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

Got an appointment or a hot date you can’t miss? Want to turn your iPhone into your personal assistant? For those of you who own an iPhone 3GS or below, and run iOS4, you can sync the appointments on your Yahoo! Calendar to the calendar on your iPhone in a few easy steps. Once activated, you’ll be able to add or find your appointments whether you’re running around with your iPhone, or if you’re visiting Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! Calendar on your PC. Here’s what you need to do:

If you’re an existing user:
Settings->Mail/Contacts/Calendar->Your Mail Account

If you’re using Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! Calendar for the first time:
Settings->Mail/Contacts/Calendar->Add Account->Yahoo->Enter your account info and click next.

For iPhone 4 users, you won’t need to do anything because the new phone software will automatically activate your Yahoo! Calendar once you sync your Yahoo! Mail. You can also sync your contacts to Yahoo! by using the CardDAV protocol. Visit this page to learn how to set this up.

Going forward, you’ll see more ways to access Yahoo! Mail features on all types of mobile devices, such as the iPhone and Android phones, to help organize your life. In fact, we’ve seen tremendous growth after we activated Calendar sync for the iPhone 4. Since the iPhone 4 launched in June, many users have jumped on board and activated their Yahoo! accounts on the new phone, and we expect more to follow:

Try it out, and tell us what you think.

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Lots of Yahoo! Mail users are Facebook users. If you follow this blog, you know that we’ve been trying to help you get more out of both services, from updating your Facebook status from Yahoo! Mail to importing your Facebook friend’s email addresses in Yahoo! Contacts. Today I’d like to tell you about a new feature that populates your contact’s details page with information from Facebook – all without you barely lifting a finger!

To activate any Facebook-related feature, you first must link your Facebook account by clicking on “Add to Facebook” in the status section of Yahoo! Mail (if you’ve linked before, you are already good to go).

After you sign in with Facebook, presto! Your Yahoo! Contacts now gets filled with information from Facebook to make it even more useful. (Plus you get all the new features we’ve launched recently – and continue to launch – in Yahoo! Mail).

Specifically, for any contact that uses Facebook, you will now see public details about them automatically added from Facebook. For example, you’ll see their Facebook photo and any information they have chosen to share publicly – like current location and work history. Your Yahoo! Contacts just populated itself!

For contacts that you are also connected with on Facebook, you get to see even more about them including their birthday, email address if you don’t have it, and even their most recent status message – right from their contact details page.

Now your Yahoo! Contacts becomes much richer – effortlessly – by supplementing details you’ve added with information automatically from Facebook (and don’t worry, we will never overwrite Facebook details with anything you’ve added). It’s just our way of helping you stay connected to the people who matter the most to you.

Again, to get started, simply link your account and you’ll be on your way to a better Yahoo! Contacts in no time! As always, please let us know what you think and thank you in advance for your feedback.

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Have you ever lost track of a friend because she moved and forgot to let you know her new address and phone number? When you’ve changed your contact information, did you remember to let all of your friends and colleagues know?

Wouldn’t it be great if you had an address book that updated itself — that always had the most up-to-date information for the people who matter most to you?

In the latest version of Yahoo! Contacts – in addition to making it simple to import email addresses from your Facebook friends – we have rolled out an “auto-updating” Address Book! Let’s take that friend who moved away and didn’t share her new phone number. In the old days, you might have lost touch with her. But now, when your friend updates her Yahoo! contact details and chooses to share the information, your Yahoo! Contacts gets automatically updated. Here’s how it works:

Let’s turn my example around, and make sure your friends always have the most up-to-date information for you! Just go to Yahoo! Contacts and click on the Share my info link under the Popular Tools.

Clicking on the link will show all the contact information that Yahoo! has for you.

If everything looks good, just click Start Sharing and this information will be shared with all the people you’ve chosen to share it with (such as your Connections). If you are like me, much of the information shown will likely come from when you registered for Yahoo! In other words – it’s ancient! To update your information just click Edit to go to your account information page. From there you can easily update your contact details and choose who you want to share it with. Remember, you have complete control over what you share.

Now here’s the fun part: your friends get your latest contact information without having to lift a finger! First, they will get a Yahoo! Update notifying them that your contact information has changed. Next, when they go to look you up in Yahoo! Contacts, they will see the contact information you gave them access to and the last time it was updated (don’t worry, none of the information you have for them will ever be over-written). Here’s what you’re friends will see:

Hopefully this feature helps you never lose touch with the people who matter most.

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You might have heard that Yahoo! announced plans in December to integrate Facebook Connect across a variety of our popular sites and services. While we’re still early in the partnership, we wanted to let you know about one new thing you can do with Facebook that we are rolling out over the next few days.

In addition to importing your contacts from sites like Gmail and Windows Live Hotmail, starting this week you can now easily add your Facebook friends’ email addresses to your Yahoo! Contacts list. This will make it easy to communicate and share with the people you care about – wherever you are in Yahoo!. So when you are on Yahoo! Sports and you want to email your old high school buddy that great article on the Winter Olympics, his email address is just a click away. Or maybe you want to forward your cousin your airplane reservations on Yahoo! Mail, but you’ve never emailed him before. Now you can type the first few letters of his name in Yahoo! Mail and – presto! – his email address from his Facebook profile will appear in your email.

Importing from Facebook is super simple. To get started, just go to the Import Contacts landing page and select Facebook (and as you can tell from screenshot below, it is also easy to import email addresses from other services).

Next, enter your Facebook username and password in the Facebook login window that opens.

After you click login, we will authorize your account and begin importing, which may take a minute or two depending on your Internet speed and how many Facebook friends you have.

That’s it! Your Facebook friends’ email addresses will be added to your Yahoo! Contacts. You will see which contacts and email addresses were imported and who you already had contact information for (don’t worry, we won’t create duplicates).

We hope this feature makes it even easier to stay connected to the people who matter the most to you. And this is just one of the first steps you’ll see us take to help people interact with Facebook users all across Yahoo!. Stay tuned here and elsewhere on Yahoo! for more ways to use Facebook and Yahoo! together.

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Recently, we introduced a quick and easy way to consolidate all your different contacts lists into your Yahoo! Contacts. Whether you’ve imported the various address books that you’ve accumulated over the years or have a really big contact list, you may now find yourself with a few duplicate entries. If so, no problem, now it’s easier than ever to merge duplicate entries into one.

To get started, when you first open Yahoo! Contacts, just click the link to ‘Fix duplicate entries’. (There is also a link in the ‘Tools’ button at the top of your contacts window.)

The tool will scan your contacts list and present you with the duplicate entries that were found. To combine the duplicates into one, just click the button ‘Merge all EXACT’ and then ‘Yes’ to confirm.

OK, so it’s actually two clicks, but it really couldn’t be any easier to clean up your contacts list. If you would rather review each duplicate separately, just click the ‘Next’ button instead. A wizard will guide you through the process of merging each duplicate entry.

If you made a resolution to organize and clean up your address book for 2010 and were dreading doing it, now there is no excuse not to. What may have taken hours will now take just a couple of minutes.

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Hi everyone! My name is Ajay and I am a project manager for Yahoo! Mail and Contacts. Today, I’d like to show you how to add a splash of color to your Yahoo! Mailbox. These same themes are available in Yahoo! Mail and Contacts so you’ll be completely color coordinated! Here’s how to change the colors in your Yahoo! Mailbox:

If you use the All New Yahoo! Mail:

1. From the Yahoo! Mailbox click on the Options menu
2. Choose Color and then select the color theme of your choice
3. That’s it you’re done!

If you use Classic Mail:

1. Click on the Options menu
2. Choose Mail Options

3. Choose Colors

4. Choose the theme of your choice

5. Click save and go back to your Yahoo! Mailbox.
6. Enjoy!!

The color themes in Yahoo! Mail and Contacts are a great way for you to personalize your Mailbox. I personally like ‘Lime Green’ but the feedback you’ve been sending tells me that ‘Bubblegum’ (‘Pink’ in the UK) is very popular too. Whichever theme you choose, I’m sure you’ll find one that’s right for you.

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Multiple email accounts dragging you down? Do you have too many contact lists in too many places? Following in the footsteps of Craig Wright’s post about the great new features in Yahoo! Contacts, I want to add to his list. We have made it easy for you to import, manage and consolidate your different contact lists into your Yahoo! Contacts.

A simple, easy to use form walks you through the steps of importing the various contact lists you’ve created over the years directly into your Yahoo! Contacts. You can choose to import your address books from Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook and more.

You can find the contacts import tool in the ‘Options’ menu of the new Yahoo! Mail and on the Yahoo! Contacts welcome page. Or to get started right away click this link: http://overview.mail.yahoo.com/transfercontacts

Import contact lists from multiple providers in one go, or do one at a time. After a couple more clicks you’re done. And don’t worry if you have duplicate contacts. The ‘Clean up duplicates’ tool in Yahoo! Contacts makes it easy to combine any duplicate contact entries into one.

If you’re moving to Yahoo! Mail from another provider, you can even choose to send an email alert to the contacts that you are importing. Once the import process completes, your newly imported contacts are conveniently set up as a group. To view them, just open your contacts list in Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! Contacts. Click ‘View All Contacts’ and you’ll find them grouped by the email service.

The import contacts tool is an easy and effective way to combine your various address books into one, easily managed contact list. Just like Apps in Mail, this is another tool to help you be more productive, more social and stay better connected.

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Hi everyone, my name is Craig and I am the engineering manager for Yahoo! Contacts. We’ve undergone some major changes lately, as you may have noticed. Here’s a quick update on what we have been up to lately.

A major goal for Yahoo! Contacts was to unify the experience of managing your contacts across the Yahoo! network. Before we made this change, every time another Yahoo! product wanted to integrate some form of contacts management functionality, they would have to build their own version of an address book.

Another goal was to create a product that could slip seamlessly anywhere in the Yahoo! network. We launched the new Contacts inside of Yahoo! Profiles, and have since replaced the new Yahoo! Mail and Classic Yahoo! Mail address book with the new Yahoo! Contacts. This means that all of our users will gain the benefits of new features and bug fixes all at the same time.

New features within Yahoo! Contacts:
For example, one of the latest-and-greatest features available now: Clean-up Duplicates Tool. With this new feature, you can reduce all of the duplicate contacts with a push of the button.

Another example from our latest release is the large improvement in performance. We know that when it comes to contact management, you want to get in, take care of the task at hand, and get back to what you were doing. We have significantly reduced the amount of code it takes to load the app, which translates to a much faster start-up time.

Also included in this release is some visual enhancements based on your feedback. For starters, we’ve added themes! Now you add your personal touch to Contacts by skinning it with color themes available in Yahoo! Mail. We also heard feedback from users on small screens like Netbooks that it was difficult to use Contacts. We have removed an one ad to give you more space for address book content – check it out.

Finally I wanted to call out one of our most important new features. There is a new option on the Tools menu, “Send Feedback.” Sending us a quick note via the Send Feedback link is a great way to let us know what we are doing right or what we are doing wrong! We are getting some great insights from this feedback already and we deeply consider your ideas, suggestions, and pain-points for future improvements to the product.

Let us know what you think!

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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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This month in the UK, the Office of Fair Trade is promoting their annual Scams Awareness Month. In support of their efforts, I’ve posted some scam avoidance tips on the UK Mail Blog. Since they apply just as much across the pond as they do State-side, I wanted to share them with you too. The first step in helping you to stay scam-free is to recognize the types of scams that are out there. Here are the three most common types that come in email form (which I’m sure some of you have seen before):

1. Phishing scams – These are email scams that claim to be from an organization, like a bank, and they ask you click on a link which takes you to a Website that looks real but is, in fact, fake. When you log in with your account details and password on this fake site, the bad guys gain access to your private information.
2. Lottery Scams – These are emails that tell you have won a local or foreign lottery and to get the money you have to pay processing fees and send personal details.
3. Advance fee or fund transfer schemes – These are also called Nigerian ‘419’ scams where you receive an email, often times from someone claiming to be in Africa or Asia, and claiming that they have access to huge sums of cash but need your help getting it out of the country. In this scam, the criminal offers to send you a check for $100,000 and you send him back a personal check for $90,000 and keep the difference. The scam is, of course, that the initial check is bogus but may take several weeks to clear, by which point the criminal is long gone with your money.

You know what? Your bank will NEVER ask you for a password in an email, you have NOT won the lottery and all you end up with for those huge sums is a ZERO balance in your bank account. I’ve been collaborating with our Spam Czar, Mark, and we’ve come up with these tips to help you avoid the scammers:

1. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is – If someone stopped you on the street and said he needed your help smuggling millions of dollars out of the country, you’d be pretty suspicious. We recommend the same type of skepticism when you’re online. If you didn’t enter that Sweepstakes or Lottery, there’s no way that you won. Be extra suspicious if someone offers to send you money up front — as honest as I’m sure you are, that wealthy prince who offers to buy your iPod for 10 times its value isn’t as gullible as he seems.
2. Check the FROM line – One big giveaway is when a seemingly official message originates from a generic e-mail address. If your bank has something to say to you, it won’t come from “security_services_293@freemail.com,” and when the IRS discovers a tax error in your favor, they won’t write to you from a personal account like “charlotte.magnolia@internetonline.gr” Check the return address and make sure it looks legit (including looking for spelling errors!)
3. Beware if someone requests personal information or any payment over e-mail – Yahoo! and other respected Internet companies will never request your username or password over e-mail, and neither will your bank, credit card company, or insurance agency. If a message is asking you to e-mail your sensitive information, that’s an immediate red flag. Likewise, legitimate companies will not request money up front for you to claim a prize you’ve won.

For good measure I’m including some of the choicest scam emails we’ve seen in the recent past. By arming with yourselves with the knowledge of what scams are out there and how to avoid them, you’ll be much safer online. As always, if you do see one of these scams, please do your part and click the “Spam” button inside Yahoo! Mail – it’s the single strongest way to let us know so that we can block these terrible messages.

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