Yahoo! Mail Blog

Keeping your account safe is our highest priority. My colleagues and I have posted a number of articles about how to keep your information safeguarded and to avoid emails asking for account details. Unfortunately, phishing attempts do occur, so please remember to ignore all emails requesting your Yahoo! ID and password. We will never ask you for this information.

And even armed with all the tools and knowledge, sometimes though your account can become compromised by crafty phishers. It is very important in these cases that we offer you the best support possible. To assist you, we are now providing direct phone support to all customers in the UK and Ireland whose accounts are phished so we can fix your problem in a timely manner.

The contact phone number is available in our help section dedicated to Phishing.

If you’re using the new Yahoo! Mail
http://help.yahoo.com/l/uk/yahoo/mail/yahoomail/abuse/abuse-50.html

If you’re using Yahoo! Mail Classic
http://help.yahoo.com/l/uk/yahoo/mail/classic/abuse/abuse-51.html

Phone support is available only for users who have had their accounts compromised. For any other help request we have live chat and email support.

We hope this will help to solve any potential issue related to Phishing or any other case where your account may be compromised.

Talk to you soon,

Gregory Talon
Product Manager

Our Yahoo! Mail team is committed to providing a best-in-class mail experience to our users. Sending, receiving and attaching your files and photos should always work flawlessly, and almost all of the time it does. But when you have over 300 million mailboxes, every once in a while something might not work quite right. So what do you do if you ever experience an issue with your Yahoo! Mail account?

Well, if you are a Yahoo! Mail user in the UK, you can now get instant support from our top-class customer care team. We are now offering Live Chat Support to all of our Yahoo! Mail users in the UK and Ireland. Just visit our help pages and click on ‘Contact Us’. You will see an opt ion to chat with us live now. Just click that button and you will be connected directly to one of our chat support agents.

Live chat support is available 8am-8pm / 7 days a week, and is just one click away. We are excited to offer you this service, which I think you’ll find is unique among our competitors.

Yahoo! Mail is available anywhere on your mobile.
Pretty often in the morning, I’m getting off my flat without having checked my personal emails. So I’m quite happy to be able to connect to the internet on my mobile and check my emails while going to the office, in the tube (I get signal at Embankment station) or in the bus… Actually whenever I’ve got inactivity time (please avoid checking them on your racing bicycle at the traffic light stop, that’s dangerous! ok?). Whatever if you’re an email / iPhone addict like me or not, you’ll be pleased to check your Yahoo! Mail inbox on the go when you need it (as long as your mobile can connect to the internet).

Yahoo! will launch a new mobile experience pretty soon.
In order to improve your mobile experience with emails, we’re working on a brand new Yahoo! Mail experience for mobile phones. I’ll give you more details on this really soon. I just wanted to let you know that things are coming up.

What do you think this new Yahoo! Mail experience for mobile will be?

Gregory Talon
Product Manager – Yahoo! Mail

The usage of the “Updates” feature is a personal choice really.

Thanks to the “Updates” within Yahoo! Mail, my family and my friends can follow a piece of my actions and discoveries on the Internet (only what I’m willing to share obviously). My entourage can actually keep an eye on a part of my day-to-day online life.It generates discussion between us, that’s cool. But sometimes we don’t want to share some of those things with everyone and some people are just not willing to share anything online. Both choices are understandable and Yahoo! has no intention of dictating your choice.  We allow you to manage what you share and with whom.

The page “Manage Updates” on your Yahoo! Profile lets you control what you’re sharing and with whom.

- Go to your Yahoo! Profile (profiles.yahoo.com)
- On your profile, click on ”Updates” and then Manage My Updates

On this page, you can  control who you’re sharing each type of Update with. For instance, you can decide to share your Flickr pictures only with your “Connections” (friends & family), the article you publish on your blog with everyone and not to share any video you add on YouTube.

It’s just as you wish, you own it all.

You can also access this page using the direct URL:
http://profiles.yahoo.com/settings/updates/

If you don’t want to share any Updates

It’s fairly easy to deactivate them in the Yahoo! Mail’s Options.

- Click on “Options” and then “More Options”
- Deselect “Enable Updates”

Have a great weekend,

Gregory talon
Product Manager

Apps in Mail let you activate all sorts of additional features that enhance your experience …. Today I want to introduce you to Fontself, an application that allows you to add something special to your emails. To tell you all about it is Fernando Saturno, Director of Product for Fontself.
Enjoy, Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team
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We are really proud to announce that Fontself is now available in Yahoo! Mail. With the new Fontself application, now you can add a bit of color and style to your messages using a variety of original hand-drawn fonts and send eye-catching emails to your friends.

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 Fontself, you can always find a cool font that suits your mood and gives your email messages that very personal touch. Your personalized emails will not only stand out in a crowded inbox, but will surprise your friends and put a smile on their face.

Creating colorful emails using our original fonts is very easy. First, click on this link to take you to the Applications gallery where you can install the Fontself application. After, just launch the Fontself 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 colours to choose from in our growing library of free Fonts.

Below are samples from just of few of them:

Most of these fonts have their own set of smileys, so expect some interesting surprises to pop up as you type your messages. The whole list of smileys is here.

The Fontself application is currently available to all Yahoo! Mail UK users, and will be released in additional European countries very soon. And for those of you who are eager to start creating your own alphabets, we have some extra goodness coming your way soon… so, stay tuned!

Fernando Saturno – Fontself

Our goal is to make Yahoo! Mail the smartest communication tool on the web. Since our conversations often start while sharing what we do or like, Yahoo! Mail now allows you to share Updates about the things you do on the Web, with the people that you care about the most.

How do you share the things you do on your favourite sites – tweeting on Twitter, posting a video on Youtube, listening to music on Lastfm or uploading photos to Flickr – with your friends and family? You’ll see, it’s pretty simple.

1. Sharing Updates from Yahoo! sites (Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Buzz, Flickr, etc.)
You don’t have to do anything to share your Updates on Yahoo! sites.

Here is an example of an Update coming from a Yahoo! site:  Adding a picture on Flickr
Flickr is one of the world’s largest online photo sharing communities where people share their photos and personal video clips with friends, family and the world. I recently added a new picture to my Flickr account, and now Yahoo! posts a notification to my Yahoo! Profile and to the “What’s New” page of my contacts in Yahoo! Mail.

Here is what my account looks like after posting to Flickr

Here is what my connections see on their “What’s New” page.

2. Sharing Updates from other popular websites
Everyone has their own list of favourite sites. That’s why we offer you the ability to share your Updates from sites like YouTube, Twitter, Vimeo and many more with your friends using Yahoo! Mail. To start sharing, you need to link your favourite sites to your Yahoo! Account by going to the “Share More” section of your Yahoo! Profile.
http://profiles.yahoo.com/share_more/

From here you can select the sites you want to share Updates from and add them by providing your related user name.

Here’s an example of an Update from a non Yahoo! site: Publishing or adding a video to your favourites on YouTube.
When I’m not at my day job, I’m also a musician. So I have my own channel on YouTube where I publish my music videos or discover what’s upcoming like this single titled « Take It In » from Hot Chip (a Grammy-nominated British electropop band). So I added YouTube in the “Share More” section of my Yahoo! Profile. Now I can easily share all my discoveries with my connections.

Here is what my profile page looks like with the YouTube update

Here’s what it looks like on my connection’s ‘What’s New’ page

The list of sites that you can connect with your Yahoo! account:
You’ll find the complete list of sites that you can connect with your Yahoo! account on the “Share More” section of your profile. We are always updating the list of sites.
http://profiles.yahoo.com/share_more/

If you’re not ready to start sharing your Updates
Your privacy is very important to us.  So if you’re not interested in sharing Updates with your connections, you have the ability to turn them off.  Just click ‘Options’ at the top right of your Inbox and select ‘Mail Options’.  Then uncheck the box ‘Enable Connection-related features’ and click ‘Save Changes’.

Gregory Talon
Product Manager Yahoo! Mail

Apps in Mail let you do more, be more social and stay better connected. Our new My Social Networks App (available now to our UK users) makes it easy to do all three. We’ve teamed up with sobees, who developed the App, to let you keep up with Facebook, Twitter and MySpace right from inside your Yahoo! mailbox. Who better to tell you about it, than Francois Bochatay from the Sobees team? It is now my favorite App in mail. It’s brilliant, so keep reading.
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

We are really proud to announce that sobees is now available in Yahoo! Mail. This new application, called My Social Networks, is the one that was missing in your Inbox! As a social client application, it lets you stay up-to-date and interact with all your different communities (Facebook, Twitter and MySpace), just like sobees lite and sobees web do.

What are your friends doing right now? Did they share a picture? Are they enjoying a good meal in a restaurant close to you? Follow all the activities of your friends without leaving the comfort of your Inbox thanks to My Social Networks. In addition, the App also lets you search – in real time – all the messages people are sharing about your brand, your favorite sports team, a movie star, etc. You will be the first to know if anything that matters to you happens. My Social Networks also gives you the possibility to update your status on multiple social networks in one go.

The application would not have been complete without fully integrating with your Yahoo! Inbox. We have therefore developed some ‘Yahoo! Mail only’ features. Easily share, by email, any item you come across on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. We’ve given you the possibility to add Facebook events to your Yahoo! calendar with a single click. And, if you want to tell your friends what is on your mind while reading an email, just open the ‘Update Status’ pop-up window.

This integration has been a really exciting experience and we are happy to be working with the Yahoo! team. Our aim has always been to create an easy, intuitive application to help people make the most of their social networks.

My Social Networks is currently available for Yahoo! Mail UK users. However, it will be added to additional European countries very soon, so stay tuned!

Francois Bochatay – sobees

The Yahoo! Mail team and I have used this blog many times to keep you informed about how you can stay safe and protect your personal information on the Internet and in Yahoo! Mail. We’ve posted on the best ways to recognize and avoid phishing scams and how to avoid falling victim to lottery attacks. We also use several measures to help you protect your account information including secure login pages, the ability to set up a sign-in seal, and scanning attachments for viruses.

There is another threat that exists called the ‘cookie replay’ attack, where attackers gain access to your account using public WiFi networks. It is an industry wide issue that can affect any Web site including Yahoo! Mail. While this threat does exist, I have not heard of any of our users complaining about being a victim.

I try to be as safe as I can when online. Here are some things you should do to help protect you against this type of exploit:

• Always be cautious when accessing your email account when using public WiFi networks. Consider accessing your account only on secure networks.
• If you need to use public WiFi networks to access your email, use a POP email client to access your mail via SSL. Yahoo! Mail UK users have the ability to send and receive mail via email clients like Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird and others (our friends on the other side of the ‘pond’ will need to sign up for Mail Plus). Make sure to set up your client with SSL security for the best account security.
• Sign up to a personal VPN service (or, if they offer it, use your work’s VPN)

We feel strongly about offering you protections to safeguard your account. We are committed to developing solutions to tackle this industry wide security issue. And we hope to have a solution in sometime in 2010.

I will to keep you up-to-date on the progress of that solution. Until then, be smart when accessing your account via public WiFi networks. If you must access your email on a public WiFi network, try to use POP via SSL or a personal VPN client.

More general information on security can be found at http://security.yahoo.com, and for security tips for mail visit http://uk.antispam.yahoo.com/. As always, please feel free to contact our Customer Care team.

You might have noticed that we unveiled our new global marketing campaign. It includes a new video ad – ‘Anthem’ – that features the many ways that Yahoo! connects our users to the people and things that matter most to them. At the heart of the campaign is YOU and how you use Yahoo! to make the Internet your own.

BeCause Yahoo! Mail is all about you too, it now offers the ability to:

• Have your picture on your “What’s New” page and a complete profile http://profiles.yahoo.com
• Select and add useful apps you want in Yahoo! Mail. Click on the “+” button next to “Application” in the bottom left of Yahoo! Mail)
• See messages and updates from people you really care about right on your “What’s New” page

And we will continue to innovate and enhance Yahoo! Mail to make sure that we provide you with the Smartest Mail experience on the Internet.

Gregory Talon – Product Manager Yahoo! Mail Europe