The Good, The Bland & The Ugly
December 27th, 2008 1 comment
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Archive for December, 2008
Introducing the Smarter Inbox
December 16th, 2008 28 comments
Hi everyone, the Australian mail team here at Yahoo!7 has been beavering away for the last few months to deliver some enhancements to your email experience, think of it as an early Christmas present. If you’ve logged into Yahoo!7 Mail you’ve probably already seen some of the changes which are based on your feedback on how we can improve our already excellent mail product.
One issue we heard from you was that the amount of email you receive from friends, family, newsletters, marketing emails and of course spam (the good, the bland and the ugly) has become overwhelming to the point where you find it difficult to find the emails that are really important to you. We’re going to fix this.
Another issue was in regards to attachment size limits. In this digital age, media storage capacity has outpaced the email send/receive limits. For example, 10 years ago I didn’t even own a digital camera, where as today my camera takes photos of a few megabytes in size, sending them via email is a pain as I have to resize them manually. We’re going to fix this too.
Big claims I know so let’s take you through what we’re doing. Here at Yahoo! we’ve dubbed the changes “A Smarter Inbox”. The first smart thing is allowing you to “connect” to the people who are most important to you (learn more about connections). For example let’s say you get emails from your estate agent, your partner and your mother, you may want to connect to your partner and your mother but not the estate agent. If your mum accepts the invitation the next time you get an email from them you’ll be able to see their message directly on the Mail Welcome page, so no more trawling through your inbox to find the emails which matter.
This “smarter” benefit doesn’t stop there though. If you go into the inbox or any other folder you have created within mail you can click on the “connections” button and filter out all the mail which isn’t from your most important connections. So again you can see that we’ve improved your email experience.
A further benefit of these changes is the ability for you to see “updates” from your connections on the Mail Welcome page. For now these “updates” are things that your contacts do on Yahoo! This will open up in the next month to include other websites like YouTube and Blogger. Learn more about Updates.
Rome wasn’t built in a day so we’re not changing the email attachment size today. For now the send receive limit is going to stay at 10MB per email. In the not so distant future we’re going to give our mail users the ability to share massive files of up to 1GB at any one time, pretty useful for sharing video, music and heaps of photos over email. We’re very excited about this feature as coupled with our already unlimited storage we’ll be able to offer a truly unlimited email experience.
So to recap today we’re launching a redesigned Mail Welcome page that gives you a “smarter inbox” including these features:
- Connections: Users can “connect” with others using Yahoo!’s universal profile service and designate the people whose messages and activity updates are most important to them.
- Filtered View of the Inbox and Folders: Yahoo!7 Mail users can now view a prioritised view of the inbox and folders based on their connections.
- New Welcome Page with Messages from Connections and Updates: Users receive a preview of messages from their connections, see connection suggestions made by Yahoo!, and have the ability to send and receive connection invitations. Users can also see activity Update feeds from their connections, including activity across Yahoo! and, in the future, across the Web.
We’ve got two videos that you can watch to help you understand the changes – they can viewed here:
and here:
BTW, these changes are only available to every user of the Australian Yahoo!7 Mail and a limited number of users of the US mail product.
We’d love to hear what you think of the changes and we’ll do our very best to answer your questions.
Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas!
Morgan and the rest of the Yahoo!7 Mail team
Season up your Mail
December 10th, 2008 4 comments
With the holiday season upon us, kids finishing school, all that shopping to do, people preparing to go on holidays until the new year and the many other things that happen at this time of year; it’s only to be expected that things like Christmas cards will slip our minds. So do what I do, and send an e-mail to your friends and loved ones!
And e-mails don’t have to be boring, with the addition of Stationery, you can give your mail that bit of flair to make it almost as good as the card you might have sent, Mum will never know the difference! 
If you are not too sure what Stationery is or how to use it, be sure to check out Will’s post over here.
Here’s a quick guide to the different Stationery options that you may like to use for your Christmas and holiday e-mails…
Featured -> Liam: Party
Abstract -> Green Fantasia
Abstract -> Kaleidoscopes
Flowers -> Orchids
Holidays and Events -> Christmas
Holidays and Events -> Happy Holidays
Holidays and Events -> Joy and Prosperity
Holidays and Events -> Snow (Blue)
Holidays and Events -> Stars (Blue)
The above selections are only a few of the different types of Stationery available in the All-New Mail. Why not go try it, then come back and let us know what your favourite is? Which reminds me, I better e-mail my Mum and Dad pronto!
Happy holiday e-mailing,
Kate – Yahoo!7 Mail Team
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