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

For the next edition of our Yahoo! Mail Workshop series, we are going to be focusing on understanding the basics of  Yahoo! Mail.  Join us on Wednesday, October 8th, from 3-4PM PT, for the live, moderated chat with members of the Yahoo! Mail team.  Whether you are using Classic, or the All-New Yahoo! Mail, we want your questions.  It could be something as simple as setting your chat status in the New Mail.  Or maybe where to go to update your signature.  You ask and we will do our best to answer.

You will be able to submit questions in advance by visiting our Workshop page, as well as live during the event.  So get those questions in and be sure to be there!

In July we held our first Yahoo! Mail Workshop.  It featured a live Q&A with Yahoo! Spam Czar, Mark Risher, and the response we got from everyone was very positive.  If you don’t recall the details, Workshops are live, online, moderated chats led by Yahoo! staff, with a focus on a specific topic of conversation at a specific, scheduled time. It is our hope that these Workshops can be a great opportunity for users to get tips on a variety of Mail related topics, as well as gets answers to specific questions that you have.

After each event I’ll post a complete transcript of the event, so that those who couldn’t attend live can still get the scoop.

I’m currently putting together the next Workshop, and wanted to get a taste of what you guys would like to talk about.  Keep in mind that these workshops are for educational and informational purposes, not to obtain account support.  That being said, let me know what topics you want to ask about.

UPDATE: It seems from several of the comments that the intention of the Workshop has been misunderstood (or I did a lousy job explaining).  What we are looking for are topics that you have educational questions about.  How to do something…how to use something…how to _____ (fill in blank).  What this isn’t supposed to be is a sort of Town Hall where we get together and discuss the direction of the product(s).

I understand that many of you would like to know what features may be coming down the pipeline, or what changes are on the horizon, but as a public company we can’t go into a lot of detail until the appropriate time.

So all that being said, what types of things do you think you would like to talk about?

There have been some questions about how updating your Flash could have anything to do with inputting text for your messages.  In fact Flash doesn’t play a role in text input, but it does touch on some other aspects of the All-New Yahoo! Mail.  Most notable would be the Chat/Messenger feature (which has been around for a while), but there are some other components too.  Some existing and some new stuff.

So while we have no intention of changing Mail to some sort of Flash based tool, we’ve also found that some users can improve the experience and resolve some bugs we’ve discovered by upgrading to the latest Flash version.

We fully intend that anything we add or change in no way conflicts with the core functions of Mail (inputting text would be an example) and our engineers are working to resolve it.  However, I also wanted people to know that updating Flash could improve it that much faster.

Hope that clears up some of the confusion.

It has come to my attention that some users have reported problems with keystrokes not registering within the compose box of the All-New Yahoo! Mail.

Our engineers are working on the issue, but in the meantime you may be able to resolve it yourself if you make sure your browser is running the most current version of Flash.

To determine the version number please go here:

http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/about/

If it’s older than 9.0.115, please upgrade and then see if the issue continues to happen.

Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve the issue you’ve reported.

Ahoy mateys! Thar be a phenomenon that be takin’ the world by storm today.  Lest ye hadn’t heard, but today be International Talk Like Pirate Day, an’ far be it from me t’ withold one o’ the best costumed Liam’s we be havin’.

If ye haven’t heard, this new “holiday” be pickin’ up steam o’er the last few moons.

The founders conceived o’ it after a painful racquetball game in 1995 prompted some seafarin’-esque exclamations (ARRRRR!!!).

Ye can learn all about it on their official site.

But alas…Liam may be a quiet swabbie, but he does know a thin’ or two about dressin’ up. So on behalf of that scalleywag, an’ the rest o’ the Yahoo! Mail Team, I’d like t’ wish all ye bilge rats a great tide!

We want to make sure we give users info about steps they can take to enhance the security of their account.  So our VP of Mail, John Kremer, has put together a message (courtesy of the Yodel blog) that highlights many of the things people can do to protect themselves online.

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Mail security tips

There are nearly 275 million Yahoo! Mail account holders worldwide.

Since one Yahoo! Mail address is in the news today, I thought this might be a good time to remind everyone about some online safety tips that will help protect your account. (In order to protect the privacy of our users, we can’t get into specific details of any of our users’ accounts — we know you’d want us to do the same for you!).

• Choose a strong password. It’s like a toothbrush – choose a good one and don’t share it. Your Yahoo! Mail password can be any length and can contain spaces, symbols, or numbers –- letting you come up with something that’s easy for you to remember but impossible for someone else to figure out.
• Avoid using a complete word from a dictionary (English or otherwise) or a name.
• Use at least 7 characters. The more the better. A long but simple password can be safer than a shorter complex one.
• Use a combination of capital and lowercase letters, numbers, and standard symbols (! @ # $ % ^ &, etc.).
• Don’t use personal information that someone could easily figure out. Avoid a password based on information easily obtained about your (a birthday, your child’s name, your phone number, school name, etc.). Don’t use a password you already use for another account, like your bank account PIN. And don’t’ use your Yahoo! ID (or other username) in any form (reversed, capitalized, doubled, etc.).
• Avoid the obvious. Attackers tend to first try repeating letters or number sequences (123456). Stay away from “test” or “password.” And when you change your password, which you should do relatively often, don’t just add a number to the end.
• Create a sign-in seal. Yahoo! and many financial institutions let you personalize your sign-in page to help you make absolutely sure you’re not falling victim to a phishing scam. See a photo of your cat Rupert? You know it’s safe to proceed.

Cybercrime is an industry-wide issue and we’ve been working with the industry in combating it (with innovations like Domain Keys). Rest assured that we take security and privacy very seriously here.

You are the first line of defense. Head over to antispam.yahoo.com and security.yahoo.com for more tips to help you protect your account, your privacy, and your identity.

John Kremer
Vice President, Yahoo! Mail

I was chatting with a buddy from Customer Experience the other day (everybody say hi to Carl. He is not only tasked with finding ways to make your Customer Care experience more pleasant, but he also reads this blog from time to time), and I learned about some of the common questions agents are getting.

Now it’s not all that noteworthy that there are common questions, but what people may not know is that when we identify these common questions we try to update the Help Center.  This means if you didn’t find the answer to a question before, that doesn’t mean that it won’t be there in the future.  It’s kind of organic that way.

Anyway, one of the more recent additions to the Tutorials area just so happens to address not one, but TWO of the common questions he was telling me about.  This tutorial offers a thorough run through of the different ways you can customize the All-New Yahoo! Mail.

Included in the Customizing Yahoo! Mail tutorial are step by step instructions for changing the content on your Home tab, changing the color of the interface, and more.  But the one that caught my eye was changing your personal information.  It turns out that two very common questions are about changing your password and changing your password and changing your name.  It also turns out that we have a great tutorial with step by step instructions.

Just below your Yahoo! ID, and above your Home tab, are links for Sign Out, My Account, and Mail Classic (for switching back to Classic).

Clicking My Account takes you to the Yahoo! Account information page, which covers your info across all of the Yahoo! Network.  Keep in mind that the password update, accessed by the Change Password link near the top of the page, is a system wide change, meaning you will now be using that password for all things Yahoo!

Another common question people have involves changing your name.  Whether it’s because of marriage, because of divorce, because you resent your parents, or just messed up during registration, people keep wanting to update that name.

Well you can also update your name from the same page, but we’ve found that in some cases people just want to update their name within Mail.  Maybe you want your full name on your Yahoo! account, but want a nickname or short name within Mail.  Well on the same page you’ll find a tutorial with steps to update your Mail name on an account by account basis.

There you have it.  Changing account information is easy if you know where to look for the directions.

BTW … our Tutorials team is always looking to make them better, so after checking them out please be sure to answer the “Was this helpful?” and provide any feedback you can!

There was some big news yesterday from our Mobile team.  Yahoo! oneConnect was released for the iPhone!  For those of you who aren’t familiar with oneConnect, it is designed to help you communicate with not only your Yahoo! friends, but also the friends you have on social networks like Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Youtube, Bebo, Dopplr, Friendster and Twitter.

It makes it easy to pull up anyone from your contacts and quickly call, email, instant message, or text/SMS with them…all from the same place.  You can also get status updates from what your friends have been doing on your favorite social networks.  If you look at the example picture to the right you can see hat you can select which contact channels appear for each of your Favorite contacts.

With a quick tap I can send an instant message or initiate an email to my first contact (note the “Available” status).  I can also see that my friend Thien is offline, but since I have his mobile number it defaults to SMS.  I also have 3 different email addresses on file for him, but have chosen to only display the one I use most.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, I’m going to repost this awesome rundown of oneConnect’s top features (courtesy of the Messenger blog):

Full address book
oneConnect integrates contacts from your Yahoo! Address Book, iPhone, and many social networks. To add social networks to your oneConnect, tap on the “Settings” icon at the bottom, then hit “My Accounts”. Once you’ve added a social network account, oneConnect will import all your contacts. Tap on the “Contacts” icon in the bottom bar to access them.

Send and receive instant messages, SMS, or initiate an Email,
Once you sign in with your Yahoo! ID, your entire Yahoo! Messenger contact list will appear. Just tap on the “Message” icon in the bottom bar, then tap the “+” in the upper right corner to start a new IM (or start one from a friend’s listing under “Contacts”).

You can insert your favorite emoticons into your conversation and you’ll see your Avatar or display image as well as your friend’s.  (note: if email is more your style you can easily initiate an email message, and the TO: field  populates itself).

When you’re messaging, you’ll notice a “Y!” icon to the left of the text box. Tap on that and it changes to an SMS icon. When you want to send a SMS message, make sure the SMS icon appears there and just start typing. Note that you must have the mobile phone number for your friend already entered into their contact info. To go back to sending IMs, tap on the icon again to bring up the Y! icon.

Updates from your friends (Pulse)
In addition to IMs and SMS text messages, you can keep up with what your friends are doing on your favorite social networks. Tap on the Pulse icon to see a running list of updates from your friends. See the latest photos from your Flickr friends (note the recent Flickr update from lifecasting star iJustine), get status updates from your Facebook contacts, or see what your Twitter buddies have to say. You can even select which types of updates you want to view.

You can also update your own status on your social networks from oneConnect. When you’re in the Pulse area, tap the “My Status” button in the upper right corner. Enter a new status message and it gets sent out too all of your networks at once.

Yahoo! oneConnect is available for free from the Yahoo! Mobile website. To install it, click the “Get Yahoo! oneConnect” button on the page to access the oneConnect listing in the App Store on iTunes (or click here to launch it immediately in iTunes). It works on all versions of the iPhone.

Try it out and let us know what you think here on the blog or on the oneConnect Suggestion Board.

If you’ve heard of Hack Day before, you probably know that hack days are usually just for Yahoo! employees. But this time the event is a wide open, public hack day where people with a passion for Yahoo! products can come together to build and share their best ideas for extending, re-shaping and mashing together our products and features.  If you are interested in particpating you can still sign-up for a Hack Day invitation by visiting http://www.hackday.org.

Looking for inspiration? Check out the brief video for Hack Day below.

It’s dawning on me that the shady emailers have no intention of dialing back their malicious messages, so I might just have to ramp of the amount of warnings I post here.  Take that “Mr. Rasim Hassan of Burkina Faso”!!!  By the way, no offense to any actual Rasim Hassans out there.  It just so happens that the most recent “claim these millions” style message came from a Rasim Hassan.

While I’m hopeful that more and more users are aware that Yahoo! lotteries asking for your personal dossier, as well as wire transfer requests to receive unclaimed fortunes, are dangerous, it could be even more important that people recognize the dangers of deceptive links in messages.

You’ve often been warned about clicking links within unexpected emails.  A common approach is to link you over to a spoofed login page to collect your password.  In the beginning scammers didn’t worry much about what the link looked like.  Once people began looking more closely at the domain in the hyperlink the scammers started creating links that looked like they pointed to one place, but when you put your mouse over them you would see that the link actually directed you elsewhere.

Now, the NY Times has reported that malicious spammers are finding new ways to make their links look more legitimate.  The latest trend is….(drumroll)….free web services!

Jeremy Kirk, in a recent story from NYTimes.com, explains:

One of the services, a photo-hosting site called ImageShack, lets people upload different types of photo formats, including Flash files, said Paul Wood, a senior analyst with MessageLabs.

Flash files, which have the extension “.swf”, can be used for animated graphics and can also be used to automatically redirect people to other Web sites. That feature can be abused.

I recommend checking out the complete story, when you have a chance.  But also remember that whenever an email directs you to a site (typically where you have an account and would need to login), you should instead visit the site via typical methods (bookmark, typing URL by hand, even a web search).  If there is something significant going on with  your account they will usually tell you when you login.  If you feel that you absolutely HAVE to click on the link in an email you should examine it closely before clicking on it!