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

On the Yahoo! Mail team, we have no shortage of big personalities and big brains. We’re a diverse family of technical and creative talent dedicated to making Yahoo! Mail the best email experience for you. We love what we do, and we wanted to share with you some of our thinking as well as introduce you to some members of our team.

Today we’re featuring Rick Pal, who is the product manager responsible for Yahoo! Contacts and for making Yahoo! Mail more social and connected. Yahoo! Mail is not just about sending and receiving emails; it’s also about helping you keep in touch to the people who matter most to you. In this interview, Rick discusses the thinking behind why Yahoo! Mail is becoming more social, and why we brought in Facebook to improve user experiences in Mail, Contacts, and more. Check out this video clip and feel free to give us feedback about what you like (or don’t like) about these new social features. Enjoy!

Are you a regular at the Zynga Poker table? Catch yourself yelling “Bingo!” at work? (Don’t worry… we won’t tell). At Yahoo! Mail, we recognize that users are interacting with apps from all over the Web, so we want make it easier for your apps to communicate with you.

Yahoo! Mail will now let you know when you’ve received a notification from your favorite Yahoo! or Zynga app. When you receive an email from a Zynga game or Yahoo! App, a notification will appear in the new Recent Apps Activity module on the What’s New page in Yahoo! Mail. That means you’ll see e-mails for free chips, coupons, or points front-and-center when you sign into Yahoo! Mail.

If you haven’t started using apps on Yahoo!, it’s easy to get started. Just log into your Yahoo! account and go to your Yahoo! Pulse page. From there click the “Apps” button on the bottom-left of the page and start searching for apps that interest you. My personal favorites are Mafia Wars and Nike Football. I highly recommend them!

Keep your eye out for the new Recent App Activity module – it will only appear when you have an unread email from an app. As always, please let us know what you think. Happy gaming!

Here at Yahoo! we’re always striving to give our users the best possible communications experience across all the devices they use. In recent months we’ve released some great new Yahoo! Mail products for mobile devices like the iPhone, iPod touch and Android phones. Now we are setting our sights on the iPad.

If you’ve used our recently launched HTML5 mobile Web mail for iPhone you’ll feel right at home. We’ve kept all the things users love about our new mobile Web mail experience, while also optimizing for the gorgeous large screen of the iPad. You can expect the iPad experience to be:

• Faster and more reliable: If you’re offline, Yahoo! Mail uses local caching capabilities to help you access and search your messages even without an Internet connection.

• Smart: You can find and organize your messages using Full Search, personal folders and Smart Folders with messages from your most important contacts and optimized views for photos and file attachments.

• Feature Rich: View rich photo attachments in their full form, or as previews directly in the inbox view. Also includes a dual-pane view to make reading and organizing a breeze.

The new Yahoo! Mail experience will be available globally to anyone who has an iPad. So if you do have one, simply open up Safari and head on over to http://mail.yahoo.com to try it for yourself.

Of course this is just the first version, and we’ll be constantly iterating to add new features, improve performance, and make Yahoo! Mail for iPad the best it can possibly be. And please let us know what you think. One of the great things about working on Yahoo! Mail is getting so much direct feedback from our users. It’s so exciting to hear about how people are using the products, and also to hear your ideas for how we can make our experiences even better.

We’re looking forward to hearing what you think about the new Yahoo! Mail for iPad. Enjoy!

In the spirit of Comicon last month, we teamed up with Wired Magazine to see what Yahoo! would look like as a superhero. In Wired’s August issue Yahoo! products were brought to life in the story “Battling the Blah Blah Blah’s” with the help of the creative minds at Wired. You can download the comic by visiting this site. There, you can also check out Yahoo!’s collection of mobile apps, including Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Finance, and the Yahoo! Homepage.

Enjoy seeing how our valiant superhero saved humankind from spam-clogged inboxes, social isolation, and mediocre meals!

Just remembered it was your friend’s birthday? Want to let someone know how much you miss them? How about making the invite for your upcoming party a bit more memorable? Or even better, why not send a funky message to your friends just for fun?

With My Cool Fonts you can always find a font that suits your mood and gives your email messages a personal touch. Your personalized emails will not only stand out in a crowded inbox, but they will also surprise your friends and even put a smile on their faces.

Creating colorful emails using our original fonts is very easy. Just launch the My Cool Fonts app from the Applications menu, select a font, type a message, click on “Create email” and voila! A new email gets created, and you can then add any other text or attachments to your illustrated message.

Be creative! Whether you are trying to impress your friends or getting your point across in a funny way, there are plenty of styles and colors to choose from in our growing library of free Fonts.

Below are samples from just of few of them:

Most of these fonts have its their own set of smileys, which you can browse and easily insert into your message from the Smileys menu. See the whole list here.

The Fontself application is now available to Yahoo! Mail users in the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, and the U.K. We’ll also be adding some very cool personalization features very soon, so keep an eye out for them!

Enjoy!

I’m a foodie, and I love to immerse myself in anything food-related. Some of my favorite activities have included attending chocolate salons and shows, taking cooking classes in Vietnam, and picking cherries and peaches from local California farms. Over the years, my Yahoo! Mail has played a vital role in helping me grow as a chef because it makes the best recipe box. It stores recipes that I’ve found and personalized, it’s easily searchable, and it is the best way for me to share recipes with friends. Let me explain.

Store
I like to experiment with new recipes, and my email makes a perfect recipe box. Last week I had a craving for noodles in an Asian peanut sauce, and after some digging online I found a recipe that resembled what I remember my mother making from my childhood. The reviews were favorable, so I copied and pasted the recipe into an email, made direct edits based on the reviews I read from other home cooks (in the case of the peanut sauce, it was to go light on the honey and to add cayenne pepper for extra kick), and then sent it to myself. This unintended editing feature is something I actually really appreciate about storing recipes in email because personalizing recipes is important to me.

Search
Email is where I store almost every recipe that I have tried, liked, or aspire to try in the future. Searching through my recipe folder in my email is super-easy and fast, and it’s especially useful at 6 pm when I’m about to make dinner. When I’m at the grocery store trying to remember ingredients for my corn chowder, or at the farmer’s market with 4 pounds of gorgeous tomatoes wondering what else I need to make bruschetta, I’ll also use my iPhone to search for recipes that I saved years ago.

Share
Recipes are not only meant to be cooked, they are meant to be shared. Probably half of the recipes in my email folder have come from friends or people I met at potlucks/BBQs and other events. In a way, email has become my personal log of the people and events connected with a recipe. These days, I’m discovering new recipes and food ideas through my friends’ Facebook updates, often right inside Yahoo!Mail. Just the other day my friend updated her status asking for summer recipes that don’t require a grill. In the process of contributing my own favorites, I picked up a few ideas from her friends that I became excited to try. Into my email recipe box they went.

These are some ideas about how to use email to make your pursuit of culinary joy easier. Fellow aspiring chefs: Tell us how email has improved what comes out of your kitchen. Better yet, feel free to share your favorite recipes too! I’m always looking for new ideas.

My noodles in peanut sauce

Hey fans of ABC’s The Bachelorette, did you watch Jimmy Kimmel Live on Monday, July 19? Bachelorette Ali Fedotwosky gave Jimmy a recap of the night’s episode through a Yahoo! Messenger video call. We wanted to give some love to our communications comrades over in Messenger. Way to go!

Here’s the clip:

Got an appointment or a hot date you can’t miss? Want to turn your iPhone into your personal assistant? For those of you who own an iPhone 3GS or below, and run iOS4, you can sync the appointments on your Yahoo! Calendar to the calendar on your iPhone in a few easy steps. Once activated, you’ll be able to add or find your appointments whether you’re running around with your iPhone, or if you’re visiting Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! Calendar on your PC. Here’s what you need to do:

If you’re an existing user:
Settings->Mail/Contacts/Calendar->Your Mail Account

If you’re using Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! Calendar for the first time:
Settings->Mail/Contacts/Calendar->Add Account->Yahoo->Enter your account info and click next.

For iPhone 4 users, you won’t need to do anything because the new phone software will automatically activate your Yahoo! Calendar once you sync your Yahoo! Mail. You can also sync your contacts to Yahoo! by using the CardDAV protocol. Visit this page to learn how to set this up.

Going forward, you’ll see more ways to access Yahoo! Mail features on all types of mobile devices, such as the iPhone and Android phones, to help organize your life. In fact, we’ve seen tremendous growth after we activated Calendar sync for the iPhone 4. Since the iPhone 4 launched in June, many users have jumped on board and activated their Yahoo! accounts on the new phone, and we expect more to follow:

Try it out, and tell us what you think.

Yesterday we made some big announcements. We launched our first-ever Yahoo! Mail and Messenger Android apps and unveiled a redesigned version of Yahoo! Mail optimized for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Today I wanted to share with you some thoughts from the people who brought these products to life. Check out this latest episode of Yahoo! News Bytes featuring our very own Lee Parry. Enjoy the video!

Jim Hu
Product Marketing Manager
Yahoo! Mail

At Yahoo!, our goal is to help you stay in touch with the people who matter most in your life. Whether it’s on a PC, a smartphone, an iPad, or a TV, we want to bring you a Yahoo! communications experience that you can enjoy on any Internet-connected device. Today, I’m thrilled to share with you two announcements that bring this vision even closer.

The Best Yahoo! Communications Experience — for your Android Phone
First, we’re excited to unveil Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger apps for the Android operating system. These are the first Android applications that Yahoo! has ever released and we couldn’t be happier to be sharing them with you today. You can download them from the Android Market for phones that support Android OS 2.0+, such the popular Motorola Droid, the HTC Incredible and the Google Nexus One.

Yahoo! Mail and Messenger are available as separate streamlined apps, however they offer common features that will give you a better mobile communications experience that’s easy to use and immediately familiar. Both apps let you compose messages with rich text, express yourself through our many Yahoo! emoticons, access Yahoo! Address Book and phone contacts, as well as share photos that you’ve taken on your phone.

The Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger Android apps offer many of the core features that you find in their PC counterparts. In the Yahoo! Mail Android app, you can search for important messages with our Full Search and Smart Folders features and organize messages into the same personal folders you use on the PC. In Messenger you can set your Yahoo! Messenger status message, view the status messages of your buddy list contacts and chat with your MSN/Windows Live Messenger friends. For more details on the Messenger app, click here.

Give them a try today! You can download the Yahoo! Mail and Messenger apps from the Android Market.

For additional information, visit http://mobile.yahoo.com/mail/android.

The new HTML5 mobile Web Mail for iPhone and iPod Touch – A smarter, faster, and richer mobile mail experience
For our second announcement, we are upgrading our mobile Web mail experience with a faster, more feature-rich version. We wanted to give our nearly 300 million Yahoo! Mail users more options to access our service on the devices they love. The newest version of Yahoo! Mail, available today as an opt-in trial, has many of the features that you’ll find on our PC version and leverages the power of HTML5 to deliver an app-like experience never before seen on the mobile Web. It’s a mobile email experience that is:

• Faster and more reliable: If you’re offline, Yahoo! Mail uses local caching capabilities to help you access and search your messages even without an internet connection.
• Smart: You can find and organize your messages using Full Search, personal folders and Smart Folders with messages from your most important contacts and optimized views for photos and file attachments.
• Rich: View rich photo and video attachments in their full form, or as previews directly in the inbox view.
• Seamless & unified experience: Going forward, you’ll see a consistent look and feel, whether you’re on a smartphone or a PC.

During the trial period, our new mobile Web mail experience will be available in 28 languages across more than 200 countries. We’ve optimized it for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch running iOS 3.0+, with more mobile devices and platforms on the way.

The new HTML5 version of Yahoo! Mail is available as an opt-in beta, though we expect to upgrade everyone to this experience shortly. Get started by visiting http://y.ahoo.it/mailbeta on your phone’s browser, or by visiting http://m.yahoo.com/mail and tapping on ‘Preview the new Yahoo! Mail’.

We’re really excited about both our HTML5 Yahoo! Mail experience, and the awesome new Android applications, so give them a whirl and don’t forget to come back and let us know what you think!