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

by Andrew Molyneux, Senior Product Manager – Yahoo! Mail

Here at Yahoo! Mail, we’re (not surprisingly) big fans of email. But, sometimes a conversation is better suited to IM or SMS. That’s why today we’re excited to be launching a refresh to the Yahoo! Messenger integration in Yahoo! Mail (Messenger in Mail). With this, we’re making it faster and easier than ever for you to IM and SMS within Yahoo! Mail. We’re also introducing a number of customizable options so your IM and SMS experience is personalized for you.

Faster
Speed is paramount – especially in IM conversations. That’s why we’ve re-architected Messenger in Mail so it’s nearly 50% faster than before. We’ve also thought about how to make it faster to use. For instance, most of us communicate with the same handful of people. The new Messenger in Mail has a “Favorites” feature so that you can quickly start a conversation with them. And, if you want to see all of your Messenger friends, simply click the Messenger dropdown next to ‘Me:’.

Easier
Just like our new Yahoo! Mail experience, we’ve streamlined the interface to make it cleaner and easier to use. We’ve improved the notification experience so it doesn’t distract. When your chat window is minimized or closed, and you receive a notification, it will appear in the left rail.

Customizable
The new Messenger in Mail is a customizable experience. Chats appear in a window that you can move, resize or minimize based on your preferences. Additionally, you can set yourself as available, invisible or offline by clicking ‘Available’ menu next to ‘Me:’ in the left rail. And, you can add a custom status message by clicking the Messenger dropdown and selecting ‘Custom Status’. We remember your last five status messages so you can quickly change to a status you use often.

We hope you like these new changes. Check them out and let us know what you think!

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Today, we’re rolling out an updated version of Yahoo! Calendar that’s cleaner and easier to use. Our intent with these changes is to give you more information in fewer clicks, so you can more easily manage your busy schedule and ToDo lists.

New Calendar Features:

• View your entire day easily: Now when you go to the Day view, you can see events for 8+ hours without having to scroll down.
• Specify the event location more quickly: You can now easily add the location of an event using the quick add feature.
• Event previews: In Day view, easily get a preview of all the events on your calendar for that day, including important details like location and meeting organizer. To drill down on an event, just click once on the event entry and to edit, just double-click the event.

New ToDos Features

Like many of you, I use the ToDos feature to organize my tasks and I’m excited about the updates we’ve made to the ToDos feature since now you can prioritize tasks across multiple lists.

• Important and Urgent) to each ToDo. With new Priority View, you can see all ToDos across all ToDo lists grouped by priority. You can easily change priority of ToDos by dragging and dropping tasks from one priority section to another.
• Quick ToDo Addition: Miss that feature earlier? Not anymore. In every ToDo view, you can quickly add a ToDo inline at the end of the section.
• Marking as done: Like many of you, I love checking off a ToDo item off my list. Now marking a ToDo as done takes just one click.  Hover on the ToDo and click on the check-box to mark it as done. Satisfaction!
• Postponing a ToDo: Many times we need to postpone ToDos to tomorrow or a later date. To make it easier, you can click on the Postpone icon on the right to push the due date out.

These new features are rolling out globally today for Yahoo! Calendar and are available on calendar.yahoo.com or via Yahoo! Mail using the Calendar tab. Please check them out and let us know what you think!

Ashish Parnami

Sr. Product Manager

Yahoo! Calendar

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By Lee Parry, Senior Director of Product Management, Yahoo!

This morning, we introduced the new Yahoo! Mail for iPad and Android tablets. As we set out to develop these apps, we wanted to take full advantage of the unique aspects of tablet devices, like the beautiful screens and intuitive gestures, while also making it easier and more fun for you to read and manage your email. Below are our tips for using a couple of our favorite new features.

Enjoy a lean-back, magazine-style experience when reading your email.

• Tap the full-screen button in the lower left corner of your message to expand it across the entire screen. If you want to reply, delete, file or star a message simply tap anywhere on the screen and Yahoo! Mail’s familiar icons will appear.
• To move to the next message on your iPad, simply swipe, as if you’re turning the page in a magazine.
• To flip through messages even faster, simply tap on the side of the screen to rapidly scan through your inbox.

Focus on the messages you care about most with a new feature that lets you easily sort by sender in Yahoo! Mail’s split-screen view.

• Select a message in your inbox on the left side of the screen by checking the box that appears with the email. You will then see that sender’s name appear on the right side of your screen.
• Swipe on the sender’s name and you will see Yahoo! Mail’s familiar icons appear to delete, file, star or mark as unread or spam.
• You’ll also see a plus sign that will indicate how many more messages you have from that sender. If you select that, it will pull all the messages from that sender and then you can star, delete or file them all at once. Just think – you can easily take control of your inbox with just a few taps.

We hope these new features make email on your tablet easy and enjoyable. Check them out and let us know what you think!

Download Yahoo! Mail for iPad

Download Yahoo! Mail for Android tablets

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By Ash Sharma, Product Manager, Yahoo! Mail for Mobile

Like you, we often find ourselves checking email throughout the day while we’re on the go. If you’re using the new Yahoo! Mail app for iOS, here are a few tips to make it even easier for you to send and organize messages in Yahoo! Mail for iPhone.

Make sure you’ve got the latest version

We’ve issued a couple of updates to our iPhone app since December, so make sure you’re running the latest version of the app that’s available in the App Store.

Quickly delete a group of messages

We know that email can get unwieldy, so we give you several ways to keep it organized. To quickly delete a group of messages, tap the checkbox to the left of each message to select it and reveal a trash icon within the toolbar at the bottom of your screen. From there, you can delete messages individually, select all and delete, move messages to your personal folders, mark as spam, or change the status to read or unread.

Sometimes even legitimate emails can set off alerts that mark them as spam. To get those back, open the spam folder and tap the checkbox to the left of each message you want to keep. Select the Not Spam icon shown within the toolbar at the bottom of your screen.

Disable push notifications

Don’t need notifications for your Yahoo! Mail app? Turn off push notifications in your device’s Settings. While in Settings, go to the Notifications screen and tap on Yahoo! Mail. Here, you can change the Alert Style to “none.” You can also change the settings for sounds or the badge app icon.

Other problems?

If you’re facing intermittent issues, such as crashing, freezing, issues loading mail, etc., try resetting the app. To reset the app, sign in and go to the sidebar (the icon on the top left), then select Settings and Reset App.

If you have other questions or feedback, you can reach the Yahoo! Mail for iPhone team directly at aerogram-feedback@yahoo-inc.com.

Thanks for using Yahoo! Mail for iPhone– we look forward to bringing you more tips and features soon!

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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.

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Today we are launching two new features on Yahoo! Calendar that make using the Calendar an easier and more seamless part of your Yahoo! Mail experience.

1. Yahoo! Calendar as a tab in Yahoo! Mail:

• Currently, users access the Calendar by clicking on the Calendar link under the “Applications” section in the left panel. The Calendar would then open in a new browser window/tab.
• To simplify the process (who wants more tabs open on their browser!?), we’re now making Calendar a permanent tab within Yahoo! Mail. So, as soon as you login to your Yahoo! Mail account, you will see a ‘Calendar’ tab right next to the ‘Contacts’ tab. This tab will remain there even as you navigate around to other tabs within Yahoo! Mail.

• When you’re inside the ‘Calendar’ tab, you’ll be able to search for events/tasks on your calendar.
• Additionally, you will be able to access ‘Calendar Options’ under the ‘Options’ menu in the header.  Options include the ability to share a calendar (like with your spouse to make it easier to align busy family schedules!) or import holiday calendars from around the world.

2. Sending RSVP response for Calendar invites from within Yahoo! Mail:

• Now, when you receive a calendar invite from your friends, you can easily respond to the event organizer with ‘Attending’/’Not Attending’/’Maybe’, add comments and have the event added to your own Yahoo! Calendar.

• You can also quickly check your availability by navigating to the day’s calendar through the ‘Check Availability’ button.   When you respond, you can also set a reminder for yourself so that you don’t miss out on fun events like ‘Make your own pizza party’.

• When you open an invitation that has already been updated or cancelled, you’ll see an indicator telling you that ‘This event is out of date’ or ‘This event has been cancelled’.
• Best part is the invitation feature works for calendar invites sent by organizers using any calendar client like Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal, Windows Live Calendar, Thunderbird and of course Yahoo! Calendar.

These features have begun to roll out to all of our global users. Try out these new additions to Yahoo! Calendar and check back often! We’ve got more features coming later this year.

Ashish Parnami

Sr. Product Manager

Yahoo! Mail & Calendar

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If you’re like me, you send and receive a LOT of photos in Yahoo! Mail.  From baby pictures, to soccer photos, to what-happens-in-Vegas-stays-in-Vegas shenanigans, my Yahoo! Mail contains a treasure trove of memories.  The problem is, those memories are buried deep within my mailbox.  Ask me to retrieve those great photos Grandma sent when the twins were 3 (or was that 4?) and I’m likely to throw my hands up in dismay.

No longer.  Now, Yahoo! Mail makes it super simple to find and share those treasures with our new Photos app.  The Photos app aggregates all of the photos in your inbox that you’ve ever sent or received during the entire life of your email account. You can see thumbnails of all the photos and filter by date, sender, folder and size.

Check it out and you’ll quickly see how easy and fun it is to use! Take a walk down memory lane—relive that family reunion from 2010, the trip to Mexico or your nephew’s graduation from just last week! The Photos app defaults to showing the most recent photos first, but to surface your older photos just select “Sort by: Oldest.”

When you’re ready to share, you can either send your photos as an attachment in Yahoo! Mail, or you can post your own photos to Flickr and share from there.  Not a Flickr user?  No problem, we let you create an account seamlessly from within Yahoo! Mail.  If you’re an existing Flickr user, your Flickr account can easily be connected to your Yahoo! Mail inbox.  Now you can see your entire Flickr photostream in Yahoo! Mail.  Remember that photo you uploaded to Flickr from your iPhone yesterday?  There it is, in your Yahoo! Mail.

See how the Photos application works in this video.

Key features of the new Photos application includes:

• Skip searching: Easily find all of your photos in one place
• Share in seconds: Email your photos with one click or upload to Flickr
• Find the associated email: Locate the photo (or attachment) and the email it was originally sent with
• Sort easily: Easily sort and filter photos and attachments by sender, date, size or file type

The Photos app can be found in the lower-left side of Yahoo! Mail in the Applications area. To learn more, please visit our help page. Enjoy!

Miriam Geller

Director of Product Management

Yahoo! Mail

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I love my pocket-sized Flip Video and my tiny digital camera. Recently, I brought the cameras to my kids’ first time on ice skates and captured their elegant moves and occasional gaffes in HD brilliance. But when I wanted to share the clip with my family and friends, I realized that sending them a 78MB video memory would be a challenge. Yahoo! Mail allows me to attach up to 25MB in each email, and usually that’s plenty. This task, however, required more.

Thanks to the new “Attach Large Files” application on Yahoo! Mail, anyone can easily upload and send files of up to 100MB from their Yahoo! Mail accounts. The application, developed by YouSendIt, the global leader in secure digital content delivery, leverages the Yahoo! Mail Application Platform to enable this capability.

You can access the YouSendIt app by clicking on the “Attach Large Files” paper airplane icon in the Applications area of Yahoo! Mail.

From there, click on the “select files” button to attach files into your message. YouSendIt uploads those files and then opens an email compose window that includes a link to the file for download.

Send the email to whomever you choose (here it comes, Mom). The recipient can click on the “download” button within your message to retrieve your files. All files sent through YouSendIt are encrypted and then scanned by the system for viruses, so they will arrive safely. YouSendIt will first go live to users in the U.S., and in the coming weeks our international users will get access.

So go ahead— SuperSize your messages.

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Here at Yahoo! we’re always striving to give our users the best possible communications experience across all the devices they use. In recent months we’ve released some great new Yahoo! Mail products for mobile devices like the iPhone, iPod touch and Android phones. Now we are setting our sights on the iPad.

If you’ve used our recently launched HTML5 mobile Web mail for iPhone you’ll feel right at home. We’ve kept all the things users love about our new mobile Web mail experience, while also optimizing for the gorgeous large screen of the iPad. You can expect the iPad experience to be:

• Faster and more reliable: If you’re offline, Yahoo! Mail uses local caching capabilities to help you access and search your messages even without an Internet connection.

• Smart: You can find and organize your messages using Full Search, personal folders and Smart Folders with messages from your most important contacts and optimized views for photos and file attachments.

• Feature Rich: View rich photo attachments in their full form, or as previews directly in the inbox view. Also includes a dual-pane view to make reading and organizing a breeze.

The new Yahoo! Mail experience will be available globally to anyone who has an iPad. So if you do have one, simply open up Safari and head on over to http://mail.yahoo.com to try it for yourself.

Of course this is just the first version, and we’ll be constantly iterating to add new features, improve performance, and make Yahoo! Mail for iPad the best it can possibly be. And please let us know what you think. One of the great things about working on Yahoo! Mail is getting so much direct feedback from our users. It’s so exciting to hear about how people are using the products, and also to hear your ideas for how we can make our experiences even better.

We’re looking forward to hearing what you think about the new Yahoo! Mail for iPad. Enjoy!

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Just remembered it was your friend’s birthday? Want to let someone know how much you miss them? How about making the invite for your upcoming party a bit more memorable? Or even better, why not send a funky message to your friends just for fun?

With My Cool Fonts you can always find a font that suits your mood and gives your email messages a personal touch. Your personalized emails will not only stand out in a crowded inbox, but they will also surprise your friends and even put a smile on their faces.

Creating colorful emails using our original fonts is very easy. Just launch the My Cool Fonts app from the Applications menu, select a font, type a message, click on “Create email” and voila! A new email gets created, and you can then add any other text or attachments to your illustrated message.

Be creative! Whether you are trying to impress your friends or getting your point across in a funny way, there are plenty of styles and colors to choose from in our growing library of free Fonts.

Below are samples from just of few of them:

Most of these fonts have its their own set of smileys, which you can browse and easily insert into your message from the Smileys menu. See the whole list here.

The Fontself application is now available to Yahoo! Mail users in the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, and the U.K. We’ll also be adding some very cool personalization features very soon, so keep an eye out for them!

Enjoy!

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