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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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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This doesn’t really have anything to do with Mail, but it’s too important not to mention.  Today is election day, so if you have already done so…THANK-YOU.

If you haven’t, there’s still plenty of time to head over to your local polling location.  If you don’t know where that is, you can check the special Yahoo! Election ’08 page for details.

A quick peek at the Yahoo! homepage will also reveal a special election day logo that asks about your voting activity.  It doesn’t ask you to declare what you voted for, just that you voted.

If you click on the NO button you will be directed to the same Yahoo! Election ’08 page referenced above, but a YES gets you a wonderful affirmation of your contribution.

So make sure you earn yourself an updated Yahoo! Header!

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You didn’t think I would let Halloween pass without showing off some of our favorite costumed Liams did you?  My favorite is Rappin’ Liam, but since Dracula is a more famous character I thought I would give Count Liam the top position.

Hope all of you out there have a happy and safe Halloween!

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If he keeps this up I may just have to find a way to give Mark his own byline, but in case you missed the Yodel post, our resident anti-spam czar Mark (the same one who held the recent workshop) had a few words to share about the ever increasing “lottery” scams.  Check it out!

Coalition crackdown on lottery spammers

What generally increases when the overall economy declines? That’s right – crime. And these days, when you receive an email that proclaims that you’ve won the “Yahoo! Lottery,” the financially-pressured optimist in you might be more inclined to bite the bait.

Last May, we filed a lawsuit against “Yahoo! Lottery” spammers who use our brand to trick unsuspecting users into handing over personal data to claim a prize. And we’re making progress on catching these scammers, but we’re concerned that they may step up efforts to dupe people impacted by these tough times.

Today we announced a public-private coalition with Microsoft, the African Development Bank, and Western Union to allow victims of lottery scams to upload police reports we can use with the goal of tracking down these devious criminals and developing better ways of protecting people online. INTERPOL has gotten involved to inform international law enforcement agencies about the initiative and provide guidance on critical information to collect to identify trends and common patterns.

Here’s how it works. Yahoo! and the other coalition members have set up dedicated email addresses and Web sites (ours is http://antispam.yahoo.com/phishingtips) where lottery scam victims — those who took the bait and handed over personal information — can share details of the police report they have filed. These reports may be helpful to other coalition members and law enforcement in fighting lottery scammers.

For readers who spot a scam but don’t fall for it, we have tips for you, too. First off, don’t ever reply to the message, even as a joke. You don’t want to be encouraging these guys. Instead, click the “Spam” button, which helps us and our anti-spam systems block these types of messages and kick these criminals off the Internet. We also have a form you can use to report lottery scams and other kinds of abuse originating from Yahoo! users.

As we’ve said before, no one ever wins the Yahoo! Lottery. And that’s simply because there is no Yahoo! Lottery. We’re on a mission to protect you from these online predators, but in addition to what we’re doing on our end, you can also find some tips on how you can protect yourself on our anti-spam resource site.

Mark
Anti-Spam Czar, Yahoo! Mail

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Over the next several weeks, the RSS Feeds Reader (integrated into the sidebar of the All-New Mail) will begin to ease off into the sunset.  Overall usage of the feature was very low, and we’ve made the choice to focus our development resources on features and functionality that are valuable to the most users.

All of your feeds are safe, and can all be found over at MyYahoo!  There you can continue to access all of your favorite feeds, along with a host of other useful tools and modules (personally I couldn’t live without my Fantasy Sports, EW.com, and Personal Assistant modules).

A very limited number of preview servers have already begun the transition, while other servers will start to see the change over the next few weeks.  Initially the Feeds link will remain in your sidebar, and will provide the following message:

We’ve learned that some users may have encountered errors while attempting to access their Feeds over the last day or so, but those are completely unrelated.  Nonetheless, we are working to get that issue resolved ASAP and make sure our Customer Care agents are clear on the timing of the actual change.

Again, we apologize to those of you who have enjoyed using the feature, and want you to know that decisions like these are not made without careful consideration.  It was a tough call, but one that makes sense for the overall Mail Community.

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Hi all,

Based on feedback on this blog, and much of what I’m hearing from other blogs, there is a bit of confusion regarding the new profiles experience.  Because of this I want to offer some important clarification about how it works.

There are a lot of people who think we are now automatically displaying your information to the world, which is totally and completely untrue.  This probably stems from the fact that what you see, when logged in to your profile, is completely different than what everyone else sees.

You can test this by copying the URL for your profile, logging out, and then pasting that URL back in.  Unless you have gone into your settings and changed them (to specifically lower your privacy settings), or “connected” with another user, your profile is pretty barren.  Once you have made a connection with another user, they will be able to view more detail on your profile, but since you don’t have to connect with others you can still keep your info private.

Some other users are concerned by the fact that they will no longer be able to maintain unique profile pages for each alias used on an account.[edited for clarification] It’s correct that aliases can’t have unique profile pages anymore, however many users think we are directing all of the aliases to your primary profile, which is false.  Users can choose to have their profile tied to those aliases, but it’s not the default.  We understand that this impacts people who have grown accustomed to maintaining multiple identities on the Yahoo! network with a single Yahoo! account.  We are not prohibiting users from maintaining multiple identities, but we are asking those that prefer to do so to open additional Yahoo! accounts.

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There’s some big news that has a “connection” to your Mail experience.  If you checked your profile over the weekend, you may have noticed things look a little different. Last Thursday we rolled out an all-new profile for Yahoo! users, geared towards a more “open and social” Yahoo!.

The update includes a sneak peek of what your Address Book/Contacts experience will be like down the road, which is something Mail users should be interested especially in.  There’s also an important change for users who have created an alias for their account, so if that’s you make sure you read on.

To get started, you’ll need to go to: http://profiles.yahoo.com/ to begin setting up your new profile. When you log in, it should automatically pull in your old profile data, and will give you the opportunity to update your information.

The new profile provides users with a single identity while they’re on the Yahoo! network, consolidating your aliases into one account with your main profile. This doesn’t, however, mean that you can’t still have an “alias” while you’re on the Yahoo! network – you can still use multiple identities on Groups, Chat, or Finance. However, these aliases CANNOT have their own profile page, nor can they have any unique profile data associated with them.

To learn more about editing and managing your new profile on Yahoo!, be sure to visit the profiles news blog for more information, as well as tips on how to manage your aliases and profiles within the network.

Additionally, if you want more information on how to use your profile, start with the new profiles tutorial, located here: http://help.yahoo.com/tutorials/prof/index.html

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Once again we’d like to thank everyone who submitted questions, and who stopped by to participate, during last week’s Mail Basics Workshop (transcript here). If you missed it, I was joined by Chris (Product Manager for All-New Mail), Carl (Customer Experience, referenced here), Maryn (liaison between the Mail team and Mail Customer Care), Melissa (Messenger twitterer and blogger), and some others who popped in and out during the hour … and we all chipped in to answer user questions.

We received a lot of great questions, and the staffers really enjoyed the opportunity to hear directly from the users. Below is a sample of one of the questions, but there were a lot more:

peteyboyyyy: First off, I LOVE Yahoo! But I always see these weird flag things in my inbox. What do the backwards arrow, forward arrow, and flag icons mean?
YMailTeam: They’re there to show you what messages you’ve replied to (backwards arrow), what messages you’ve forwarded (forward arrow), and what messages you’ve flagged for follow-up.
YMailTeam: To flag a message, click the message you’d like to flag. Find the “More actions” button above the main Yahoo! mail window. Click it and select “flag for follow-up.” It’s as easy as that!

And now that we have completed our second workshop, I’m creating a Workshops page.  There you will be able to easily access transcripts from all previous Workshops, but also see if any other Workshops are scheduled in the near future.

Check out the transcript for the Mail Basics Workshop here, and keep an eye on the Workshops page for other transcripts and news.

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There have been some questions about how updating your Flash could have anything to do with inputting text for your messages.  In fact Flash doesn’t play a role in text input, but it does touch on some other aspects of the All-New Yahoo! Mail.  Most notable would be the Chat/Messenger feature (which has been around for a while), but there are some other components too.  Some existing and some new stuff.

So while we have no intention of changing Mail to some sort of Flash based tool, we’ve also found that some users can improve the experience and resolve some bugs we’ve discovered by upgrading to the latest Flash version.

We fully intend that anything we add or change in no way conflicts with the core functions of Mail (inputting text would be an example) and our engineers are working to resolve it.  However, I also wanted people to know that updating Flash could improve it that much faster.

Hope that clears up some of the confusion.

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