This month is the Office of Fair Trade’s Scams Awareness Month. According to the OFT at their Consumer Direct site, almost 3 million UK consumers fall victim to Internet, post, email, text and phone, costing in the area of £3.5 billion per year. So, in support of the OFT, I wanted to share some of our top tips to avoid falling victim yourselves.

The first step in helping you to stay scam-free is to recognise the types of scams that are out there. Here are the three most common types that come in email form (which I’m sure some of you have seen before):

1. Phishing scams – These are email scams that claim to be from an organisation, like a bank, and they ask you click on a link which takes you to a Website that looks real but is, in fact, fake. When you log in with your account details and password on this fake site, the bad guys gain access to your private information.
2. Lottery Scams – These are emails that tell you have won a local or foreign lottery and to get the money you have to pay processing fees and send personal details.
3. Advance fee or fund transfer schemes – These are also called Nigerian ‘419’ scams where you receive an email, often times from someone claiming to be in Africa or Asia, and claiming that they have access to huge sums of cash but need your help getting it out of the country. In this scam, the criminal offers to send you a cashier’s cheque for £100.000 and you send him back a personal cheque for £90.000 and keep the difference. The scam is, of course, that the initial cheque is bogus but may take several weeks to clear, by which point the criminal is long gone with your money.

You know what? Your bank will NEVER ask you for a password in an email, you have NOT won the lottery and all you end up with for those huge sums is a ZERO balance in your bank account. I’ve been collaborating with our Spam Czar, Mark, and we’ve come up with these tips to help you avoid the scammers:

1. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is – If someone stopped you on the pavements and said he needed your help smuggling millions of pounds out of the country, you’d be pretty suspicious. We recommend the same type of skepticism when you’re online. If you didn’t enter that Sweepstakes or Lottery, there’s no way that you won. Be extra suspicious if someone offers to send you money up front — as honest as I’m sure you are, that wealthy prince who offers to buy your iPod for 10 times its value isn’t as gullible as he seems.
2. Check the FROM line – One big giveaway is when a seemingly official message originates from a generic e-mail address. If your bank has something to say to you, it won’t come from ‘security_services_293@freemail.ru,’ and when the Inland Revenue discovers an tax error in your favor, they won’t write to you from a personal account like ‘charlotte.magnolia@orange.co.uk’ Check the return address and make sure it looks legit (including looking for spelling errors!)
3. Beware if someone requests personal information or any payment over e-mail – Yahoo! and other respected Internet companies will never request your username or password over e-mail, and neither will your bank, credit card company, or insurance agency. If a message is asking you to e-mail your sensitive information, that’s an immediate red flag. Likewise, legitimate companies will not request money up front for you to claim a prize you’ve won.

For good measure I’m including some of the choicest scam emails we’ve seen in the recent past. You can see the full-size version by clicking the thumbnail:

By arming with yourselves with the knowledge of what scams are out there and how to avoid them, you’ll be much safer online. As always, if you do see one of these scams, please do your part and click the “Spam” button inside Yahoo! Mail – it’s the single strongest way to let us know so that we can block these terrible messages. Here in the UK, you may also report the message to reports@banksafeonline.org.uk.

Happy Emailing,
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

I just had a look over at the Lycos mail site today, and it looks like they will be shutting down their service in the next few weeks. I know it’s never easy to change email addresses, but if you are a Lycos mail user, and are looking for a new mail provider, then we have a solution for you.

With one simple solution, you can bring all of your email and contacts from your existing Lycos account directly into a new or existing Yahoo! Mail account. Here’s all you need to do:

1. If you haven’t already done so, sign up for a Yahoo! Mail account.
2. Use our secure application to transfer over all of your Lycos email and contacts into your Yahoo! Mail account.

Yes!! It’s that easy. If you’re still unsure, watch this video and see that it’s just that easy. (Unfortunately, we’ve made some changes since we made the video, so calendar items are no longer an option)

And with our new email address options, getting the name you want is that much easier. During the sign up process, make sure to check out whether the email address you want is available @ymail.com or @rocketmail.com.

And last but not least, this isn’t just for Lycos users. You can transfer over all of your Hotmail, Gmail, AOL and many other email accounts into Yahoo! Mail.

Happy transferring,
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

It’s that time of year again, and I can’t believe that the holiday season is already upon us. I just finished writing my Christmas Cards (yes I still do sometimes put pen to paper), but if you’re more apt to send holiday wishes using email, why not try out the Christmas stationery in the all new mail.

I’ve blogged about how to use the Yahoo! Mail stationery before, so if you need a refresher course you can read that post here. If you want to add a little Christmas cheer to your email, why not try the “Christmas”, “Happy Holidays” or even the “Snow” stationery.

You can find those, and many more by under the ‘Holidays and Events’ section of the stationery feature. To find it, when you are composing an email, just click the link labeled ‘Featured’ and select the ‘Holidays and Events’ option.

Have a merry Christmas.
Andrew - Yahoo! Mail team

I’ve been hearing reports from some of you that you are getting errors, sometimes when logging into the all-new Mail. Here is a screen shot of the error message…

It seems that the ad-blocker in some Symantec security suites and Yahoo are not playing well together. So if you are having login issues and have a Symantec (sometimes know as Norton) anti-virus with ad-blocker installed, here are two ways you can fix your login problem.

1. You can switch to the classic version of Yahoo! Mail. Click the link at the very top of your Mailbox window called “Mail Classic”. (I’ve posted complete instructions in another post.)
2. You can turn off the ad-blocking feature of Symantec/Norton. Check your product help pages for specific instructions on how to do that. (Of course you should always have a working anti-virus software running, so don’t turn that off.)

Rest assured that we are working with Symantec to come up with a permanent solution to this issue. I apologize if you are one of those affected, and once the solution is found and implemented, I’ll let you know.

Happy emailing!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

I just wanted to let you know that the maintenance is now complete and all Yahoo! Mail services are working normally.

If you are still experiencing difficulties, you can contact our customer care here: http://help.yahoo.com/l/uk/yahoo/mail/yahoomail/contactus/

Happy emailing!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

I want to give you some advanced warning that we are going to be doing maintenance to some of our Yahoo! Mail servers this weekend. Starting on Friday evening (November 7th) and continuing throughout the night, we are going to be undertaking extensive but essential work to our mail servers which means that some of you may not be able to access your archived mail folders or your mail overnight.

To minimize the inconvenience, we are starting the maintenance on the evening of Friday 7th of November at approximately 9pm GMT (London, Dublin)/ 10pm CET (Paris) and expect to complete it by midday GMT/ 1pm CET Saturday 8th November. If you are one of the users affected during that time, we will direct you to a page alerting you to what we’re doing.

Like other updates and upgrades (see here and here) that have come before, this maintenance is part of our continual efforts to give you the best Mail experience possible.

If you are one of the few that are affected, please accept my sincere apologies. We will restore access to your mailbox as soon as the maintenance is complete. And, when everything’s back online, I’ll update this post to let you know.

Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

That’s right, you heard me correctly! There’s a whole new calendar application for Yahoo! and you are welcome to try it out now. I know that a lot of you have been requesting this for a long time, so this news is definitely something to sit up and take notice of.

What can I expect with the new Calendar (beta)?
I’m going to skip some of boring (well, not for me) stuff like it’s built by incorporating much of the technology developed by our Zimbra team, adhering to open standards, using Web 2.0 technology, and interoperability with Apple, Microsoft, AOL, Mozilla, and Google.

The good stuff that I think you’ll appreciate are the things like:

• Drag and drop events
• Calendar sharing
• Personalisation like color coding and adding photos from Flickr
• To do list
• Setting reminders… plus a whole lot more

How do I get it?
Switching to the new calendar is easy. However, before I tell you how, there are just a couple of points you should be aware of:

• The all new calendar is still in its Beta stage which means there are still some things to be ironed out, and you may run across a few errors now and again
• And while switching over is easy, switching back is hard(ish). So, if you decide you don’t like the new calendar and want to switch back, all of your changes and additions will be lost. You’ll be taken to your old calendar from the day that you switched.

So, now that you’re in the know, here’s how to try it out. Just go to http://switch.calendar.yahoo.com and start using the all-new calendar (beta). If you’re not sure if it’s right for you, check out this video from the calendar team to give you a preview of what to expect.

Happy calendaring,
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

Final Update (27 October 2008): I have just spoken with Virgin/NTL. According to them, the issue affecting service in their ticket - F820104 - has been resolved. Everything should be back to normal again. At present, there are no other reported outages and all Yahoo services are working. If you are a Virgin/NTL customer and are having issues viewing Yahoo pages, please contact them and reference F820104.

————–
UPDATE (23 October 2008): Some Virgin Media customers are experiencing difficulty accessing Yahoo sites including Yahoo Mail. If your ISP is Virgin Media or NTL and you are having difficulty accessing Yahoo, you can give them a call and give them F820104 as a reference number.

The issue described below has been fixed and everything is working normally now.

Thanks,
Andrew - Yahoo Mail Team
———
Original Post (29/08/2008):
Some of you may have experienced difficulties logging into Yahoo! Mail this morning. The problem occurred this from about 8.00 in the morning. Our crack network engineering team was on the case immediately and was able to fix the problem by 10.00. We had some difficulties with some of our equipment which were fixed as quickly as possible. Any PC user who ever has had to reboot their computer should know what that’s like - of course you Mac users out there probably never feel our pain

All systems are back to normal now and you should no longer have any issues logging into and using mail. We apologize if you were one of the few effected by the Yahoo! Mail outage.

Happy emailing,
Andrew - Yahoo Mail Team

You might notice over the next couple of days that in your folder list, on the left-hand column of the All-new Yahoo Mail, the item called “All feeds” has been removed. If you use the classic version of mail, or have no idea what that was for anyway ;-), then you can stop reading. However, some of you might be wondering where in the world your feeds have gone. If that’s the case, then read on…

We haven’t removed the feeds completely. We’ve just changed their location. All you have to do to find your feeds is check over at My Yahoo! (http://uk.my.yahoo.com) and you’ll find them all there (usually towards the bottom of your My Yahoo page).

Personally, I really like My Yahoo. In fact, I recently changed it to my home page. You can drag “modules” to different locations, so that the things that are important to you are right where you want them. I have moved my “Mail Preview” module and the BBC news feed to the top of my page, and now I get a great preview of my most recent messages and news. With the Mail module, I love that when you hover your mouse over one of your messages, you get a quick preview of the message.

If you haven’t taken a look at My Yahoo – http://uk.my.yahoo.com – recently, now’s a great time. If you use My Yahoo regularly, like my brother Dave, you know how good it is already.

Happy emailing,
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

A while back I mentioned that we had an issue that affected some of you retrieving your mail using a POP mail client like Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, etc. Even though we fixed that issue some time ago, it prompted us to take a look to see if there was any room to improve the POP/SMTP performance as a whole. As I’m sure you are aware by now, our team is committed to improving the performance of Yahoo Mail.

I can tell you, that after doing a thorough check of our POP server’s performance here in Europe, we came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t hurt to do a bit of an upgrade. And, if you’re a regular reader to the blog, you’ll remember we did a similar upgrade to our Webmail servers, which has dramatically improved performance across Yahoo Mail in the UK.

So, taking a page out of our own book, over the last month or so, we’ve been adding more hardware to improve the performance to our UK users that use an external mail client to access their mail. I can tell you now, that we’ve just completed installing brand-new hardware to process the mail that you send and receive. That means improved speed, fewer errors and an improved experience.

Take a look at the graph below starting at week 33 when the new hardware was installed. 100 is where we want to be (we’re not perfect yet as you can see at the end of week 35, but we’re getting there ;-)).

Happy emailing!
Andrew - Yahoo! Mail Team

I love the click and drag functionality of the all-new mail. It makes moving messages a snap. But if reaching for your mouse is too tiring, have I got a tip for you. This tip is squarely aimed at all you efficiency freaks out there - you know who you are ;-). Before we begin, I have to give credit where credit is due… I pilfered this tip from my colleague Ryan from the States who writes the US Mail Blog.

This tip allows you to move messages to your folders just by using a single keystroke. Let’s say you have your folders set up like mine displayed here. If I want to move a message to my folder “Accts” all I have to do is highlight the message and type “1″ on my keyboard. If I get my BT statement and I want to move it to “Bills” all I have to do is press “2″. I can do that for up to my first 9 folders.

What’s more is that you can utilize the keyboard shortcut whether you are viewing your inbox, or whether you are reading the actual email. For example, if I’ve opened up my BT bill and have finished reading it, I just type “2″ and off it goes into my “Bills” folder.

If you want to re-arrange your folders in order of importance, or if you can’t remember what number goes with what folder name, you can always rename your 9 most important folders - putting a number in front - so that you are always reminded which folder goes with which number. I’ve done it to my folders here. One obvious advantage with this method is that you can bring important folders up to the top of the list because they are sorted alphabetically starting with numbers. (You can rename your folders by right-clicking on them)

Incidentally, this is just one of many keyboard shortcuts you can use in the all-new mail. For more keyboard shortcuts, you can visit this help page.

Happy message moving,
Andrew - Yahoo! Mail Team

I’ve been asked before about how to set Yahoo Mail as your default email. Up until now, the only way that I knew, was to download and install the complete Yahoo! Messenger client, and install the Yahoo! Extras that come along with it. But I’m happy to tell you that, since Firefox 3 was released recently, there’s a new and much easier way to make Yahoo! Mail be the default mail when you see those clickable email addresses.

Here’s how to set up Yahoo! Mail to be your default email application using Firefox 3:

1. Download and install Firefox 3
2. After installation and when you have Firefox 3 up and running, click Tools, then Options
3. In the options window that pops up, click the Applications Tab
4. In the box labeled “Search” type Mail
5. In the “Action” drop down box, select “Use Yahoo Mail”
6. Finally, click “OK”

Here’s a little slide show that shows you all the steps:

That’s all there is to it. The next time you click on an email address link (also know as a mailto: link) when using Firefox 3, it will take you right to the compose window in Yahoo Mail.

Happy emailing,
Andrew - Yahoo! Mail Team

I get some comments on this blog, now and again, saying that “I have to sign in every time I want to get to my mail, even though I’ve checked the box…” It’s not many of you, but enough that I thought I would take this opportunity to see if I can offer some suggestions on how to keep yourself signed into Yahoo! Mail for up to 2 weeks.

So if it’s your wish to remain logged into Yahoo! Mail for two weeks, but are having difficulty doing so, I’ve created a help page for you in the Yahoo Mail Help pages. You can read the detailed instructions here: http://help.yahoo.com/l/uk/yahoo/mail/classic/account/account-20.html

Some of the instructions are a bit technical, so if you’re not technically inclined you might want to get your resident computer nerd to give you a hand. Here is the abriged version:

1. Check the box “Keep me signed in” on the login page of Yahoo! Mail.
2. Make sure you are using the correct URL/web address to access Yahoo! Mail.
3. Check your account settings to make sure that you have your account set to keep you logged in for 2 weeks.
4. Make sure that you have your Internet browser set to accept “cookies” from Yahoo.
5. Make sure that your anti-virus/firewall software isn’t blocking or deleting you Yahoo! cookies.

After confirming those five steps you should now be kept logged in for 2 weeks at a time. Remember – DO NOT do this if you use a computer in an Internet Café, or you share your computer with someone else. Finally, I know this is a pretty technical post, so I apologize if some of the instructions above seem fairly complicated.

Happy emailing.
Andrew - Yahoo! Mail Team