Yahoo!7 Mail & Messenger Blog

The New Yahoo!7 Contacts

November 27th, 2009 10 comments

It’s been a while since we last posted on our blog so I decided to create this 2 in 1 post about recent changes to Yahoo!7 Contacts.  First, there’s the post below from Craig Wright, Yahoo! Contacts Engineering Manager in Sunnyvale, California (where the Yahoo! headquarters are located) :

Hi everyone, my name is Craig and I am the engineering manager for Yahoo! Contacts. We’ve undergone some major changes lately. 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.

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.

But wait -  there’s more! Now there’s a quicker and easier way to import all your contacts from different email accounts into your Yahoo!7 Contacts.  Andrew Molyneux explains how-to consolidate your contact lists:

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.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Cheers,

Tasla – Yahoo!7 Mail and Contacts

Quick Tips & Timesavers for Yahoo!7 Messenger

November 10th, 2009 Add comment

The following comes from Sarah, Product Manager for Yahoo! Messenger in the USA:

Yahoo!7 Messenger for Windows has many more features than most of us use in a given day. Our preferences menu is chock full of useful settings that can help you customise your Yahoo!7 Messenger or make you a more efficient user.

One preference I always set when I upgrade to a new version is “Always use my fonts and colours” (Messenger > Preferences > Appearance). That means that no matter what quirky font, colour or size my friends use when they message me, it will always show up in the style I prefer (Arial, 12 for anyone who’s keeping track). I think I discovered this after my college roommate kept insisting on IMs with fluorescent green Tahoma letters in size 16.

While I like to think of myself as young, my aging eyes do betray me. I got tired of squinting at my list to find a friend so a few years ago, I changed my preferences to increase the font size of my contact list (you can also change the font). You can even have online friends show up in bold so they’re more noticeable. You’ll find this ageist setting in Preferences > Appearance, under the Messenger List section.

We’ve all dealt with random people IM’ing us. Sometimes we know them, sometimes they are spammers. To help me quickly separate the riff raff from my real friends, I changed my preference to “When I receive messages from people not on my Messenger list, show the messages in a single list” (Messenger > Preferences > Messages). That way, the messages are all listed in one window and I can quickly reply or ignore them (or mark them as spam). They appear in a window that looks similar to the one used for offline messages.

On the efficiency tip are a couple of shortcuts that may come in handy. If you’re like me and leave your Messenger window open all day long, you can save a step when it comes time to shut down at the end of the day. Under Preferences > General you’ll find a setting for “Sign out of Messenger when I close the main window”. Select that and save yourself the extra step of signing out and then closing down Messenger.

And last but not least is a shortcut you can use to update your status message more quickly. You may already know about the Windows + y shortcut, but do you know the Windows + Shift + y shortcut? That one takes you right to the waiting status message menu where you can start typing your deep thoughts and important updates. For this to work, you first have to enable it under Preferences > General; look for the checkbox that says “Enable system-wide shortcut keys to activate Messenger”.

What are some of your favourite settings, shortcuts, tips or tricks in Yahoo!7 Messenger? Leave a comment to let us know.