One of my colleagues in the states was on TV the other day talking about how to be safer and smarter online. Take a look at this video where Yahoo! Web Life Editor Heather Cabot offers up several security tips to keep your online experience and mailbox safer and more secure.
Yes, yes, yes - I know that it sounds very American in tone, but if you get beyond that, Heather talks about some very, very useful stuff in the interview. Oh - and FYI - even though Heather mentions the Addressguard being a feature of Mail Plus, all users with a @yahoo.co.uk account can take advantage of that feature free of charge.
Just last month I wrote about the auto-save feature of the all-new Yahoo! Mail. I think you’ll agree that is a great feature. Some emails went around the office just recently with a great tip for using the ‘save to draft feature’, that I didn’t even know existed.
This tip is great for anyone who sends the same form letter to a whole bunch of people. (Note to you spammers out there – stop reading) Saving an email message as a draft is an excellent way to keep a single template for form letters.
Here’s all you have to do:
Write your message, and click Save Draft to save it to your Drafts folder.
Now, when you’re ready to use it, click Drafts in the folder list, highlight the message and click ‘Edit Draft’ (or just double-click the message to open it).
With the message open, now you can add a new “To:” or “Cc:” address.
Ready to send it? IMPORTANT: Hold down the shift key and click Send. (If you don’t hold down the Shift key, the message is removed from your Drafts folder when you send it.)
There you have it. Now, if you go back to your Drafts folder, you’ll find that the message is still there just waiting for the next time you have to send it out.
Sorry, but this feature is only available to users of the all-new Yahoo! Mail. So if you’re using the Classic version of mail, and would like to try this feature out, you can always switch to the new mail.
Some of you are reporting that you are having difficulty sending email via SMTP. Our engineers are looking into the issue and will have a fix soon. But while you’re waiting, don’t fret, because I have 2 - yes two - work-arounds for you. (A work-around being tech-speak for an alternate way of doing something.)
1. The simplest way is to use the Web version of mail here: http://uk.mail.yahoo.com
2. Not so simple, but still effective is to change your outgoing SMTP port. Our help pages can tell you how, just click here to find the help page you need.
If you’re using Outlook - and it appears that the majority of you are - go to Tools -> E-mail Accounts -> View or Change existing email accounts -> Highlight the account and click change -> then look at this screenshot and make sure your settings match the ones below…
I’ve written some tips in the past to help you find emails in your Inbox easier. If you’re not a regular reader of the blog, and have missed my previous posts, you can read my search tips by clicking here.
Today I wanted to let you know of a feature that I’ve found particularly useful. Let’s say a friend emails you an invite for a drinks do at their place. You’re certain that they’ve sent you directions to their place before. In theory, you could go to the search box and type in their name to search for all the emails from them.
Instead of doing that, try this trick… While you’re reading their email, all you have to do is click on the email address or name at the top of the email, and Yahoo! Mail runs a search for all mail from that sender. All that with only one click. All of life should be that easy.
(If you use the classic version of Yahoo Mail, I’m sorry to report that this feature only works with the all-new Yahoo! Mail.)
As a Yahoo! Mail user you’re probably vaguely aware that Yahoo! does other stuff too. Lots of other stuff. Did you know that there are over half a billion people doing stuff on Yahoo! every month? I find that very difficult to get my head round…that’s even more people than you get at a Rolling Stones gig isn’t it?
So what on earth are they all doing? And, more importantly, why should I/you/we care?
We’re starting up a new monthly email newsletter which will answer those questions. We believe that the stuff people are doing on Yahoo! is potentially very interesting and that “yes!”, we should care, because we might just discover some wonderful new things for ourselves.
So, if you agreed to let Yahoo! send you email when you set up your account, you can now look forward to seeing some of the fantastic, creative ways people use Yahoo! every month. And don’t worry, we won’t be trawling Yahoo! for embarrassing pictures or hilarious spelling mistakes… we respect the privacy of all our users and will not show anything without permission from the person who created it.
What else?
Will I get Yahoo! By You?
If you want to check whether or not you agreed to let us send you emails, click here. You can set your preferences as you please but remember – we’ll only ever send you stuff that we think you’ll find genuinely useful and interesting.
How can I get involved?
We want individual users to star in every issue of Yahoo! By You. If you’ve got some interesting things to share, you can volunteer yourself. Click here to become a Yahoo! By You Star!
Tell us what you think…
It’s not called Yahoo! By You for nothing. We need to know exactly what you think about this newsletter. Please leave comments, suggestions, rants against this post. Look forward to hearing from you.
I wanted to share one more new feature of the all-new mail with you. It’s something that you may have noticed already, but if not I thought I’d let you know that it’s there. First, a question (not applicable to you Apple users)… How many times have you been working on that all-important document, and all of a sudden - ZAP - your computer crashes and you lose all of your hard work?
Well with the all-new Yahoo! Mail, you never have to worry about that with your Yahoo! emails. As you type and the minutes tick away, the all-new Yahoo! mail is working in the background to help make sure that power failures and other niggly computer problems don’t make you lose that important email you’re writing. Of course I’m talking about the “auto-save” feature, which saves a copy of your email to the Drafts folder at regular intervals. You can tell your message has been saved into your Drafts folder as pictured here:
Of course you can always use the “Save Draft” button at the top of your message if you want to save it to your drafts folder more frequently.
So if you didn’t have time to finish your message or if you just needed to step away from the computer, not to worry, we’ll save your message to your Drafts folder and you can continue it at your leisure. And in the event when your computer should crash (I’m sure you Apple users are laughing at us Windows users) we’ve got you covered with the Auto-save feature.
Last week I told you about the “download all attachments” enhancement for the all-new Yahoo Mail. Well, that was just one of the new features of the all-new Yahoo Mail. This week it’s all about the Mac.
Some of you have probably already noticed that you no longer get the browser incompatibility warning when logging into the all-new mail. However, for those Mac users out there who are still using the classic version of Yahoo! Mail, there’s no better time to switch to the all new mail.
The rollout is complete, so everyone using Safari (please see my note about versions) should be able to use the all-new mail version.
So now a note about operating systems: Folks running the most recent update of Tiger (OS 10.4.11), as well as those using any version of Leopard (OS 10.5.x), will have a version of Safari that plays nice with the All-New Yahoo! Mail. Or maybe it’s a version of Safari that the All-New Mail plays nice with. Either way, they are friends now.
Oh – and for you Firefox users out there, there is also browser support for the Firefox 3 beta version.
Happy emailing (with Safari)!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team
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.
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!!
(9 votes, average: 4.11 out of 5)
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As a Yahoo! Mail user you’re probably vaguely aware that Yahoo! does other stuff too. Lots of other stuff. Did you know that there are over half a billion people doing stuff on Yahoo! every month? I find that very difficult to get my head round…that’s even more people than you get at a Rolling Stones gig isn’t it? 
(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?