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

Firstly, please try the instructions outlined here by Tasla.

If that doesn’t do the trick, try clicking upon Options (found to the top-right of your Mail) and then select Switch to Yahoo!7 Mail Classic as shown below:

It’s that easy

Kate – Yahoo!7 Mail Team

• Blocking chat messages
• Unblocking chat messages
• Chatting with Windows Live users

Happy Chatting,
Kate – Yahoo!7 Mail Team

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

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 a blue box down the right-hand column, directly under the box containing your Inbox, Spam, Trash and so forth.

It should look something like this:

By selecting the drop-down menu, you will be able to log in to Chat by selecting that you are “Available”.

Please remember that if you regularly use Yahoo!7 Messenger, you will be signed out of the client once you log in via Mail.

You can also access chat by selecting “Compose” and choosing “Chat”. You will then be prompted to sign-in if you have not already done so.

You should now be logged in, with your Chat contacts list showing in the right-hand menu of your Mail, like I am in the example below:

So I’ve got Chat running, now what?
Now that you are up and running, the rest is easy!

To talk to any of your friends that are online, simply double-click their name in the contact list and a chat window will appear in the bottom-right of your screen. You can then happily chat away to your heart’s content

How do I add my friends?
If you have a friend you wish to add to your Chat list, click upon the “[Add]” option on your Chat window.

You will then be prompted to choose from the drop-down shown below, whether they are a Yahoo!7 or Windows Live user. Yes, you read that correct, you may chat to any of your MSN friends via Yahoo!7 Messenger and Chat within Yahoo!7 Mail!

Once you have typed in their details, simply click “Save” and your friend will receive a notification that you wish to add them.

Chat away!
Using the chat window itself is very easy, when you are chatting with a friend in Classic Mail, a small window will pop-up in the bottom-right of your screen.

In this example, you can see that I am chatting with someone using Windows Live Messenger. It clearly identifies they are using Windows Live Messenger and it shows their status, in this case I am busy working

If you are a fan of smilies or emoticons, well we have those too!

What else can I do?
You may hold multiple conversations at once, as seen below where I am chatting to myself on Windows Live Messenger and about to start a conversation with Morgan.

You may also minimise or maximise the Chat window at any time you wish, or close it entirely.

In addition, you can also collapse the Chat list itself, by selecting “[Hide]“. Clicking “[Show]” will expand the list once more. By clicking upon “Settings” at the base of the Chat list, you can choose to mute or enable sounds, or reposition the window around the other folders in your right-hand menu.

If you require any further assistance, please check out our comprehensive Help section on Chat in Classic Mail

Be sure to come back and let us know what you think!

Happy Chatting,
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

Only with the new version you can drag and drop your messages into different folders, chat with your online friends instantly directly within Mail, and preview attached photos and images directly from your Inbox. And these are just some of the new functionalities available. Want to give it a try and see it for yourself? It’s fairly easy to switch from Classic to the All-New Mail and vice versa, here’s how:

1) Simply click the link ‘Options’ as show in the image above.

2) On the Options page, click the “Try it now” link in the purple box (see below):

If you feel it’s too different for you now, simply switch back to Classic. Or, if you are an undecided Libra person just like me, you can use Classic for 3 days and then the new version for 4 days, then back to Classic for another week, and so on… Maybe one day you will decide which version works best for you!Hope you like it, let us know if you do.

Cheers,

Sabrina – Yahoo!7 Mail team