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

No, Kate Middleton didn’t commit a fashion violation (is it just me or is her post wedding style flawless?).  The newest version of Yahoo! Mail is out of beta and ready for you!

We’ve got over 50 million users actively using the newest version of Yahoo! Mail and we want you to join them in this faster, safer, easier experience.  In the coming months you’ll be asked to upgrade to the latest version of Yahoo! Mail, but you don’t have to wait.

Simply go to http://overview.mail.yahoo.com to upgrade now and reap the benefits:

Faster: This version of Yahoo! Mail is 2x faster than our previous versions of Yahoo! Mail, even for those of you who have slower internet connections.

Safer: Yahoo! Mail blocks over 550 billion spam messages a month and our advanced SpamGuard technology  and anti-phishing platform have helped us reduce spam reports by 60 percent.  Here’s to a clean inbox!

Easier: Getting things done in Yahoo! Mail is even easier with features like rich photo slideshows, inline video viewing, chatting with Facebook friends, instantly responding to messages with the reply bar and tracking online purchases through the All My Purchases app.

We listened to your feedback over the last 7 months, fixing things and releasing new functionality every few months. And, we verified that 89% of users were able to complete key tasks before we removed the Beta label as well as links to the previous versions of Mail. We also put together these tips to help you during the migration process.

Finally, even though we’ve taken the Beta label off, we will continue to improve Yahoo! Mail.  There is a long list of features and functionality we’re tackling in the coming months.  We’ll continue to update you here on the blog, so please stay tuned.  In fact, it’s an awesome feeling to read your feedback, build something our users want, post about it on the blog and read that you guys love the improvements.  It motivates our team here even more, so thank you for that!

We’re constantly listening to your feedback, so  if you’re posting on Twitter, please use the hashtag #newyahoomail.

Yahoo! Mail now provides a new way to quickly reply to messages from your friends and social network. The reply bar appears at the bottom of your email messages and lets you easily reply to the sender or a group.

I’ve been using the reply bar for a few months now, prior to us turning it on for you. One thing I’ve noticed with my own usage is that it has really increased my engagement with my social network and speeded up my response time to personal messages.

I get a lot of Facebook and Yahoo Groups email notifications about activity happening in my social network. I had been in the habit of reading my Facebook notifications and then making a mental note to respond later. I did that because I didn’t want to take the time switch outside of my email, go to Facebook, wait for a page to launch, and then, after context switching over to Facebook to reply, having to then switch back to Yahoo mail. It was too distracting for me so my interactions suffered.

Now, I simply click into the reply bar at the bottom of my message, type my message, click send and I’m done. Now on to my next message. It’s simple and fast.

We are excited to announce that the latest version of Yahoo! Mail will roll out of beta testing and be available for all 284-million users worldwide in the coming weeks. This latest version of Yahoo! Mail is faster, safer, easier to use, and offers a seamless experience across PC, mobile and tablet devices.

Here’s what you can look forward to:

Social Infusion: Instantly respond to messages from Facebook, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Mail and other webmail providers with a new easy reply bar. View photo slideshows, inline videos and more from within your inbox. Plus, you can view and share notifications and updates from Twitter, Facebook and Zynga from within a new Updates tab.

Conversations Aren’t Just Email: Yahoo! Mail prioritizes messages and contacts that matter most. When you want to compose an IM, SMS or email you will find your most frequent contacts and lists surfaced first . Also, chat with Facebook friends alongside Windows Live and Yahoo! Messenger contacts and view all of your past IM and text conversations within Yahoo! Mail.

Tailor Your Inbox: Choose from over 50 vibrant themes and stationery options to express your personality and customize how you view messages and contacts.

App-ify Mail: New, easy-to-use applications help you be more productive and organized right from your inbox. Now you can track your online orders with the All My Purchases app, stop receiving unwanted newsletters using the Unsubscriber app, and send mega files using Attach Large Files by YouSendIt.

Mail Search Redefined: Our mail search experience leverages Yahoo!’s wealth of search science and technology to help you quickly find the emails you are looking for. Easily sort and narrow search results by sender, attachment file, date, or folder location using the refinement column tools on the left-hand side.

Lightning Speed: Leveraging Yahoo!’s cloud technology, Yahoo! Mail provides performance that is 2x faster than the previous versions of Yahoo! Mail, even in regions where only basic internet speeds are offered.

Spam Buster: Advanced SpamGuard technology and a new anti-phishing platform have reduced spam reports by 60 percent and help protect users from email hackers and unwanted instant message conversations. Yahoo! Mail blocks over 550 billion spam messages per month.

To upgrade an existing Yahoo! Mail account or create a new Yahoo! Mail account go to overview.mail.yahoo.com and click on the ‘Upgrade Now’ button.

Hey folks,

With the latest release of Yahoo! Mail Beta comes our new Yahoo! Contacts interface. It’s our hope you find it cleaner, easier, and much more pleasant to use. Checkout the ‘lists’ feature. Now you can easily create lists of people and compose emails to them. It makes sending emails a breeze! We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback.

If you are curious about using lists, follow the steps below:

Step 1: Select ‘New List’ from the contacts tab interface.

Step 2: Give your new list a name. I’ll use ‘Friends’.

Step 3: Now that my ‘Friends’ list is created you’ll want to select contacts you’d like to add to the list and press the ‘Assign to List’ button. From the ‘Assign to List’ dialogue select your new ‘Friends’ list. (Side Note: You can also drag contacts into lists on most browsers. It’s pretty nifty.)

Step 4: Congratulations! You’ve created a list. When you’re composing a new email your list will appear as an addressable contact.

We’ll be giving you faster and easier ways to create lists of your most relevant contacts in the future. We’re very excited about providing ways for you to simplify your communications with the people you care about the most.

With the latest release of Yahoo! Mail Beta, one new feature that is now included is the ability to add stationery (background colors and image templates) to your messages. Stationery is a feature that existed in the previous version of Yahoo! Mail. Since the release of Yahoo! Mail Beta, we have gotten feedback from customers asking us to bring this feature back. We listened and are happy to report that with the help of a 3rd party developer and our Yahoo! Mail Development Platform, we were able to do just that.

To use Stationery, go to the Applications area of Yahoo! Mail and click on the application named “Stationery.”

Once you click on Stationery you can then choose the background you wish to use in your message. Select from the drop-down menu and click on the background image of choice.

After clicking the background image, a new message window is launched. From there, simply type your message and send it along with your favorite background applied.

Have fun giving your messages more flair with Yahoo! Mail Beta.

“Phishers” keep us up at night. These people deliberately try to con you and then steal your private information. This is a huge industry-wide problem, and Yahoo! dedicates significant resources to identify and block phishing emails before they reach your inbox.

Unfortunately, we can’t stop phishers without your help. The most effective way to prevent phishers from stealing your information is to remember a handful of common sense tips that can help stop intruders in their tracks and keep you safe online:

1. Don’t recycle your password
Got a favorite password you like to use? Well, don’t use it often because attackers that successfully obtain a password you use at one Website will likely try to use it to access your other accounts, such as your bank or favorite online retailer. Here’s a better idea: Use a different password for each Website you use to access sensitive information (i.e: email, bank, social networking, and major retail Website passwords).  Mix-up your passwords even if your username is the same.

2. Never send your sensitive information over email
No reputable businesses will ask you to send them your password or account information in an email. If you receive such a message, immediately click the “Spam” button on that message and we’ll get rid of it. Likewise, beware of messages from major companies asking you to “click this link” to verify your password. Instead of clicking on the link, visit that company’s homepage or call the company’s customer service line to verify the authenticity of that email. Phishers like to use these types of emails to direct people to legitimate-looking Websites that are really meant to steal IDs and passwords.

3. Check the “From” line
If you get an email message that seems too good to be true, it probably is. Always look at the email address itself and not only at the name of the sender.  If the “From” line seems too generic or the domain does not clearly identify who the sender is, such as “yourbank@freemmail.com”, or “servicealerts@mail-boxes.us”, then it’s likely a hoax. Be safe, not sorry.

4. Know thy friend
The other day a friend of mine sent me an email with a generic, “Hey, check this out!” in the subject line and a link from an unknown Website. Turned out his account had been compromised. Be suspicious if a friend sends you a link that seems phishy – and make sure to alert them so they can warn other recipients of the message and alert their email service provider. If they ask you to send money, give them a call first (even if the email says it’s pointless). Scammers steal accounts and send messages with sad stories to convince you to wire them money. We all want to help our friends, but not by sending money to strangers.

5. Keep your system virus-free
There are viruses out there that steal your passwords by recording your keystrokes. Using and regularly updating virus scanning software is a good way to protect yourself from these and other types of malicious code. There are a number of anti-virus companies that offer free versions or trial offers, including: http://security.symantec.com , http://usa.kaspersky.com/downloads/free-virus-scanner.php, http://us.mcafee.com/root/downloads.asp?id=freeTrials, and http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html.

You’ll continue to see more tips from Yahoo! about how to protect yourself online. We’re committed to arming you with tools that will help keep you safe, including the improved spam protection we’ve built into the new Yahoo! Mail Beta. Take a test drive or learn more about it here .

As some of you may have noticed, we’ve begun emailing service announcements about an upgrade to Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! Mail Beta has been in the wild for 5 months and we’re almost ready to take off the Beta label.

Here are some questions you might have about the service announcement email:

How can I tell if it’s a legitimate email from Yahoo! versus spam?
Please look for the Yahoo! icon to the left of the “From” field in your inbox. We mark messages with this icon so that you know that they are real messages from us.

What do I have to do to upgrade?
Either click on the “Upgrade Now” button in your service announcement or just go directly to http://features.mail.yahoo.com to upgrade. Upgrading takes only a few seconds and you’ll be in the newest version of Yahoo! Mail right away.

Do I have to wait for my turn to upgrade?
Absolutely not! You can upgrade right now by going to http://features.mail.yahoo.com

How long do I have until I need to upgrade?
We will be rolling out this newest version of Yahoo! Mail over the coming months and we’ll remind you along the way to upgrade.

Why should I upgrade?

• Here are some benefits of the newest version of Yahoo! Mail:
• Faster email
• Latest Yahoo! Mail spam-protection technology
• Easier-to-use design
• Unlimited email storage so that you can keep everything you want

To read more about the benefits of the newest version of Yahoo! Mail, please visit: http://features.mail.yahoo.com

For those of you who have been using Yahoo! Mail Beta, thank you for your fantastic feedback. We’ve been listening and will continue to release new features and fixes as we roll out this newest version of Yahoo! Mail everywhere!

Dig if you will this picture: You’re taking a leisurely walk around your neighborhood park on a sunny day, taking in the sun, the scenery, and the sanctity of the place you’ve come to call home. Suddenly, a masked intruder appears out of nowhere and tries to rob you. That would be a jolting and revolting experience, wouldn’t it?

To me, the online equivalent of such a criminal encounter is finding a phishing email in my mailbox. I deem my mailbox as the safe haven of my online experience. It’s where I communicate with family and friends, receive important messages from the companies I transact with, and, within Yahoo! Mail, where I chat with my Facebook buddies. That’s why we’re obsessed with keeping phishers out of your Yahoo! Mail.

On that note, I’m happy to announce the release of Yahoo! Mail Anti-Phishing Platform (YMAP), which further reinforces the trust and security of the Yahoo! Mail experience using existing email authentication technologies. It builds on the pilot anti-phishing program we ventured into with eBay/PayPal back in 2007, but this time we’re casting a wider net on the phishing problem.

So, what does this mean for you?

Put simply, we’re beefing up Yahoo! Mail’s SpamGuard by adding more security measures that make it much harder for phishers to get to your mailbox. We’ve teamed up with email authentication partners—namely, Authentication Metrics, eCert, Return Path, and Truedomain—to gain significant coverage to protect the prime targets of phishing attacks. Our partners work with top brands and email senders to audit, monitor, and protect email traffic using their domains. This collaboration enables us to apply policies to protect the authenticated emails using the domains of well-known online services–from popular social networks like Facebook to often-targeted institutions in the banking industry.

While this project is still in its early stages of deployment, we will be rolling it out aggressively during the coming months so that Yahoo! Mail users, along with the expanding list of companies participating in the program, are better protected from the perilous plague of phishing. It’s just another way we’re beating away bandits from your mailbox.

Greetings, Yahoo! Mail Beta users!

Some exciting updates to Yahoo! Mail Beta that we’re in the middle of rolling out:

“Hello, my name is Stephanie and I’m a Facebook addict.”
To all you fellow Facebook addicts out there, you might already know that we provide Facebook integration in our downloadable Messenger client. Now you can chat with your Facebook friends in Yahoo! Mail too! On the left, you’ll see “Facebook Friends” under “Online Contacts”. If you click on the thunderbolt, you will be prompted to authenticate on Facebook Connect (if you haven’t already). Once you’ve authenticated, your online Facebook friends will appear below “Online Contacts” and you can chat freely. As if Facebook was not addictive enough on its own, right? ;)

Giving you more message space
We’ve been hearing a lot of feedback from you about how much space the purple header takes up and how it limits how much of the actual message content you can see at once. We still want to provide some room to showcase our existing and future themes at the top of the page, but now you can scroll the entire Yahoo! Mail page so you can see as much message content as possible. Just go to Options>Mail Options and select “Scroll content of the entire page”.

Along with the ability to scroll the entire page comes another way to view your inbox. For those of you who are coming to the Beta from our Yahoo! Mail Classic product, we now have a paginated Inbox list view that might look familiar to you. You can view 50 messages in your list and click to go to the next, previous, first or last pages. When you click on a message subject line, we’ll load that message in a full tab. You can change the number of messages per page by clicking on Options>Mail Options and then selecting from 50, 100 or 200 messages at a time. If you still prefer the preview pane mode, you can also change this setting by going to Options>Mail Options and selecting “Scroll each panel on the page individually”. Try it out and let us know what you think!

Access to your past IM conversations
I don’t know about you, but my friends are always, always sending me important links, dates, addresses and other tidbits of information via IM. If you’re anything like me, you’re always, always forgetting exactly what was said/shared. What restaurant were we supposed to meet at? Where is that hilarious link Mike sent me about iPhone autocorrect fails? I rely heavily on my archived messages on the Messenger client and am so excited that we now give you access to your past IMs in Yahoo! Mail Beta. Just click on “Conversations” on the left side just below “Inbox” and see all your past IM conversations from Yahoo! Mail Beta (and the latest downloadable Messenger client).

Known issues with Yahoo! Mail Beta
We’re still working hard to iron out all the kinks in Yahoo! Mail Beta and there are a couple of hairy bugs that you’ve been telling us about on our suggestion board, blog, etc.:

• Randomly getting logged out of Yahoo! Mail Beta – we just fixed this issue, so please let us know if you are still seeing it.
• Attachment upload/download slowness and failure issues – we are aware of these issues and we will release fixes as soon as we possibly can. We’ll keep you up to date on this blog and our suggestions board. Thanks for your patience!

Thanks again for using Yahoo! Mail Beta and keep giving us feedback! For those of you wanting to try out Yahoo! Mail Beta, please visit http://features.mail.yahoo.com .

What do Yahoo! Mail and a chameleon have in common?

Both are changeable with separately mobile stereoscopic eyes and rapidly extruding tongues. Okay, scratch the eyes and tongue thing, but both are changeable.

Once upon a time, when you sent an email, its content was forever cast in stone. That meant a lost opportunity for senders and frustration for customers receiving your message. Lost opportunity because while your customer is lamenting the fact that they missed the V-day deal, they aren’t opening your Presidents Day message that contains a different discount they can use today. Frustration because the great Valentines Day deal email opened on Presidents Day is no longer valid.

What if the email message you sent could change like the stereoscopic-eyed chameleon? The Valentines Day message, if opened after V-day, could show information about a different, still redeemable discount. The one-day restaurant deal, when opened, could automatically let the customer know that the deal is expired and show a currently redeemable deal instead. These emails would be more effective for the sender and much more satisfying for the customer to receive.

Now, you can deliver dynamic, timely email messages just like this with the Yahoo! Mail Development Platform. The platform empowers you to create applications that can:

• Dynamically change how messages are rendered
• Inject javascript into an email to make it interactive
• Call external web services to expand or update an email’s content
• Launch an app-specific UI within the Yahoo! Mail chrome
• Create new ways to compose, read, and organize messages

There are a several ways a Yahoo! Mail user gets their hands on your app:

Contextually
Users experience your application as part of their regular mail flow. The email message comes in, your app is applied against it and voila, your recipient sees today’s deal not yesterday’s.

Via the application list
We list our applications on the lower left hand side of Yahoo! Mail. Installed applications that aren’t strictly contextual get an icon in the application list. Yahoo! Mail comes pre-installed with applications from Yahoo! and third-party developers that let you:

• Easily and securely send files up to 100MB per email.
• Organize messages — newsletters, coupons, promotions, receipts, etc into folders — leaving email from real people in your Inbox.
• Edit, enhance, organize, and share photos directly from within Yahoo! Mail.

Via the application gallery
Yahoo! Mail users can install applications that didn’t come preinstalled.

Got a big idea that could leverage Mail? Visit http://developer.yahoo.com/mailapplications/ to get started today or contact us at developer-questions@yahoo-inc.com.