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 hope you enjoy using the new Yahoo!7 Mail.

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 then go 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.

David McDowell

Sr. Director of Product Management

Yahoo! Mail

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

So here’s a tip… Yahoo!7 Mail includes weather updates and forecasts for your local area, complete with a 5 day forecast right on your Welcome screen! Even better, it’s available in both Classic and the All-New Mail

How do I set it up?
Well I’m glad you asked, as I’ve put together a quick setup guide that will work in both versions of mail. It’s very easy to do and will only take a few minutes of your time.

Setting up Weather Forecasts
Note: These instructions are for both Classic and the All-New Mail.

1. You need to set your location. To do so, simply click upon the city or suburb area on your Welcome screen (which is the screen you see when you first log in to mail). You may find that it is already set correctly… if so, skip to step 4.

2. You will see a small box popup asking for either your city/suburb and state, or your postal code. Either will work! If you want this set as your permanent location for weather updates, make sure you place a tick in the box provided and then hit go to commence the search.

3. Since Yahoo! is an international company, there are often many cities with the same names across different countries, so do not be alarmed if you see a long list of results.

Simply scroll until you find AU for Australia, it will usually be one of the first few results or scroll until you find the country/area you are after. You will then see the item you were searching for underneath.

To set the location, simply click upon your search result – in the example shown, I would click upon “Sydney NSW AU”.

4. You will now see your requested weather forecast on your Welcome screen! Clicking upon the weather symbol or temperatures will expand the window to a 5 day forecast, as well as offer you options to switch from Celsius to Fahrenheit or to view a more detail forecast if you should so choose.

See, it’s that easy! Now you can stop worrying whether it may rain or snow tomorrow, and visit your mailbox at any time for peace of mind

Happy forecasting,
Kate – Yahoo!7 Mail Team

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:

Lasso Larry

and here:

Mail Overview

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

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

Ryan, Community Manager for Yahoo! Mail in the United States, posted the following on the Yahoo! Mail Blog:

We’ve received reports from some users that they are experiencing problems getting their inbox to load completely in the All-New Yahoo! Mail. Our engineers have been sleuthing around and discovered that if you are running Firefox 2.0.0.18, and have the RealPlayer Browser Record Plugin 1.0 installed as a browser add-on, you may run into this too.

Without getting too deep into the nitty-gritty, it seems that the plugin is preventing certain requests from reaching their intended destination within the browser. Fortunately there are two easy ways to resolve the problem.

1. Go to Tools > Add-ons, find RealPlayer plugin, Disable or Uninstall, restart Firefox.
2. Upgrade to Firefox 3.

Either of those options will do the trick.

Happy Emailing,
Kate – Yahoo!7 Mail Team

Ok, what’s all this then?
Well, basically speaking, your Messenger list loads within your mailbox and can have a live conversation with someone from within your Yahoo!7 Mail mailbox. You can talk this way with anyone who has a Yahoo!7 or Windows Live™ Messenger ID. That’s almost everyone isn’t it?

Here’s how!
When you log into your mailbox you will see, at the top of the window, a status message and a drop-down arrow. You will probably appear as “Offline”, if you never used this option:

Once you set your status to “Available” your Messenger list will start loading automatically above your folder list. You can select anyone on the list and start a conversation with them right from the comfort of your own Mailbox window. The conversation will open in a new tab and it will look like this:

One thing to note is that if you sign into chat in Mail you will get disconnected from the Messenger application immediately, as you cannot be connected to Messenger through 2 different ways at the same time. The same applies if you log into Messenger while connected to chat within Mail. I know this sounds confusing but I assure you it’s not a problem at all, as you will be warned with friendly messages like the one below if that’s the case:

Wait, there’s more!
We’ve added a couple of other new ways to start a chat. Yahoo!7 Mail is more than just email these days, so if you click on the arrow next to the “New” button (top left) you can choose “Chat” to open a chat window and go from there. Or, if you want to be really flash, you can use the keyboard shortcut. Just hit “c” and you’re off.

We hope you find this feature useful and interesting. Have a go and let us know what you think!

Happy chatting,
Sabrina – Yahoo!7 Mail Team

So without further ado, head on over to Will’s post on Stationery to check it out!

Happy emailing,
Kate – Yahoo!7 Mail Team

In order to do that you have to be logged into mail, then you should just click the “Options” link and then select “Mail Classic”:

You will be prompted with the pop-up window shown below where you should click the button “Switch to Yahoo!7 Mail Classic”:

And that’s it – you are now back in Classic Mail.

If you didn’t like the all-new version why not let us know why.

Happy emailing,
Tasla – Yahoo!7 Mail Team