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

On the Yahoo! Mail team, we have no shortage of big personalities and big brains. We’re a diverse family of technical and creative talent dedicated to making Yahoo! Mail the best email experience for you. We love what we do, and we wanted to share with you some of our thinking as well as introduce you to some members of our team.

Today we’re featuring Rick Pal, who is the product manager responsible for Yahoo! Contacts and for making Yahoo! Mail more social and connected. Yahoo! Mail is not just about sending and receiving emails; it’s also about helping you keep in touch to the people who matter most to you. In this interview, Rick discusses the thinking behind why Yahoo! Mail is becoming more social, and why we brought in Facebook to improve user experiences in Mail, Contacts, and more. Check out this video clip and feel free to give us feedback about what you like (or don’t like) about these new social features. Enjoy!

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Are you a regular at the Zynga Poker table? Catch yourself yelling “Bingo!” at work? (Don’t worry… we won’t tell). At Yahoo! Mail, we recognize that users are interacting with apps from all over the Web, so we want make it easier for your apps to communicate with you.

Yahoo! Mail will now let you know when you’ve received a notification from your favorite Yahoo! or Zynga app. When you receive an email from a Zynga game or Yahoo! App, a notification will appear in the new Recent Apps Activity module on the What’s New page in Yahoo! Mail. That means you’ll see e-mails for free chips, coupons, or points front-and-center when you sign into Yahoo! Mail.

If you haven’t started using apps on Yahoo!, it’s easy to get started. Just log into your Yahoo! account and go to your Yahoo! Pulse page. From there click the “Apps” button on the bottom-left of the page and start searching for apps that interest you. My personal favorites are Mafia Wars and Nike Football. I highly recommend them!

Keep your eye out for the new Recent App Activity module – it will only appear when you have an unread email from an app. As always, please let us know what you think. Happy gaming!

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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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In the spirit of Comicon last month, we teamed up with Wired Magazine to see what Yahoo! would look like as a superhero. In Wired’s August issue Yahoo! products were brought to life in the story “Battling the Blah Blah Blah’s” with the help of the creative minds at Wired. You can download the comic by visiting this site. There, you can also check out Yahoo!’s collection of mobile apps, including Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Finance, and the Yahoo! Homepage.

Enjoy seeing how our valiant superhero saved humankind from spam-clogged inboxes, social isolation, and mediocre meals!

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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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At Yahoo!, our goal is to help you stay in touch with the people who matter most in your life. Whether it’s on a PC, a smartphone, an iPad, or a TV, we want to bring you a Yahoo! communications experience that you can enjoy on any Internet-connected device. Today, I’m thrilled to share with you two announcements that bring this vision even closer.

The Best Yahoo! Communications Experience — for your Android Phone
First, we’re excited to unveil Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger apps for the Android operating system. These are the first Android applications that Yahoo! has ever released and we couldn’t be happier to be sharing them with you today. You can download them from the Android Market for phones that support Android OS 2.0+, such the popular Motorola Droid, the HTC Incredible and the Google Nexus One.

Yahoo! Mail and Messenger are available as separate streamlined apps, however they offer common features that will give you a better mobile communications experience that’s easy to use and immediately familiar. Both apps let you compose messages with rich text, express yourself through our many Yahoo! emoticons, access Yahoo! Address Book and phone contacts, as well as share photos that you’ve taken on your phone.

The Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger Android apps offer many of the core features that you find in their PC counterparts. In the Yahoo! Mail Android app, you can search for important messages with our Full Search and Smart Folders features and organize messages into the same personal folders you use on the PC. In Messenger you can set your Yahoo! Messenger status message, view the status messages of your buddy list contacts and chat with your MSN/Windows Live Messenger friends. For more details on the Messenger app, click here.

Give them a try today! You can download the Yahoo! Mail and Messenger apps from the Android Market.

For additional information, visit http://mobile.yahoo.com/mail/android.

The new HTML5 mobile Web Mail for iPhone and iPod Touch – A smarter, faster, and richer mobile mail experience
For our second announcement, we are upgrading our mobile Web mail experience with a faster, more feature-rich version. We wanted to give our nearly 300 million Yahoo! Mail users more options to access our service on the devices they love. The newest version of Yahoo! Mail, available today as an opt-in trial, has many of the features that you’ll find on our PC version and leverages the power of HTML5 to deliver an app-like experience never before seen on the mobile Web. It’s a mobile email experience that is:

• 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.
• Rich: View rich photo and video attachments in their full form, or as previews directly in the inbox view.
• Seamless & unified experience: Going forward, you’ll see a consistent look and feel, whether you’re on a smartphone or a PC.

During the trial period, our new mobile Web mail experience will be available in 28 languages across more than 200 countries. We’ve optimized it for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch running iOS 3.0+, with more mobile devices and platforms on the way.

The new HTML5 version of Yahoo! Mail is available as an opt-in beta, though we expect to upgrade everyone to this experience shortly. Get started by visiting http://y.ahoo.it/mailbeta on your phone’s browser, or by visiting http://m.yahoo.com/mail and tapping on ‘Preview the new Yahoo! Mail’.

We’re really excited about both our HTML5 Yahoo! Mail experience, and the awesome new Android applications, so give them a whirl and don’t forget to come back and let us know what you think!

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The bracket is set. Sixteen teams are through to the elimination round, 16 teams are flying home. If you think the World Cup has been an emotional roller coaster, buckle your seat belts because over the next two weeks the battle for world soccer supremacy is guaranteed to bring more cheers and tears around the globe. Only one team will remain standing on July 11. Will it be yours?

Speaking from the perspective of a soccer fanatic, I’ve become increasingly reliant on Yahoo! Mail to express the joy and pain of watching my team fight through the World Cup. And through these first couple of weeks, I have discovered ways that Yahoo! Mail can help me deal with the emotional roller coaster of the World Cup. Here are 5 tips for how you can use Yahoo! Mail to help you through the elimination round:

1. Tell the world how you feel through your status message
Yahoo! Mail lets you post status updates that will appear on in places like Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Pulse. You also have the option to expand your reach by sending updates to your Facebook page through Yahoo! Mail. This is a good way to plan an event or poll your friends about the referee’s sanity. More importantly, it’s a way to find an audience as you scream in joy or despair.

2. Wear your colors
Got a Yahoo! Avatar? Dress up your virtual alter-ego with your team’s colors. Through our Yahoo! Avatars page you can choose from a collection of jerseys from teams that qualified for the next round, including England, Brazil, Argentina, USA, Netherlands, Germany, Portugal and France. Oh, wait… scratch France. Or you can hoist the trophy with the FIFA avatar.

3. Search for photos in the Flickr application
Yahoo! Mail gives you the breadth and depth of Flickr through an application that you can launch in your email experience. Flickr is a great tool for World Cup viewing because it gives me a way to soak in the spirit of the game from a fan’s perspective. With so many camera phones on hand inside and outside the stadium, there’s bound to be some photos of the game making their way into Flickr. If you find something you like, you can automatically embed it into your email message and send it around to your friends. Note– this feature is only available on the new Yahoo! Mail.

4. Keep up with news from the Today module
The What’s New page is the place for news and status updates in your Yahoo! Mail session. Check back for updates and post-game articles to dig deeper into the details of the game.

5. Send some personalized smack talk to a friend
My friend George is from Ghana, so I have already saved a draft email of some juicy smack talk once USA scores on Saturday. It reads, “Dear George, GOAAAAAAAAL!!!!!” Since I’ll be at a bar or a friend’s place during the game, I’ll be able to access my draft folder by logging in from my Motorola Droid or from a friend’s iPhone. Man, I hope I didn’t just jinx my team.

Enjoy the next two weeks. There will be plenty of surprises leading up to the final game on July 11. Hopefully this year there won’t be any head-butting.

Jim Hu
Product Marketing Manager
Yahoo! Mail

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The start of the world’s biggest sporting event – the FIFA World Cup — is just around the corner and the world is buzzing, rivalries are renewing, and even the smack talk has begun. Starting today on Yahoo! Mail, you can easily share your passion for your team. Go on, let your Yahoo! and Facebook friends know who you are rooting for!

Here’s how it works. Starting today, you will see a flag icon in the status area – the flag is based on the regional version and language of Yahoo! Mail that you use.

By clicking on the flag, Yahoo! Mail will auto-fill your status message with a short phrase of support for that country.

Like any status message, you can customize it to your liking – most importantly, you can change the country you are rooting for by clicking on the drop-down arrow next to the flag. Once you do so, you can see the full list of countries that are participating. Click on the country you support and a suggested status message will populate just like before.

Once you click Share, your message will be broadcast to people who view your Updates on Yahoo!. What’s even better is that you can also share your passion to your Facebook friends by clicking “Add Facebook” and linking your account (and there are many, many, many other benefits of linking your accounts). Sharing on Yahoo! and Facebook definitely gets the conversation going, even if everyone doesn’t always agree…

Share your passion for your team and don’t forget to check out the sweet smorgasbord of World Cup activities across Yahoo!, sure to satisfy even the most ardent of fans.

Who are you rooting for in South Africa?

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Like many of you, I am an active Facebook user and have been using many of the Facebook-related features we’ve added to Yahoo! Mail since we announced our plans to integrate Facebook more deeply across all of Yahoo! last December.

Specifically, in Yahoo! Mail we’ve enabled you to import Facebook friends email addresses into Yahoo!, made it simple to post your Facebook status from Yahoo! Mail, and more. Today I’m thrilled to announce another new integration launching to all users* that enables you to view, comment, and like your Facebook news feed items – all right from Yahoo! Mail.

Facebook activity from your friends will now appear in your Updates section, alongside your friends’ activity on Yahoo!, Twitter, Flickr and so on. Now you can get all your Updates in one place, right when you log in to Yahoo! Mail.

Just like on Facebook, you can Comment or Like a news feed item right from Yahoo! Mail…

…and of course, the comment goes back to Facebook so others can see it right away.

We also know that you have different friends on Yahoo! and Facebook, and seeing all their Updates in one place may not be ideal. No problem. By default, we show both Yahoo! and Facebook items intermingled, but you can filter – All Updates, only Yahoo!, only Facebook – by clicking on that tab. Not only that, regardless of what tab you are on, anytime you get a new update on Yahoo! or Facebook, you get notified via a “Show new Updates” link without having to refresh your browser.

So there you have it – one-stop updates from across Yahoo! and Facebook, right on Yahoo! Mail, with more to come across the broader Yahoo! network soon. We hope this feature helps you easily stay in touch with the people who matter most to you. Please let us know what you think!

* = (To activate all Facebook features, you first must link your Facebook account if you have not done so already. It’s super simple! Here’s how).

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We’ve recently been hard at work helping you stay in touch with the people who matter the most to you, from posting your Facebook status from Mail to making sure you always have your friends’ updated contact information. Today I wanted to introduce another easy way to keep up with the people on Yahoo! Mail… and keep the conversation going!

Specifically, you can now comment or ‘Like’ Updates that you see on the What’s New page in Yahoo! Mail. Say, for example, that your friend rates a movie on Yahoo! Movies. Now by clicking on ‘Like’, you can show your approval.

A different friend may see that you Like it and want more information. By clicking Comment, a text box opens up where he can share his thoughts or questions on the Update.

As with any conversation, you can follow it from afar or jump in!

And as with all Updates at Yahoo! Mail, you fully control what you share. Let’s say you have a second thought on something you posted. Simply click ‘Remove’ in the ‘Like’ bubble or click the ‘X’ in the comment bubble to remove anything you don’t want others to see.

These features are now live for All New Yahoo! Mail users worldwide and will be coming to Classic Mail users next week. Please let us know what you think – and happy commenting!

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