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

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!

The bracket is set. Sixteen teams are through to the elimination round, 16 teams are flying home. If you think the World Cup has been an emotional roller coaster, buckle your seat belts because over the next two weeks the battle for world soccer supremacy is guaranteed to bring more cheers and tears around the globe. Only one team will remain standing on July 11. Will it be yours?

Speaking from the perspective of a soccer fanatic, I’ve become increasingly reliant on Yahoo! Mail to express the joy and pain of watching my team fight through the World Cup. And through these first couple of weeks, I have discovered ways that Yahoo! Mail can help me deal with the emotional roller coaster of the World Cup. Here are 5 tips for how you can use Yahoo! Mail to help you through the elimination round:

1. Tell the world how you feel through your status message
Yahoo! Mail lets you post status updates that will appear on in places like Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Pulse. You also have the option to expand your reach by sending updates to your Facebook page through Yahoo! Mail. This is a good way to plan an event or poll your friends about the referee’s sanity. More importantly, it’s a way to find an audience as you scream in joy or despair.

2. Wear your colors
Got a Yahoo! Avatar? Dress up your virtual alter-ego with your team’s colors. Through our Yahoo! Avatars page you can choose from a collection of jerseys from teams that qualified for the next round, including England, Brazil, Argentina, USA, Netherlands, Germany, Portugal and France. Oh, wait… scratch France. Or you can hoist the trophy with the FIFA avatar.

3. Search for photos in the Flickr application
Yahoo! Mail gives you the breadth and depth of Flickr through an application that you can launch in your email experience. Flickr is a great tool for World Cup viewing because it gives me a way to soak in the spirit of the game from a fan’s perspective. With so many camera phones on hand inside and outside the stadium, there’s bound to be some photos of the game making their way into Flickr. If you find something you like, you can automatically embed it into your email message and send it around to your friends. Note– this feature is only available on the new Yahoo! Mail.

4. Keep up with news from the Today module
The What’s New page is the place for news and status updates in your Yahoo! Mail session. Check back for updates and post-game articles to dig deeper into the details of the game.

5. Send some personalized smack talk to a friend
My friend George is from Ghana, so I have already saved a draft email of some juicy smack talk once USA scores on Saturday. It reads, “Dear George, GOAAAAAAAAL!!!!!” Since I’ll be at a bar or a friend’s place during the game, I’ll be able to access my draft folder by logging in from my Motorola Droid or from a friend’s iPhone. Man, I hope I didn’t just jinx my team.

Enjoy the next two weeks. There will be plenty of surprises leading up to the final game on July 11. Hopefully this year there won’t be any head-butting.

Jim Hu
Product Marketing Manager
Yahoo! Mail

The start of the world’s biggest sporting event – the FIFA World Cup — is just around the corner and the world is buzzing, rivalries are renewing, and even the smack talk has begun. Starting today on Yahoo! Mail, you can easily share your passion for your team. Go on, let your Yahoo! and Facebook friends know who you are rooting for!

Here’s how it works. Starting today, you will see a flag icon in the status area – the flag is based on the regional version and language of Yahoo! Mail that you use.

By clicking on the flag, Yahoo! Mail will auto-fill your status message with a short phrase of support for that country.

Like any status message, you can customize it to your liking – most importantly, you can change the country you are rooting for by clicking on the drop-down arrow next to the flag. Once you do so, you can see the full list of countries that are participating. Click on the country you support and a suggested status message will populate just like before.

Once you click Share, your message will be broadcast to people who view your Updates on Yahoo!. What’s even better is that you can also share your passion to your Facebook friends by clicking “Add Facebook” and linking your account (and there are many, many, many other benefits of linking your accounts). Sharing on Yahoo! and Facebook definitely gets the conversation going, even if everyone doesn’t always agree…

Share your passion for your team and don’t forget to check out the sweet smorgasbord of World Cup activities across Yahoo!, sure to satisfy even the most ardent of fans.

Who are you rooting for in South Africa?

Like many of you, I am an active Facebook user and have been using many of the Facebook-related features we’ve added to Yahoo! Mail since we announced our plans to integrate Facebook more deeply across all of Yahoo! last December.

Specifically, in Yahoo! Mail we’ve enabled you to import Facebook friends email addresses into Yahoo!, made it simple to post your Facebook status from Yahoo! Mail, and more. Today I’m thrilled to announce another new integration launching to all users* that enables you to view, comment, and like your Facebook news feed items – all right from Yahoo! Mail.

Facebook activity from your friends will now appear in your Updates section, alongside your friends’ activity on Yahoo!, Twitter, Flickr and so on. Now you can get all your Updates in one place, right when you log in to Yahoo! Mail.

Just like on Facebook, you can Comment or Like a news feed item right from Yahoo! Mail…

…and of course, the comment goes back to Facebook so others can see it right away.

We also know that you have different friends on Yahoo! and Facebook, and seeing all their Updates in one place may not be ideal. No problem. By default, we show both Yahoo! and Facebook items intermingled, but you can filter – All Updates, only Yahoo!, only Facebook – by clicking on that tab. Not only that, regardless of what tab you are on, anytime you get a new update on Yahoo! or Facebook, you get notified via a “Show new Updates” link without having to refresh your browser.

So there you have it – one-stop updates from across Yahoo! and Facebook, right on Yahoo! Mail, with more to come across the broader Yahoo! network soon. We hope this feature helps you easily stay in touch with the people who matter most to you. Please let us know what you think!

* = (To activate all Facebook features, you first must link your Facebook account if you have not done so already. It’s super simple! Here’s how).

Independent empirical studies done by the prestigious Fraunhofer Institute show that Yahoo! Mail is #1 in blocking malware and spam from reaching mailboxes.

We, at Yahoo! are proud about putting technology to work for our users. Under the hood, a complex system of spam filters is combing every mail coming into the system for spam signals and automatically detecting the spammers’ next steps. Every spam report counts and tells a little more about how to counteract unwanted email.

Spammers use every trick in the book to distribute millions of spam and scam emails every day – but with Yahoo! Mail, most of these messages are stopped even before they get to our users. In fact, unlike our competitors’ antispam systems, our filters flag or block greater than 99% of spam. With nearly 300 million Yahoo! Mail users worldwide, we are blocking over 120 billion spam messages every month. That’s an average of 400 blocked spam messages per Yahoo! Mail inbox per month.

And we are not the only ones who have noticed our spam-reduction efforts.

The Fraunhofer Institute, an independent research firm, found that Yahoo! Mail users saw the least amount of spam out of the five providers tested, with nearly 40% less spam than Hotmail and 55% less spam than Gmail – meaning Gmail users in the study saw more than twice as much spam as Yahoo! Mail users.

While it’s great to lead the industry with our efforts, it is just as important for us to work together to win the war against spam. As we push forward with our collaboration with anti-spam industry partners, and advance our technology efforts, we’ll continue to arm you with tools, tips and strategies to keep your inbox away from spam, phishing and online scams.

And, as always, keep reporting spam so we can make our engines work even harder to keep your inbox clean.

Disposable Email Addresses in Yahoo! Mail (you might also know them as Addressguard) are a great way to help keep your Inbox free from spam. They are email addresses that you create and give out if you don’t want to give out your primary email address. Messages to your disposable email addresses are delivered to your Inbox or a folder you choose, and you can simply delete them if they start to receive spam.

If you’re like me and you use Disposable Email Addresses in the fight against spam, then I want to let you know about some upcoming changes to your Disposable Email Addresses. First of all, you probably know to look for the Disposable Email Addresses in the Spam section of Yahoo! Mail Options (click the ‘Options’ link in the top of your Inbox and then click ‘More Options’ or ‘Mail Options’). Soon, we are giving ‘Disposable Email Addresses’ its very own place on the Mail Options Screen. Let’s have a look:

(Please note: If you don’t see ‘Disposable Email Addresses’ as an option in the left-hand menu, you will need to sign up from the ‘Spam’ section of Mail Options.) Creating a Disposable Email Address is really very easy. Just click the ‘Add Address’ button at the top of the screen and an easy to follow wizard will walk you through creating your Disposable Email Addresses.

There are a few other changes as well. So let’s walk through each of them:

1. Changes to ‘Spamguard’ settings: In the current version of Disposable Email Addresses – I’m going to abbreviate them to DEA’s now – you have the option of choosing whether you want to turn the ‘Spamguard’ setting on for each individual DEA. With the upcoming changes, all DEA’s will take the Spamguard setting that you have set up in the Spam section of your Yahoo! Mail Options. That means you have will have one global Spamguard setting for your entire Mailbox and you can control it from one central location. How’s that for easy?
2. Changes to the delivery options: Now, when you set up a DEA, you have an option to move messages addressed to your DEA to your Inbox or any personal folder that you’ve created. With the new DEA’s you can still do that, but now you will have to use a filter. After you create your DEA, just click the link ‘Manage Filters for Disposable Addresses’. That link will take you to the ‘Filters’ section of Yahoo! Mail Options. Create a new filter, then just put your newly created DEA in the ‘recipient’ field and select the folder you want it delivered to. (Please note: as a consequence of this change you will have to set up new filters for your current Disposable Email Addresses.)
3. Changes to the ‘Sending Mail’ option: Our current DEA creation lets you pick an option to send email from a DEA. With the new version of Disposable Email Addresses you will now have the option of sending mail from all of the DEA’s you create. When you compose a new mail, you can find all your DEA’s in the ‘From:’ pick-list.

These changes to your have already begun to roll-out to Yahoo! Mail Users. If you don’t see these changes in your Yahoo! Mail Options right now, they should be showing up soon. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact our Customer Care team.