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

As you may have seen, this week we announced the limited beta launch of applications in Yahoo ! Mail. This means that we are bringing your favorite Web sites and services right into your inbox. These applications will allow you to communicate, share and get more done within Yahoo ! Mail.

Over 60% of attachments in Yahoo ! Mail are photos, so I am especially excited about our new photo sharing applications. We’ve been working closely with Xoopit to make browsing and sharing photos from Yahoo ! Mail easy. Their application allows you to browse through all the Flickr, Picassa, Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery and attachment photos you have, right in your inbox. I’ve had my Yahoo ! Mail account for over eight years, so when I activated the Xoopit application, I rediscovered and shared photos of my Halloween costume from 2002! (Madonna, circa the 80’s, in case you were wondering).

Here are the apps that our limited beta users are trying out now:

• Family Journal: build a family tree inside Yahoo ! Mail and easily share with relatives.
• Flickr: share Flickr photos with friends and family right from the inbox.
• Flixster: share movie show times, trailers and reviews instantly from the inbox.
• WordPress: post photos, links, and more from the inbox to a WordPress blog.
• Xoopit: see and share all the photos stored in email, including attachments and links to photo sharing sites, in one organized ‘photo view’ of the inbox.
• Yahoo ! Greetings and American Greetings: use the autocomplete email address feature to send an ecard seamlessly from Yahoo ! Mail.

We’re in limited beta right now, but please stay tuned as we start to give more of you access to these applications. You can sign up here to be on the waitlist.

Stephanie Shum
Sr. Product Manager

If I could earn a nickel for how many times I’ve heard people say “I get WAY too much email!” I could retire soon. :) I’ve seen studies that show that users get 30 emails a day on average. That’s a lot of email to go through each day!

Let’s face it - messages from some people are more important than those from others. We would all rather read an email from our best friend than view a “special offer” from a Web site we bought something on years ago. New features coming to both our Classic and New versions of Yahoo ! Mail will make it easier to give important people VIP treatment in your inbox.

Of course, not everyone can be a VIP, so you have to invite people to become a connection (what we call VIPs). To do this, you send them an invitation to connect (they don’t even have to be using Yahoo ! Mail) and once they accept, new features are unlocked that only connections get. For starters, we make it super simple to see messages from connections right when you sign in on the Welcome Page and right in your inbox.

We also help you see what they are up to on other Web sites, like Yahoo ! TV, Travel and Music. For example, when they review the latest episode of “House,” review their favorite beach in Kauai , or rate the newest song from U2, you get automatically updated. We are calling this next generation of Yahoo ! Mail the “smarter inbox.” This video that shows the new stuff in action:

Connections will get even more VIP treatment in your inbox in the coming months. For example, we will allow you to share enormous files over email with your connections, and we’ll remind you when their birthdays are coming up. Those are just a few things… more on those features later. Connections will also get benefits across all Yahoo!, not just in Yahoo ! Mail.

These features in Yahoo ! Mail are now rolling out to users in Australia and some in the US – but coming everywhere soon. Users with Yahoo! profile will get access first, so create a profile at profile.yahoo.com to get to the head of the line!

Rick Pal
Yahoo! Mail Product Guy

As mentioned previously, the open applications in Yahoo ! Mail are available by invitation only. However, if you are interested in participating in the limited beta, please go here and sign up to be a beta tester. We will slowly be adding new users over the coming weeks and months. Thanks very much for your interest!

- The Yahoo ! Mail Team

As you may have heard, we’ve been working on a new smarter inbox to help make your life easier. We’re happy to announce that today, some of you will begin to experience the smarter inbox, and we wanted to give everyone a chance to see what it looks like and what it can do.

The smarter inbox experience features a new Yahoo! Mail Welcome Page which surfaces messages, information and activity updates you care about most, as well as an updated inbox and folder view that filters messages from your personal connections.

The smarter Yahoo! Mail inbox also gives you immediate access to relevant third-party applications like Flickr, Flixster and Xoopit allowing you to do much more, and be more efficient, all from within your inbox. Take a look now and let us know what you think!

- Yahoo! Mail Team

Update: We are conducting a very limited beta test right now of the open applications in Yahoo! Mail. Only our power users, who were invited into the limited beta, can test out the new applications at beta.mail.yahoo.com. We will be extending this beta test to additional users over the coming months.

Back when I posted about updates to the Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop beta (get the latest version here) many people were intrigued. It was, after all, our first real step into the IMAP world, and it also represented a great way for users with multiple Yahoo! accounts to easily keep track of them without the dreaded logout-login-logout-login.

One of the more frequent comments from users had to do with something that we alluded to but was not yet supported … synchronizing your Yahoo! Contacts and Calendar with Zimbra.  Well the latest version, also dubbed “beta 5″, does just that.

To take advantage of the Calendar sync you will have to be on the new Yahoo! Calendar Beta (CalDav supported), but anyone should be able to sync their Contacts.  That was actually supported with a recent version, but I dropped the ball on announcing it.

After you have installed or updated your Zimbra software, go to the Account Setup link and then look for the link to Edit your account details.  You should see a whole bunch of fun Synchronization Settings to select.  Just like the first time you set up your Zimbra, it should take some time to populate.  But once it finishes the first sync it should be much faster.

If you run into problems you can head over to the Zimbra Desktop forums to give feedback or report issues.

Due to an unplanned power equipment issue at one of Yahoo’s third-party co-location facilities, a small portion of Yahoo! services and features may be temporarily unavailable. Our provider is working expeditiously to complete the maintenance, which we expect to last a few hours.

What this specifically means for Mail users is that some of you will be unable to access your Yahoo! Mail for several hours this evening, and others will experience delays in email delivery.  Additionally, some users may notice that they are unable to login to the chat feature within the All-New Yahoo! Mail. Overall it is a very small percentage of users who are impacted, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating for those of you who are, and for that we are sorry.

Once the maintenance is complete, those users that have been affected will have full access to their email accounts. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience and will be working to resolve this as quickly as possible.

As a kid I was always flummoxed by the idea that the word used to represent immobility was also used to describe the fancy paper used for messages that are inherently mobile.

Perhaps if I had paid more attention to the fact that they were spelled differently it might not have baffled me so. But in my defense…how often do you ever really write the word “stationery?”

I may have spent several occasions sitting stationary while writing on stationery…but I can’t recall a single time I wrote the word stationery (that was fun).

Anyway, it wasn’t too long ago that only Plus users could incorporate stationery into their Yahoo! Mail messages.

Well, not any more. Everyone using the All-New Yahoo! Mail not only has the option to add designs from one of 8 standard categories, but also from a featured section that surfaces several Liam related options that are sprinkled throughout the original categories.

Have a look the options, and if you have any questions you can check out the details in Yahoo! Help for guidance.

Many of you have probably noticed that all around the Yahoo! network you are being greeted a little differently than you were before.  Gone is the Yahoo! ID (often shortened for space constraints) and it has been replaced with your first name.

It doesn’t stop there, because it is also home to a new menu that provides access to your Profile, Contacts, Applications, and Edit My Account options.

Sure the Contacts one isn’t that revolutionary if you are in your Mail account, but it will likely come in handy if you are out exploring another area of the Y! network.

All you need to do is mouse-over the area where your name is displayed (along with the arrow symbol) and the menu is revealed.

Just about everyone using Yahoo! Mail (Classic or the newer version) should already be seeing it there, as well as on your profiles pages, throughout  Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! News, and more.  Be sure to keep your eyes peeled.

I wouldn’t dare try to keep you from your friends, family, and food today.  Just be careful not to end up losing control and bursting that stomach!

We’ve received reports from some users that they are experiencing problems getting their inbox to load completely in the All-New Yahoo! Mail. Our engineers have been sleuthing around and discovered that if you are running Firefox 2.0.0.18, and have the RealPlayer Browser Record Plugin 1.0 installed as a browser add-on, you may run into this too.

Without getting too deep into the nitty-gritty, it seems that the plugin is preventing certain requests from reaching their intended destination within the browser. Fortunately there are two easy ways to resolve the problem.

1. Go to Tools > Add-ons, find RealPlayer plugin, Disable or Uninstall, restart Firefox.
2. Upgrade to Firefox 3.

Either of those options will do the trick.