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Yahoo Mail gets some new threads for its 16th birthday
It's not a new sports car, but it'll have to do. In time for its 16th birthday, Yahoo Mail's getting a couple of nice tweaks, including the ability to thread conversations in its desktop, iOS and Android versions. Also on the list is one-click message deleting, starring and searching and some new mail themes drawn from curated Flickr images. Yahoo's also bringing a handful of Mail Plus features to free users, including enhanced filters, auto message forwarding and disposable address. Mail storage is also now at 1TB -- not quite unlimited, but still, not too shabby.
Yahoo Mail gets Dropbox file sharing on Android, multi-account support on iOS
There's more than just Dropbox itself with big news at DBX -- Yahoo has just rolled Dropbox integration into its Mail app for Android. Much like what we saw on the desktop, Android users can now choose email attachments from their Dropbox accounts, no matter the size. There's no mention of matching support on other mobile platforms, although the iOS app is getting a separate upgrade that allows both multiple accounts and Yahoo Small Business mail. The two refreshed Yahoo Mail apps should be ready and waiting at the source links.
Yahoo Mail adds simple Flickr photo sharing
Many criticized a pre-Marissa Mayer Yahoo for doing little to integrate acquisitions with its core services, even when they were popular services like Del.icio.us. We can't accuse the company of negligence today, as it just added simple Flickr photo sharing to Yahoo Mail. Those drafting messages just have to tap an arrow to attach files from their photo streams, and they can sign up for Flickr on the spot. While there's only so many of us who could use Flickr sharing right now, Yahoo teases that there are more Mail upgrades in the pipeline -- it's not done fighting Gmail and Outlook just yet.
Yahoo axing six more apps and services as part of streamlining effort
Get ready to say goodbye to another another batch of Yahoo products at the end of this month. As the company continues to streamline and focus its services, March 31st will be the last day of stand-alone existence for Upcoming, Yahoo Deals, Yahoo Kids, Yahoo SMS Alerts, Yahoo Mail and Messages for feature phones. In a move designed to whittle down the company's 75 some-odd products to a group of about 15, this latest announcement comes a few weeks after the company nixed other services like its BlackBerry app. Additionally, if you've been hanging onto the old version of Yahoo Mail, you'll have no choice but to switch to the new version by June 3rd. There's no word on what we can expect next, although EVP of Platforms Jay Rossiter says cuts like these are needed so the firm can focus on more experiences like its new Mail and Weather apps. You'll find the details for each cut at the source link. Update: The total number of offerings being killed this time around is six, not seven as initially reported.
Yahoo rolls out Flickr-driven Weather app and new iPad mail app
Remember Yahoo? The company's attempt at a return to relevance is in full gear, with the introduction of two new free mobile apps -- Yahoo! Weather and a tablet version of Yahoo! Mail. If Burt Bacharach was still writing songs, he probably wouldn't write "What the world needs now is weather apps, sweet weather apps." After all, a day doesn't go by where yet another weather app is unleashed on the planet. But I have to admit, Yahoo did an incredible job with this app. Launching Yahoo! Weather for the first time, the app determines where you are and then pulls a Flickr image appropriate for the location and weather to be displayed on the screen. Those images change with changes in the weather, so you'll usually know at a glance what's going on in the great outdoors. %Gallery-186094% Swiping vertically in the app unveils a variety of detailed weather information, while swiping horizontally displays weather in other user-selected locations. Tapping on the map in the app, users can see satellite cloud images, a temperature map, a wind velocity map or a radar map for any of the locations. I'm not sure why, but all of the the maps with the exception of the radar imagery loaded very slowly for me. Still, the app provides a lot of weather information in a very attractive and immediately useful manner, and I can see Yahoo! Weather replacing several of the other weather apps on my iPhone. Yahoo! Mail now runs on either the iPad or iPad mini, with a full-screen reading mode for emails with embedded photos, newsletters or shared articles. The app also provides support for more languages and has advanced options for message actions. If you feel like browsing your inbox book-style, you can go to a full screen viewing mode and flick through your messages with a swipe.
Yahoo Weather arrives on iPhone with Flickr integration, Mail comes to iPad and Android tablets
This morning, Yahoo brought out a pair of new mobile apps to help broaden its mobile presence and fall in line with its recent redesign campaign. First up on the list is Mail, which currently is no stranger to smartphones but is now available in all its tablet-optimized glory on Android slates and iPads. Also added to the Yahoo portfolio is a Flickr-integrated Weather app for iPhone and iPod touch, which allows you to look at user-submitted pictures of the weather in the city or region you're checking out. Want your image to be gazed upon by millions of admirers? Upload them to the Project Weather Flickr Group and there's a solid chance you'll get featured. Head below to the source for the full scoop.
Yahoo! Mail adds Dropbox integration for simple sharing, end to attachment limits
Google, Amazon and Microsoft are finally getting the syncing cloud storage thing right. But, Dropbox is still the player to catch. While the rest are still working on actually getting the desktop client stuff ironed out, the iconic blue box is spreading its tentacles across the web. Today Yahoo! announced a partnership that puts the pioneering storage service right in your inbox. Yahoo! Mail is now tightly integrated with Dropbox, allowing you to share files straight from your folders online or save attachments to them. The tie-in comes courtesy of Dropbox Chooser, which also means an end to size limits for email attachments. Anything over 25MB is shared through a Dropbox link, rather than directly attached to your message. If you're a Yahoo! user you should see the new options in your inbox today.
Yahoo launches Mail redesign, with eye on speed and simplicity
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer used her company's official blog to announced a Mail redesign. According to the exec, the company's shiny new inbox was revamped with speed in mind, letting users access their messages "faster than ever before." Mayer also promised fewer distractions for consumers, with messages at the center of the new design, as well as a "consistent look and feel across devices," including platforms like Windows 8, iOS, Android and the web. All of Mayer's comments can be found in the source link below.
AOL previews cloud-based Alto mail, iCloud-ready
AOL is now taking beta invite requests for its new Alto email congregation tool. Not looking to compete outright with the likes of Gmail, Yahoo! or its own AOL client on the email front, Alto will instead act as a singular destination for users to check all their existing accounts at once. The service can also sync with your iCloud account, and AOL has stated that an iOS version of the Alto platform is in the works as well. Alto looks to give your standard inbox browsing experience a visual twist by grouping your content into stacks based on a common theme. Emails including media (such as photos) will be grouped in one pile, social goings-on in another and so on. You can drag and drop emails into new piles if they end up going astray, and create custom groupings based on various criteria. If you really want to go all-out, you can even link up your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts and keep track of all your social notifications from within Alto. There's no word on whether Alto will eventually be supported by ads or a subscription model, but for now the service will be free for anyone who scores an invitation. The paid Sanebox service, mentioned last night, currently offers a similar pre-inbox filtering tool, starting at $2.04/month. Note: Alto and TUAW are both owned by AOL.
SaneBox looks to tame busy email inboxes
Simplifying email is a task that several applications and email clients have tried and failed at. SaneBox, like many add-ons before it, aims to make your digital life easier without forcing you to change your email platform, but it ventures to accomplish this without just adding priority flags or grouping your contacts into "Work" and "Personal" categories. To be sure, you can apply various priority classes and groupings using SaneBox, but that's not what sets it apart from other so-called productivity enhancers. What really makes SaneBox worth checking out (at the very least) is its ability to ensure unimportant and low-priority emails don't take up even a second of your day. When you apply SaneBox to your email client, it spends a good deal of time scanning your entire inbox, including ones you've already read. This helps the add-on determine which emails are most important to you. From then on you'll only see emails that SaneBox determines are must-reads, with all others falling into a "Later" folder which you can browse at your leisure. Each day -- or however often you want it -- SaneBox will produce a report of all the low-pri emails it has collected for you, kind of like a secretary gathering all the odds and ends for a concise daily rundown. If you find an important email has somehow been flagged as low-pri, you can tweak the settings so it never happens again. SaneBox works with all IMAP, WebDAV and OWA email clients including Yahoo!, Gmail, AOL, MS Exchange and others. The program is also compatible with OS X's Mail client, though it requires a bit of tweaking. POP-only email services are not supported. You can try out SaneBox for two weeks with no charge and after that point a trio of subscriptions options are available, ranging from US$2 to $20 per month.
Marissa Mayer planning to reveal her plans for Yahoo's turnaround tomorrow
The first "all hands" meeting of a CEO is always a time for high drama, so we're expecting big things tomorrow. New boss Marissa Mayer is telling employees about her plans to turn around the faded internet giant on Tuesday, with the same slides she used in closed-door board meetings in an act of "radical transparency." Yahoo's fortunes have been on the slide for a while, after Scott Thompson's scandal-ridden departure, patent clashes, security breaches and the sale of its Alibaba stake in order to spend $3.65 billion on quelling a shareholder revolution. A report from AllThingsD says that Mayer's likely to introduce progress and goal tracking as a measure of performance. The new system will run from the company as a whole right down to individual employees, something that she picked up from her tenure at Mountain View. The same report has revealed that Mayer's pushing to improve the consumer experience in its Homepage, Mail and Flickr offerings (amongst others) at the expense of advertising -- a move that'll win her plenty of fans used to the minimalist Google homepage.
Yahoo confirms Mail / Messenger outage, working on a fix
Google Talk and Twitter had their moments last week, and now it's Yahoo's turn. As noted by a flood of readers -- and confirmed by the company itself -- the exclamation marked mail service is currently experiencing some issues. Yahoo Mail is prompting users to accept its terms and then just sort of conking out. We reached out to Yahoo for comment and received the following response: Yahoo! Mail, Messenger and other areas of Yahoo! may currently be inaccessible or slow to respond to some users in certain locations. We are working to correct the issue and restore all functionality immediately. We know that this may have caused some inconvenience and we apologize to our users who might be affected. We'll update you when things are back to normal. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Update: Phew, everything seems to be back in working order.
Microsoft updates Hotmail with more signature options, Gmail and Yahoo Mail keyboard shortcuts
Okay, it's not as titillating as the time Microsoft added conversation view to Hotmail, but the outfit did just freshen up its email service with a handful of helpful tweaks. Topping the list is an assortment of shortcuts, including the ability to right click a message to reply, reply all, or forward (you could already do this for other things, like marking something as unread). Hotmail also now responds to some additional Gmail- and Yahoo Mail-specific keyboard shortcuts, such as "#" for deleting messages -- a Gmail trick. And the company is none too subtle about admitting it wants the service to be user-friendly for folks if -- or when -- they switch from Google or Yahoo. Rounding out the batch of improvements, you get an easy way to recover deleted emails, an improved back button, HTML5-fueled speed improvements, and the option of changing your default font signature -- something we can't believe Hotmail has been missing until now. Hit the source link for the full spill, and find a short demo video after the break.
Yahoo upgrades its email for everyone, puts Facebook updates and tweets in your inbox
Yahoo is the latest in a line of would-be champions to try to topple king Gmail from its perch atop the email mountain. The company's newest Mail Beta (no relation to Gmail Beta) was introduced last October, but now its overhauled UI and fresh features are available to all. With the change comes quicker load times, stronger spam filtration, and it lets you send and receive Facebook updates and tweets. It also automatically turns picture and video links into thumbnail previews and handles up to 100MB attachments. These fancy new features are certainly a step in the right direction (even if the purple paintjob isn't), but time will tell if it'll rule the webmail world.
Nokia's Ovi Mail relocates to Yahoo, takes the scenic route to get there
Nokia's mantra for 2011 is change, and lots of it. A full-on shift to Windows Phone 7 ain't the only thing making waves in Espoo, though, as the overlooked Ovi Suite appears to be facing a plethora of alterations as well. Starting this month, Ovi Mail moved from its own platform and began migrating to Yahoo, the fruits of a "worldwide strategic alliance" between the two companies announced in May of last year in which Yahoo agreed to offer its Mail and Chat services to nine million registered Ovi users in exchange for access to Nokia's navigation and map services. Ovi Mail users have the option to either agree to the new terms of service with Yahoo within 90 days, or face the haunting reality of having the mail account nixed forever. For those who bite, the good news is that you'll now have access to Yahoo Chat as well as every other Yahoo service. The downside? Your contact list and emails may not all show up right away. According to Nokia's Ovi blog, the massive amount of information being moved to Yahoo has been causing delays, and many users are being left in the digital dark -- you know, completely without their contacts and emails. It could be anywhere between several days and a couple of weeks (!) before the missing data is accessible again, so we'd suggest using this golden opportunity to act on those vacation dreams you've been having. If we had to guess, we'd say you'll never be this hard to get in touch with ever again.
Yahoo Widgets app store delayed
Yahoo announced it would bring out a full app store for its Connected TV platform in March but IDG reports that it won't be available to consumers this month after all. According to a letter from a spokesperson, and updated version of the platform will be available to OEM partners by the end of this month, and after certification is completed it will be pushed out to existing TVs... at some point in the future. As far as the next step for the platform, it has scheduled a developer event for March 24th, and just dropped the latest edition of the developer's kit yesterday with a few new features. Of course, as ZatzNotFunny points out, platform reliability has occasionally been an issue, while we haven't many problems with our Vizio test unit, it is still waiting to get the new firmware update enabling Hulu Plus playback and USB access that was announced back at CES, so here's to smart TV platforms (hopefully) picking up the pace for the rest of 2011.
Yahoo! fixes iPhone IMAP data leak
Earlier this year, a report surfaced that suggested Yahoo! Mail was the cause of spurious data usage by Windows Phone and iPhone owners. The root cause was the Yahoo! IMAP mail servers, which were transmitting more data than was necessary for each email request. Occasional email checking was not problematic, but individuals who checked their email frequently could easily accrue enough data to push them over their plan's limit. Yahoo! confirmed this problem, told affected users to check email manually and promised to work on a solution. A month after this discovery, Yahoo! has reportedly pushed out an update that fixes this issue. Rafael Rivera, who initially identified the culprit as Yahoo! Mail, now reports that Yahoo! sends back the appropriate information during an email fetch request. Instead of sending the full message header, the Yahoo! mail servers now send back only the message ID. All you iPhone users with a Yahoo! mail account and a limited data plan can now check your email freely. [Via BGR]
Yahoo Mail gets IMAP patch, Windows Phone 7 data consumption catches a break
Yahoo had been pegged a few weeks ago as the culprit behind excessive data usage on Windows Phone 7 devices, sending far more information in replies to requests from the phone than necessary -- not really a big deal for those on unlimited data plans, but a legitimate cause for concern if you've got a data cap and overage to worry about (as more and more customers on AT&T do these days). Well, turns out Yahoo went ahead and updated its IMAP servers at some point in the last few days, fixing the issue and more or less obliterating the ravenous gobbling of kilobytes. If you don't use Yahoo... well, this is of little concern, but for the rest of you -- whether you're on a Windows Phone, an iPhone, or pretty much anything else with a limited bucket -- this should be music to your ears.
Yahoo: nonstandard IMAP implementation to blame for Windows Phone 7 data leak
Finally, what the world's been waiting for: an explanation from Yahoo regarding its role in Windows Phone 7 Data Leakage-gate. (And we suppose that you have a better suggestion?) Here it is, in full: Yahoo! Mail is widely available on tens of millions of mobile phones, including those running on Apple iOS, Android, Nokia Symbian, and RIM. The issue on the Windows Phones is specific to how Microsoft chose to implement IMAP for Yahoo! Mail and does not impact Yahoo! Mail on these other mobile devices. Yahoo! has offered to provide Microsoft a near-term solution for the implementation they chose, and is encouraging Microsoft to change to a standard way of integrating with Yahoo! Mail, which would result in a permanent fix. Now, we know what you're thinking: why is everyone always picking on IMAP? But at least they're working hard on a fix, and in the end that's what really matters.
Windows Phone 7 'phantom data' leaker unmasked as Yahoo Mail, fix due in 'coming weeks'
J'accuse... ! Remember the unnamed third party that Microsoft had found to be abusing 3G data on Windows Phone 7? Secret's out, and the culprit is none other than Yahoo Mail. According to a statement obtained by Microsoft guru Paul Thurrott, a fix is expected in the "coming weeks," but in the interim, you can mitigate the pain by going into settings and choosing less taxing options for "Download new content" and "Download email from" -- say, for example, "manually" and "the last 7 days," respectively. At least now you know exactly at whom you should wag your finger.
