Yahoo!7 Mail & Messenger Blog

Forecast your day!

April 17th, 2009 3 comments

Something that many of us have in common is that we all like to keep on top of the weather forecasts, nothing like turning up to work in a summer dress and no jacket when it’s supposed to be 15° out… brrr! And if you are like me, then you are sometimes just too busy getting dinner ready or dealing with family, study or a million other things when you get home from work or school, to catch the next day’s forecast at the tail end of the news at night.

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

Chat within Classic Mail

March 31st, 2009 9 comments

Following upon the success of Chat in the All-new Mail, we are pleased to announce that Chat is now available in Yahoo!7 Classic Mail!

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

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:

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

Tags: inbox 2.0, social mail, yahoo!7 mail