Yahoo! Mail Blog, UK and Ireland

We’ve been listening to your feedback over these past months since the all-new mail came out of beta. One of the features that you asked for was a way to download multiple attachments at once. Well, we heard you loud and clear.

So, over the next few days we will be rolling this feature out. Here is a screenshot of how it will look in your message. So when you receive a message that contains more than one attachment, you’ll see this:

All you have to do is click “Download All” to get all at once!

(Note: Occasionally, you may not see the Download All link above a message with multiple attachments. Sometimes the manner in which an individual file is named prevents it from being grouped together with other files. In these cases, you’ll need to download attachments the old way, one by one.)

As with many of our enhancements to mail, not everyone gets the new feature at once. So if you don’t see the “Download All” link, be patient, everyone will have this feature soon.

** Please note… The download all feature will download all the files into one compressed (.zip) file which then needs to be unzipped in order to view all the files. Windows XP and Vista both deal with .zip files as part of the operating system. If you are having trouble with the “download all” feature, you may need to install Winzip or another file compression software.

Happy emailing!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

Today, I thought I’d share a personal experience on how something that’s so second nature to me, is perceived so differently through the eyes of someone else. To encourage you to read this post, I’ve put a tip at the end.

Here’s the scenario: I was setting up a new Yahoo! Mail account for my mum the other day. I KNOW!! She doesn’t already use Yahoo! Mail?!?! Well the answer is no. In fact, she doesn’t really use the Internet at all, until now. My dad got her a new laptop for Christmas and she’s just getting around to using it now.

At the moment, she’s just going to use it for email, and maybe some Web surfing. She wants to be in touch with her book-group and another group she meets up with. So while setting up the account, it got me to thinking what’s the easiest way for my mum to logon to her new email account? And as I was saying, “Click this picture, also known as an icon (BTW – I like Vista for the option to have those huge icons), then go to bookmarks, then click on this one that’s called Yahoo Mail, and then login.” I was thinking there’s got to be easier way, and then I was thinking how do other people logon to their mail?

So I asked around the team, and what I’ve found a large percentage of users do… They open an Internet browser, and then search for Yahoo Mail, and then click the Yahoo Mail search result. I’m going to assume that it’s mostly Internet explorer for the browser and mostly some other search engine I’m not going to name ;). But then that’s probably what my mum would do too, whereas I would never think to do that. But since my mum doesn’t know what a URL is or what http:// stands for, it makes more sense to me now. I’ve been immersed in this stuff for so long now, what seems second nature to me is completely foreign to someone like my mum.

So the next time the next you’re trying to explain something to someone, think about whether or not my Mum would understand it.

So here’s the tip, which is my solution to the “easier way” from above and how my mum gets to her mail each day. I put a shortcut on her desktop that goes directly to Yahoo! Mail. Here’s one way that you can do it for your mum (although I know that there’s a number of ways to do it):

- All you need to do is click and drag this link – Login to Yahoo Mail – onto your mum’s desktop.
- Make sure her desktop is clutter free so that it’s easy to see the shortcut, and if you have Window’s Vista you can turn on those really huge icons, which my mum really likes.
- The shortcut icon you get may look like one of the two shortcuts above. I thought that it has to do with which browser you have set to be the default browser, but my tests have proved inconclusive.

Now this tip is not meant for my mum, it’s meant for people like me who want to help their friends and family get the most out of their Internet experience. But I promise, mum, I’ll get working on some tips just for you!!

Happy emailing!!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

Quite often in this blog, I like to offer some tips and suggestions about how to get the most out of mail. So for today’s tip, I’m offering an alternative to checking your mail from an internet browser, plus a whole host of other fun and useful applications.

I wanted to introduce you to the Yahoo! Widget Engine (I’ve been using it since it was called Konfabulator). For those of you who don’t know what a widget is, it’s a small little program on your computer to complete a specified task. There’s an introductory video that explains it better than I can. Of course, I’m sure that you Mac (and now Windows Visa) users know what widgets are already.

After you download and install the widget engine, within the suite of incredibly useful widgets that comes with the application is the Yahoo! Mail Checker. With that widget you can have a notification of when you receive your Yahoo! Mail and you don’t even have to open a browser to find it.

Unfortunately, the Yahoo! Mail Checker is on the second page of the dock. So one really useful suggestion I have is to right click on the widgets that you don’t think you’ll need and delete them from the dock. Keep doing that until the Yahoo! Mail Checker is on the first page of the widget dock (for example, I don’t need the CPU monitor). If anyone on the widget team is reading this, maybe you can let us reorder the default order of the widgets that get installed.

Now that you have the Widget engine installed, I hope you have fun playing around and finding out all the useful widgets that are out there. My all-time personal favorite is widescapeWeather for its simplicity and functionality (exactly what a widget is supposed to be).

Happy emailing!!
Andrew - Yahoo! Mail Team

EDIT: The surgery was successful, and thanks to all of your suggestions (and some serious pain killers), I’m well on my way to recovery. Hooray!!

I ask this question to my fellow team members almost every day. Usually, they’re not very helpful because they bring their own lunch or they suggest things that are much too healthy. I’m a junk food kind of person ;-).

But tomorrow - yes Valentines day - I’m getting all of my wisdom teeth extracted. OUCH!! So I’m asking you for suggestions of what I can have for lunch after I get them out.

I’ve already got bananas and mashed potatoes on my list, so I’m hoping you can come up with some good suggetions.

Wish me luck, and I’ll see you all next week, minus 4 of my teeth

Happy emailing!!
Andrew - Yahoo! Mail Team

For this week’s post, I’m enlisting a guest host. I’ve asked Mark, who leads our anti-spam team, to share some news about what he and his team are up to, to help combat the spammers of the world. So without further ado, here’s our resident “Spam Czar”…

Happy Emailing
Andrew - Yahoo! Mail Team

We know you hate receiving spam in your mailbox, and we’re working hard to help. While there may always be bad guys trying to get their messages through to you, at Yahoo! we’re tightening up on our spam controls in ‘08, and in fact we’ve already begun rolling out a significant new defense system (and it’s only the start of February).

One reprehensible tactic spammers use is hijacking thousands of innocent home computers and forcing them to send out spam messages in the background, often without the owners even knowing! Collectively, these “zombie” computers spew out millions of spam messages a day, and that’s something that has to stop.

Starting today, we will be taking the bold move of rejecting mail from these zombie computers, using information from a number of third-party companies and ISPs to help in the identification. When these unauthorized computers attempt a connection to our back-end mail servers, they’ll be politely informed that their unsolicited mail is not welcome at Yahoo!. (This change is on the back-end only; users connecting through the Classic or All-New Yahoo! Mail web interfaces will not be blocked by this change.)

For example, consumers with a dynamic IP address will no longer be able to send mail directly to Yahoo! servers (machines with geeky, technical names like “a.mx.mail.yahoo.com”), and must instead use their ISP’s designated mail gateway. Again, users interacting through the web interface or the Yahoo! Mail POP/SMTP/IMAP services will *not* be affected by this change; aside from the spammers, this change will only impact people running a secret, unauthorized mail server in their basement.

It’s just one of the many steps we’re planning in the upcoming weeks and months to continue to improve your Yahoo! Mail experience, and we’ll be checking in here periodically on the YMail Blog to keep you up-to-date with further developments.

One reminder: If you do receive a spam message in your inbox — or an important message ends up in your spam folder — please help us out by clicking the “This is Spam” or “This is Not Spam” button on it. Clicking these buttons immediately sends a series of notifications to our SpamGuard systems and personnel so that we can correct the problem, and is the best indicator of how well we’re doing in our mission to ensure you receive all of the mail you want and none that you don’t.

Wishing you a Happy New Year from Yahoo! and SpamGuard,

Mark R.
“Spam Czar”
Yahoo! Mail

P.S. Note for geeks and system administrators: In the rare case that you do feel we’ve made an incorrect classification of your mail, please pay close attention to any SMTP reply code our servers send back to you, as these will contain essential troubleshooting information and instructions on how to report a problem. Information for legitimate bulk mailers can always be found at http://postmaster.yahoo.com.