pressing the home button twice. I had already heard that doing this when unlocked brought up favorite phone contacts, but never heard about the iPod controls (a major pain point for me).

Ryan K. Community Manager Yahoo! Mail

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Before I go any further … of course that pun was intended! In keeping with a decidedly Apple theme this week, I thought this would be a good opportunity to probe some of you Apple focused readers.Since its launch last summer, much has been made of the iPhone’s Mail and Web browsing functions. While the device does offer an internet that “is not watered down”, many users still like having a streamlined version of their favorite sites. On the other hand some folks strenuously object to streamlining, believing that it is in fact a watering down of the internet.

I’ve enabled a somewhat streamlined version of the blog that will automatically load if you are on an iPhone, but I’m also interested in creating an even more iPhone styled version (like Macworld’s special iPhone Central site) that would be an optional interface. Take a look at the currently enabled version and let me know what you think.

Additionally, some users prefer to check Y!Mail through the browser interface, rather than the iPhone’s Mail application, and it would be very useful to get a feel for how many prefer each option.

In the interest of serving my readers, I want to make sure that I know about what you prefer. This brings me to the latest polling questions!

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There’s a very good chance that many of you have already noticed, but just in case you haven’t, I’m here with some delightful news for my fellow Mac users. Yahoo! Mail, a key starting point for millions of people around the world, is now fully accessible from Safari 3.0 on the Mac!

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For all of you iPhone users out there, I just wanted to make sure you all knew about the most recent software update. Version 1.1.3 contains a bunch of new stuff, and upgrading to the latest offering should improve the performance of Mail. Even more exciting for me is that you can bookmark this blog to your home screen as a web clip. That’s right … a button that takes you straight to this blog!

If you aren’t sure if you’re running the latest software on your phone (released a few weeks ago) there are two ways to check. When you connect the iPhone to iTunes you can check for updates.

If you aren’t near your computer and want to check your software version directly from your phone you can go to:

Settings > General > About, and look for Version.

You can’t update the software directly from your phone, but it will at least let you know if you need to upgrade.

Ryan Knight Community Manager Yahoo! Mail

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