Yahoo! Mail Blog
The latest scoop on Yahoo! Mail product updates, new releases, bug fixes,

I want to give a quick heads up that we will be conducting maintenance over the next week that might impact some of you. The maintenance is part of our ongoing efforts to give you the best Mail service possible.

Beginning today, you may experience problems accessing your Yahoo! Mail account. If you are one of the very few affected, have no fear. It should be available again is as short as 30 minutes. Apologies for any inconvenience this causes you.

As always, please feel free to contact customer care for any concerns or issues. They can be reached via this link: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/classic/forms_index.html

Thanks for your patience.
Andrew - Yahoo! Mail Team

On top of the new contacts filter we introduced last week, we’ve been hard at work building new social and interactive features within Yahoo! Mail. As you might recall, we first started introducing these features back in December, and based on your feedback have continued to make enhancements throughout the year. Now we’re excited to share the latest social features coming to your Inbox, all focused on giving you a better email experience and making it even easier to keep in touch with those who matter most. Some highlights:

• Updates, Updates, Updates! You told us that you really like Yahoo! Updates, so we’ve added even more of your favorite sites. For example, when you update your Twitter (commonly known as ‘Tweets’) or write an answer on Yahoo! Answers, people you choose to share this with get updated. You also stay in the loop when others do the same. Of course, you can control which updates you share with folks by going to your Yahoo! Profile and selecting ‘manage my updates‘

  My personal favorite: now when you send an email to someone, you can see their latest Updates right on your Message Sent confirmation page.



• What’s The Status? The new Yahoo! status message located right at the top of the What’s New’ page of your Yahoo! Mail is an easy way to keep friends and family in the know with what you are doing, feeling, or thinking about. Yep, this is the same status message that appears on your Yahoo! Profile. We have just made it readily available for updating right in your Inbox. And if you are running out of things to say (as if that is ever possible) you can select from a list of handy, sometimes zany suggestions (what we call ’status-o-matique’). Just click on the inconspicuous ‘exclamation mark’ located in the status message box. :-)

  And stay tuned, you will start to see your friends’ status messages show up in additional places across Yahoo! as we incorporate Yahoo! Updates into more Yahoo! sites.



• News in Mail: Better than ever! We heard you loud and clear. You missed the tabbed format of news, so we’ve brought it back. To make it more interesting, we added a new category – Yahoo! Buzz – so you can see what current events people find most remarkable and have recently ‘buzzed’ up. For added good measure, some of you told us that you’d prefer to see the News above the Updates section. Now you can! At the bottom of your Updates section, simply click on the ‘More Actions’ menu and choose ‘Move Updates below Today section’. The News will then always appear above Updates when you log in.

These features are available for both Classic and new Yahoo! Mail users in the US and Australia starting today. If you already have created a Yahoo! Profile, you will automatically see the new features the next time you login to Yahoo! Mail. If you haven’t, simply click on profiles.yahoo.com, quickly create a profile, and presto, you will see these features in your inbox. And for those in other countries, stay tuned, as we’ll roll out these features to many of you shortly.

Of course, these features are best seen in action, and that’s why we reached out to a Yahoo! Mail user named Grady who will give you the scoop on all the new stuff. Take it away, Grady…

It seems like only yesterday when we first introduced applications in Yahoo! Mail. Well, starting today, we’re launching a handful of new and VERY cool apps in Yahoo! Mail — all focused on enabling you to do more, share more and save time in Mail.

Applications from PayPal, Zumo Drive, Picnik, OtherInbox and Photobucket cover the gamut on common tasks you handle online, from transferring money to photosharing to sending large files. We’ve reduced the number of times you have to visit multiple destinations on the Web to get things done. For example, the Zumo Drive application provides storage you can access right from inside your mailbox, giving users the ability to send large files as well as share and collaborate on documents and attachments right from their inbox. (But I digress, we’ll go into more detail on this new app and a few others in a second.)

If you already have access to the applications we launched in December, you’ll notice several of the apps the next time you log in, located along the left side of your inbox. If you haven’t already signed up to use the new applications, click here: http://overview.mail.yahoo.com/applications. The new applications are free and available to all US users of the new Yahoo! Mail. For those outside of the US, stay tuned as we will begin rolling out to select markets later this summer.

So without further ado, here is more in-depth look at some of the new apps available on Yahoo! Mail. And for those interested in a demo, check out this video where yours truly walks you through “A Day in the Life of a Yahoo! Mail app.”

Edit Photos by Picnik: This app allows you to crop, touch up, add effects and more to any of the photos that you have in your inbox or online. After you edit them you can email them to friends, save them to your computer, or post to Websites like Flickr and Picasa.

My Photos by Xoopit has continued improving their Mail experience; this app lets you organize and share all the photos in your Inbox from within one view, and they’ve added some features to let you upload new photos and shuffle amongst the treasures buried in your Unlimited Storage mailbox.

PayPal let’s you request and send money to almost anyone around the world right from Yahoo! Mail.

Share It by Zumo Drive allows you to send and share large attachments (up to 100MB) with your friends and family. With Share It, you can share large files like videos, photos, and even entire folders, and the recipients can collaborate and edit the documents with you.

These days many of you are engaged in an epic battle… separating the important emails from everything else. You get a lot of emails, some good (from friends, family, even favorite interests that you’ve added to your Address Book), and a lot of not-so-important emails (special offers, newsletters, emails you rarely read). All this has made your Inbox more work than fun. Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply snap your fingers and poof! - your Inbox magically transformed to only show the important emails?

Well, we’re not magicians on the Mail team but we are rolling out a new feature that lets you filter your Inbox (or any folder) to just show the emails from senders you’ve added to your Address Book - with just the simple click of a button! It is a crazy easy way to let the “good guys” (important emails) win! Let me show you how it works.

Step 1: Go to your Inbox or any folder. Above the list of emails, you’ll see links to View from All, Contacts, or Connections.

Click on Contacts:

Like magic, your Inbox (or any folder) transforms to only show emails from Contacts you’ve currently added to your Address Book! No work required (who says all things good in life have to be difficult)? Now you can easily see just the emails from your friends, family, and favorite interests (I love U2 and added them to my Address Book) right up front, minus the noise and clutter. Of course, you can always create filters if you want even more control.

Please check it out and let us what you think! Thank you very much for continuing to use Yahoo! Mail.

PS: This feature will roll out in the next few weeks to both Classic and the new Yahoo! Mail users who have the Smarter Inbox features enabled. To get these new features, first create a Profile at profiles.yahoo.com and then log back into Yahoo! Mail. Only users in the US and Australia can get it now, but users from many more countries will be eligible soon.

With Yahoo! Mail offering unlimited storage, I find myself using the delete button less and less these days. And with the ability to move messages to folders with one keystroke (in the all-new version of Mail), it’s more important than ever to be able to easily and quickly find messages.

Simple Searching
With just a simple keyword search, like “orders”, we give you the option to filter search results by a whole host of options. Whether you want to narrow your results by Date, Folder, Sender etc. they are all listed for you in a very nice, clickable, list (right-hand side in the new Mail, left-hand side of Classic Mail). But that just scratches the surface of what you can do.

Shortcuts
For the more advanced searchers of the world (plus those who prefer typing to clicking), you can filter your searches from directly within the search box. Think of the filters as little search shortcuts for your Mailbox.

Let’s take a look at an example:
Say you want to find all of your emails in your Mailbox with the subject pictures?
- In the search box, type: subject:pictures

But you have a ton of emails with pictures. You want to find that fantastic picture from Dave and you remember he called it cool.
- In the search box, type: subject:”cool picture” from:dave

On the other hand, if lot’s of people send you cool pics, but you’ve never really liked the ones that Dave sends you, you can hide Dave’s messages from the search results using the ‘-’ (dash) to omit his results
- In the search box, type: subject:”cool pictures” –from:dave

Attachments
Did you know that you can search for different types of attachments using search in Yahoo! Mail? And even better, you can search INSIDE attachments. Yes, that’s right, I said inside. I know what you’re saying - “That’s not possible from a web mail provider.” Well it is possible, and you can do search inside Word documents, Excel and PDFs with Yahoo! Mail. I’m not aware of any other free Web mail provider that does that!

Let’s use one of those shortcuts.
- In the search box, type: from:dave attachment:”restaurant list”

Why do I care about this? Well, since Dave sends so many emails with attachments to me, being able to search inside attachments I can find the document he sent me with his restaurant recommendations. And we even give a little preview and highlight the part of the document with the search terms.

More with Attachments
There are plenty of other things you can do with the attachment shortcuts. You are able to search for an attachment name, type and number of attachments. Want to see a list of boarding pass PDFs you have received from American after checking in?
- In the search box, type: from:american attachmenttype:pdf

Further reading
If any of this is slightly confusing or you want to learn more, we’ve created some tutorials. Tutorial topics include: Quick Searches, Searching for Messages, Narrowing Search Results. And there is a complete list of these Yahoo Mail search shortcuts in our help pages.

Now if only I could find my car keys…

Last week we took a look at some of the keyboard shortcuts available in the all-new Yahoo! Mail. We looked at the basics: opening and closing a message, composing and sending, etc. Today I wanted to dive a little deeper and look at some shortcuts that really make Yahoo! Mail great and you incredibly productive.

Moving messages with a single keystroke:
Do you use personal folders to keep your mailbox organized? Did you know that the numbers 1-9 on your keyboard correspond to the first 9 of your folders? So when you’re finished reading a message, just press the right number and off it goes. No need to click and drag.

Here are some other quick tips for moving messages:

• You can see which number your folder is by clicking the ‘Move’ button at the top of your mailbox. Your folders are listed in numerical order
• If you want to make it even easier, just rename your folders and put a number in front of the folder name (i.e. 1 Family, 2 Orders, etc).
• If you like the idea of renaming folders use the F2 key to rename a folder
• Finally, 0 (zero) moves a message from any folder back to the Inbox
• We’ve stopped at 9. So if you want to move a message to the 10th folder in your list, you’ll have to grab that mouse.

Navigate your mailbox without a mouse:
One of the features that I think makes the new Yahoo! Mail so great is the ability to have multiple messages (tabs) open at the same time from right inside your mailbox. Using CTRL+] (that’s the right bracket key) will move from one tab to another (going from left to right). Need to go the other direction CTRL+[ (that’s the left bracket key).

No need to stop there. Hitting TAB will let your navigate all around your Mailbox. This time SHIFT+TAB sends you the other way around. Looking at your Inbox? Need to perform a search? Just hit SHIFT+TAB and your cursor goes into the search box. Type your query and hit Enter.

Just a reminder that the complete list of shortcuts can be found on our help site. And don’t forget you can always look at the tool-tips when you mouse over a link.

I hope you find these features as useful as I do. Every time I find that I have to use an email that isn’t Yahoo Mail (for testing purposes only, of course) I’m always disappointed when I can’t use my keyboard.

Now, I know, for most, when using a computer reaching for the mouse is almost second nature. You probably don’t even realize you’re doing it. I grew up in the age of DOS, if you can believe it (certainly shows you what a dinosaur I am). My first computer didn’t come with a mouse, so I learned to use a computer using nothing but a keyboard. Which is why - for me - the keyboard shortcuts in the all-new version of Yahoo! mail are fantastic. I can go almost a whole session without ever having to reach for the mouse. Who needs drag and drop, or point and click, when you can do the exact same thing with a single keystroke?

I challenge you to go a whole session of email reading and writing without reaching for that mouse and only using Yahoo! Mail’s keyboard shortcut. Can’t be done you say? Assuming you already have the all-new version of Yahoo! mail open, let’s give it a try. (Why not use Alt-Tab to get there?)

Got a new message you want to read? Wait - don’t do it - don’t reach for that mouse.

• Just use your up and down arrows on your keyboard until you’ve highlighted the message you want to read and hit ‘Enter‘. BAM!! - the message opens in a new tab.
• Done reading? Hit the escape - ‘Esc‘ - key and the message closes.
• Want to delete the message? Hit the ‘Delete‘ key. Say goodbye to that message.

Want to write a new message? Keep you hands off that mouse!

• If you are looking at your Inbox, just hit the ‘n’ key. Open sesame. A new message opens and your cursor is in the To: field.
• Start typing a contact and Auto-complete takes over. Highlight the right contact from the list using the up or down arrows and hit ‘Tab’. That’s it you’ve entered a contact.
• Need another? Repeat above.
• Need a Cc:? Hit ‘Tab’ and presto, you’re in the Cc: field. Just do the same thing you just did in the To: field.
• Hit ‘Tab’ again and you’re in the Subject: field.
• Hit ‘Tab’ again to get to the Message body.
• Finished composing your email already? Still no need for that mouse. On your keyboard, just press and hold Control and then Enter (Ctrl+Enter) and away it goes. (That shortcut should look familiar to MS Outlook users)

Those are two of the things that we do most with email (reading and writing), completed without touching that mouse. I know! It IS very cool!! And I guarantee – once you get used to it – it’s quicker and easier to do than the same with a mouse.

There’s a lot more keyboard shortcuts than the ones above. You can do almost everything in Yahoo! Mail with a single keystroke. It’s easy to find out what they are too. You can navigate on over to this help page, which lists all the available keyboard shortcuts. Alternatively, you can use your mouse (the last time you’ll need to touch that, I promise) and the menus and mouse-overs show you what keystroke does the same thing. Take a look at the screenshots below to see which letters denote the equivalent keyboard shortcut.

So what can’t you accomplish with the keyboard? To be honest, not much. I guess the main things that I would like to see a keyboard shortcut for are spell checking, attaching files and switching between rich-text and plain text when composing an email. But that’s about it.

I can tell you my favorite sequence of keyboard shortcuts. I get a lot of stuff that isn’t junk, but I don’t necessarily want to read all the time. Mostly newsletters and such. Plus, I’m kind of a neat freak and I don’t like ‘unread’ messages in my trash folder (I don’t know why). So here’s what I do… I use ‘Shift’+arrow down to highlight the messages I don’t want. Then I hit ‘k’ to mark them all read. Then I hit ‘Delete’ to send them all to the trash. That’s it 10 messages deleted in a matter of seconds and no mouse needed.

You’ve all probably seen some sort of scam email, and by now you probably think you’ll never be fooled by one. But from time to time, I get one that I think is particularly cunning. And it reminds me that it’s never a bad thing to have a little refresher course on how to avoid be the victim of phishing scams. I received this email over the weekend, and thought I’d share it with you as a particularly good example of a phishing email.

Phishing, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is the act of trying to trick you into revealing your account and login information via a fake email or fake Website. The one pictured above is a prime example of a phishing email, which uses a scare tactic to try to solicit you to send your account details and password. Here I’m being asked for the password for my Yahoo! account, and the email threatens that I could lose my account if I don’t send my info. It could just as easily been my banking information.

The most important thing you need to know is that we will never ask you for your password. NEVER!! And we would certainly never ask you to give us any of your account information unsolicited. Banking sites, like Yahoo!, are the same and you will never be asked for your account details in an email.

So if you receive an email like the one above, don’t fall for it. Just delete it, or better yet, report it using this form.

Find more tips for online safety in this blog post, and this one too.

Happy emailing,
Andrew - Yahoo! Mail Team

In case you missed it, Yahoo! Messenger for the iPhone is now available for download on from the iPhone App Store. I have to admit, I don’t have an iPhone - I’m a BlackBerry user - but I’ve seen it in action and it’s very, very cool. So cool, in fact, Apple have made it a featured application in the App Store in iTunes (scroll to the bottom of that page, if the link doesn’t take you there automagically).

The top features for the new Messenger version for the iPhone are:

• Instant Messaging (of course)
• Photo Sharing
• Stealth Settings
• Custom Status Messages
• And more…

If you’d like to see it in action, Sarah on the Messenger team has called out the top Messenger for iPhone features in more detail. And they have put together a short video of Messenger for the iPhone in action.

It’s almost enough for me to take the plunge and buy an iPhone, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while. But for the moment, I’m sticking with my Blackberry, which of course has its own BlackBerry Yahoo! Instant Messenger application. I use it all the time, and especially like the way I can have conversations appear my main BB message list. That way I can go back to my important emails while I wait for John to tell me where he wants to go for lunch.

After tabulating the results of the survey about email pet peeves that we ran last month on this blog, it turns out that your biggest email bugbear is the use of text speak in the body of an email. In fact, more than 1 in 5 of you think so. Here’s a list of the top five email pet peeves as voted by you our loyal blog readers:

1. Use of text speak such as LOL and BTW (22%)
2. Mass distribution emails to 5 or more recipients (16%)
3. Use of ‘shouting’ CAPITAL letters (15%)
4. No entry in subject line (12%)
5. Read receipts (10%)

With those results in mind, we’ve teamed up with leading etiquette expert Jean Broke-Smith to put together the rules of email engagement. This guide should help you use email more effectively, and show you how you can get the most out of email.

Here it is the definitive guide to email etiquette and don’t forget to share it with your m8s ;-)

Do….create the right impression and banish the BTWs. People react to email within seconds of receiving it. As the Yahoo! research shows, text speak can be very annoying and shows a lack of correct spelling ability and laziness. It won’t impress!

Don’t… offend. Using capitals is the email equivalent of SHOUTING and is perceived as being extremely rude, so make sure your caps lock is switched off.

Do…. include a subject line. You’ve got three seconds to grab attention when an email appears and by not including a subject in the email, the chances of it being read are greatly reduced. Use the subject line for the purpose it was made and tell people what the email is about.

Don’t… use read receipts. Read receipts demonstrate a distinct lack of trust, so avoid where possible. Follow up with a phone call if you want to ensure your message has reached the right person.

Do… remember the recipient. The failsafe method for emailing is to imagine you are writing a succinct letter. Address the recipient in the correct manner and title. You can be light hearted and humorous as in any written communication, it is a just a matter of judgment. But if you don’t know the recipient, don’t be over familiar and sign off with the right degree of formality.

Don’t…. use CC and BCC unnecessarily. The no. 2 email bug bear is mass distribution of emails, so exercise constraint when it comes to copying people in. If the email is important to other people, simply forward to them at the end, rather than them being caught up in a never-ending email trail. Likewise use the BCC button wisely, again forward emails separately rather than ‘hiding’ other recipients.

Do… take your time. Because of the instant nature of emails it is tempting to deal with them immediately, but rushing an email can lead to errors. Deal with them promptly but don’t panic and reply in haste and always check what you have written before you hit send.

Don’t… over use ‘importance’. Before you even consider using a red exclamation mark, ask yourself is this really important? Only use when it is vital that the email is read, otherwise you are drawing unnecessary attention to yourself and it is a quick way of irritating recipients.

Do…save the kisses. Over familiarity towards your boss or work colleagues is bad etiquette, keep the love and kisses for very good friends.

Don’t… email when angry. If you receive a ‘harsh’ email, read it through, then close it and walk away. Consider your response and if necessary ask someone else to read your reply before you send it, don’t fight fire with fire.

Do… choose a sensible email address. Common sense tells you that you are less likely to land a job if you use a frivolous email address, such as, crazychick@yahoo.co.uk. Think about what your email address says about you as it’s an insight into your personality.

Don’t… hide behind email. It is often easier to write something in words than it is to say it out loud, but don’t say something on email that you wouldn’t say in person. Emails have longevity and it can come back to haunt you!

Happy emailing,
Andrew - Yahoo! Mail Team