Last month, the newest version of Yahoo!7 Mail went live. Some of you may have already seen and used it in beta form but now it’s dropped its ‘beta’ tag to become our latest and greatest Yahoo!7 Mail! We’re proud of it and pleased to offer it to you. We hope you upgrade soon – it’s easy, just go to our Mail Microsite to upgrade and enjoy the benefits:
Faster: This version of Yahoo!7 Mail is 2x faster than our previous versions of Yahoo!7 Mail, even for those with slower internet connections. Safer: Globally, Yahoo! 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!7 Mail is even easier with features like rich photo slideshows, chatting with Facebook friends and instantly responding to messages with the reply bar. We’ve also got over 50 themes so you can personalise your Mail box the way you like it – just drop down Options menu!
We’ve been building this new Mail for a while now and continually fixing things and releasing new functionality every few months. Have a look at our Help page for some tips to guide you during the migration process – click here.
Finally, even though the ‘beta’ label is no longer on the Mail product, we’re continuing to improve Yahoo!7 Mail. There is a long list of features and functionality we’re tackling in the coming months and you’ll be hearing more!
We’re very excited about our new Yahoo!7 Mail Beta product. It’s got an elegant design, it’s easy to navigate and it provides a central hub for all your comms and social needs – with Mail, Instant Message, Facebook and Twitter updates, photo slideshows within Mail and more.
We invite you to take a look yourself! To view, log into your Mail and thengo to this site. Have a squiz and have a play. Don’t worry, you can easily revert back to your current Mail by clicking Help and choosing ‘Return to Original Mail’.
We hope you like our Yahoo!7 Mail Beta version as much as we do! David McDowell, Sr. Director of Product Management, Yahoo! USA, says more below in his post.
Lucy – Yahoo!7 Mail
If you follow our blog, you’ve heard about Yahoo! Mail Beta and seen a sneak peak of the new product. Today, you will get the chance to I’m pleased to announce the release of Yahoo! Mail Beta, which delivers a faster, safer and more social email experience. Let me give you a tour of what’s new in the product.try it yourself.
Speed thrills
A faster email experience is at the core of Yahoo! Mail Beta. We built the product from the ground up to be fast so you can be more productive. In fact, Yahoo! Mail Beta is more than two-times faster than previous versions of Yahoo! Mail. You can learn more about how we enhanced the performance of Yahoo! Mail Beta at the YDN Blog.
Be gone, spammer!
Spam can be distracting, irritating and downright dangerous. We block more than 130 billion spam messages every month to deliver you a safer place to email. And, our focus on battling spam has earned us the highest marks among our competitors, as noted in a 2010 study by the prestigious Fraunhofer Institute.
Yahoo! Mail everywhere
If you use Yahoo! Mail on the iPhone, iPad or an Android device, the look and feel of Yahoo! Mail Beta will be familiar. We designed Yahoo! Mail Beta to be sleek, elegant and consistent across devices.
Beyond email
There are many ways to connect with the people that matter to you. That’s why we invited Twitter into our social stream. Now you can read your friends’ tweets, retweet or compose your own 140-character message alongside Facebook posts and Yahoo! status updates all from the What’s New page. In addition, we made our IM and SMS features more productive because you can organize your conversations in separate tabs, switch between text and chat conversations and dock the conversation window when you are multi-tasking.
Photos and videos
Email is a great place to share private photos and videos with friends and family. Now you can browse rich slideshows from Flickr or Picasa links and watch video clips from Flickr and YouTube right from your email.
Find stuff faster
We’re using Yahoo!’s wealth of search science and technology to make email search faster. A new left-hand column helps you navigate, sort and narrow your search results by sender, attachment file, date or folder location.
We’re just getting started
As you can imagine, we have big plans for Yahoo! Mail Beta. Our engineers designed Yahoo! Mail Beta in a way that lets us make changes fast, so stay tuned as we release new enhancements over the coming months.
Now it’s your turn to try Yahoo! Mail Beta. You can switch back to your original Yahoo! Mail any time. And, please note that Yahoo! Mail Beta will not be immediately available for Yahoo! Small Business users or users on some older browsers and operating systems.
We want to know all about your experience and we hope you will tell us what you think by leaving us a comment. Check back to the Yahoo! Mail Blog for more updates.
What best way to start the new year than with a recap of all the good things that we did for Mail in 2009? The following highlights were posted by our Program Manager Andrew, from the Global Mail team based in Sunnyvale in the US:
What a year it’s been for Yahoo! Mail. I can tell you that all of us on the Global Yahoo! Mail team have been working hard throughout 2009 to deliver you a more social and more productive Yahoo! Mail that lets you get the important things done quickly and easily. In short, we’re working to give you the best email experience on the Web. I think you’ll agree with me, all that hard work has paid off. We’ve delivered some pretty great things to your Yahoo! Mailbox (pun intended).
As is usual at this time of year, it’s time to take a look back and see what we’ve been able to accomplish in these short 12 months. Here are the highlights (in no particular order):
To kick off 2009 we gave you a smarter, more social Mailbox. With the new welcome page “What’s New” in Yahoo! Mail you can now easily find the important mail from those who matter most. In addition you can now get updates from your connections. And from the Inbox you can filter your mail to see just the mail from your contacts or connections.
We launched Yahoo! Messenger in Classic Mail. It seems like it’s been a part of the Classic Mail forever, but the ability to instantly chat with your friends and family in the classic version of Yahoo! Mail has only been around since the beginning of the year.
We’ve added fantastic new Apps in Yahoo! Mail to let you be more productive right from your Inbox. (Of course we have to thank our Apps partners who also worked very hard to deliver you these great tools.) Apps like Edit Photos from Picnik let you easily share and edit photos right from within your Inbox. The ‘Attach Large Files’ from ZumoDrive lets you share up to 100MB files. Apps like Pingg and Evite allow you easily manage your social calendar.
One of our goals is to help you do more with your photos in your Yahoo! Mailbox. We want to make photos an integral part of your Mail experience. Our acquisition of Xoopit will go a long way to make that a reality.
In order to send all those photos (and other attachment types) we recently launched the ability for you to add attachments up to 25MB to a single email. That’s about 12 photos if your camera takes about 2MB photos. And to help you attach those files, we launched an enhanced attachment feature for the all-new version of Yahoo! Mail. It allows you drag and drop your attachments right into your email. Plus you can scale and rotate your photo attachments.
We’ve also been working hard behind the scenes to improve the speed of Yahoo! Mail. In the US we have achieved more than a 16% improvement in performance over the year. And, Yahoo! Mail is the fastest Webmail in the UK (based on our tests using 3rd party tools). So, not only have we given you more tools to increase your productivity, we’ve made it even faster to get things done.
Our friends on the Address book team recently launched the updated Yahoo! Contacts. It goes a long way to unify the Contacts experience across the Yahoo! network and fits seamlessly into the all-new Yahoo! Mail. Plus the new clean-up duplicates tool is a great way to clean up your list of contacts.
Our ongoing efforts to reduce spam and helping you keep safe in Mail have seen our lowest level of spam in recent history. We told you back at the beginning of the year about some of what the anti-spam team has been working on in the background, and we hope you’re all seeing the continued improvement. Plus we are always committed to keeping you safer online through safety tips on this blog.
Finally, we know that many of you are mobile with your mail. So we have to give a shout out and congratulations to the Mobile Team who just went GA with an updated Mobile mail experience. Just point your mobile browser over to m.yahoo.com/mail to have a look. I definitely give it two thumbs up, way up!
Wow! That’s a lot, and those are just the highlights! Rest assured, we are prepared to work even harder next year. We are aiming to give you a better photo sharing experience, more amazing third party Apps and an enhanced Yahoo! Calendar to name just a few.
Yep, as per our product roadmap for this year, 2010 is certainly going to be a busy year for the entire Yahoo! Mail team.
Cheers,
Tasla – Yahoo!7 Mail, Contacts, Calendar and Messenger
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