Have you ever lost track of a friend because she moved and forgot to let you know her new address and phone number? When you’ve changed your contact information, did you remember to let all of your friends and colleagues know?

Wouldn’t it be great if you had an address book that updated itself — that always had the most up-to-date information for the people who matter most to you?

In the latest version of Yahoo! Contacts – in addition to making it simple to import email addresses from your Facebook friends – we have rolled out an “auto-updating” Address Book! Let’s take that friend who moved away and didn’t share her new phone number. In the old days, you might have lost touch with her. But now, when your friend updates her Yahoo! contact details and chooses to share the information, your Yahoo! Contacts gets automatically updated. Here’s how it works:

Let’s turn my example around, and make sure your friends always have the most up-to-date information for you! Just go to Yahoo! Contacts and click on the Share my info link under the Popular Tools.

Clicking on the link will show all the contact information that Yahoo! has for you.

If everything looks good, just click Start Sharing and this information will be shared with all the people you’ve chosen to share it with (such as your Connections). If you are like me, much of the information shown will likely come from when you registered for Yahoo! In other words – it’s ancient! To update your information just click Edit to go to your account information page. From there you can easily update your contact details and choose who you want to share it with. Remember, you have complete control over what you share.

Now here’s the fun part: your friends get your latest contact information without having to lift a finger! First, they will get a Yahoo! Update notifying them that your contact information has changed. Next, when they go to look you up in Yahoo! Contacts, they will see the contact information you gave them access to and the last time it was updated (don’t worry, none of the information you have for them will ever be over-written). Here’s what you’re friends will see:

Hopefully this feature helps you never lose touch with the people who matter most.

As you know, we are always listening to your feedback. Many of you that have small computer screens have told us that you would like more space to read your emails. You spoke and we listened.

To give you more real estate to read your emails, we are adding a button just to the left of the advertisement in the All-New Yahoo! Mail. Clicking that button will hide the ad temporarily, while you read your email.

This is a handy tool, especially if you are using a computer with a smaller screen resolution like a small laptop or netbook. While it doesn’t permanently remove ads, it will give you more space while you read an email. Ads are what allow us to provide you Yahoo! Mail as a free service and hopefully they’re sometimes useful and interesting too. If you would like permanently disable ads you can sign up for Mail Plus which offers an ad-free experience and other enhanced features.

Tired of spending countless hours on cleaning up those emails that have piled up over the years? Spring is just around the corner and you know what that means – spring cleaning. Don’t suffer from the stress and get a jump-start on spring cleaning with an organized Yahoo! Mail inbox.

We understand the drill. Make a New Years resolution, and then somehow, months go by, and it gets lost in the chaos of life. But if your resolution was to finally have an organized inbox free of all the clutter, then we can help you!

One of our Yahoo! Mail partners, OtherInbox, created the Automatic Organizer app found right in the handy Applications box on the lower left-hand corner of your inbox. This app allows you to keep your “clean inbox” resolution. Automatic Organizer prioritizes your Yahoo! inbox by automatically filing messages that aren’t from real people into pre-defined folders (Travel, Auto, Social Networking), while leaving you with a clean and clutter-free inbox manageable on your own schedule. Easy enough, right?

So try Automatic Organizer for free and feel good about spring cleaning for a change.

I want to let you know about some changes coming to some of the menus in the All-New version of Yahoo! Mail. We’re moving a couple of options to new places and renaming others. It’s all to make them easier to find.

The Mail Menu items are being reorganized and grouped together under ‘Actions‘ and we’re adding a new menu item called ‘Show‘. Here is a detailed look:

The ‘Actions’ menu changes are as shown here

• ‘Select’ choices have been added to easily select all emails or just the ones that you can view in your Inbox.
• We’ve added ‘Sort by’ choices to give you better control on how you display the emails in your Inbox.
• ‘Print Message’ is changing to ‘Print Email…’
• ‘Filter Messages Like This…’ changes to ‘Filter Emails Like This…’
• ‘Full Header’ will now be ‘View Full Header’

We are also adding a ‘Show‘ menu that will allow you to view emails only from your Contacts or Connections. To view emails from your Connections, you will have to turn on the connection related features in Yahoo! Mail. You can find out how to do that in the next section.

There are also some changes to the ‘Options‘ Menu that is at the top right of your Inbox:

Here is everything you need to know about the new ‘Options‘ menu:

• We’ve added a menu item labeled ‘Show’ – here you can show or hide the preview pane, as well as some of the attribute columns of your email list (attachments, size and flag columns). Don’t forget that using the ‘v’ shortcut key also shows and hides the Preview Pane.
• ‘Mail Options‘ is changing to ‘More Options…‘ – this is where you can enable/disable the Connection related features, set up filters, turn on your Vacation response and more.
• ‘Add Application‘ is changing to ‘Add Application…‘ – this lets you add Apps like ‘Attach Large Files’, ‘Edit Photos’ and many others.
• ‘Mail Plus’ changes to ‘Mail Plus…’ and allows you to enjoy the benefits of Yahoo! Mail Plus
• ‘Switch to Yahoo! Mail Classic’ is now just ‘Mail Classic…’ and lets you switch back to the Classic version of Yahoo! Mail

While that might seem like a lot, it’s actually organizing items so that they are much easier to find. And don’t forget about all the great keyboard shortcuts you can use in the All-New Yahoo! Mail. Some of these menu items can be done with one keystroke. Give it a try… Go to your Inbox and hit the ‘v’ key. Voila, you get the preview pane!

You might have heard that Yahoo! announced plans in December to integrate Facebook Connect across a variety of our popular sites and services. While we’re still early in the partnership, we wanted to let you know about one new thing you can do with Facebook that we are rolling out over the next few days.

In addition to importing your contacts from sites like Gmail and Windows Live Hotmail, starting this week you can now easily add your Facebook friends’ email addresses to your Yahoo! Contacts list. This will make it easy to communicate and share with the people you care about – wherever you are in Yahoo!. So when you are on Yahoo! Sports and you want to email your old high school buddy that great article on the Winter Olympics, his email address is just a click away. Or maybe you want to forward your cousin your airplane reservations on Yahoo! Mail, but you’ve never emailed him before. Now you can type the first few letters of his name in Yahoo! Mail and – presto! – his email address from his Facebook profile will appear in your email.

Importing from Facebook is super simple. To get started, just go to the Import Contacts landing page and select Facebook (and as you can tell from screenshot below, it is also easy to import email addresses from other services).

Next, enter your Facebook username and password in the Facebook login window that opens.

After you click login, we will authorize your account and begin importing, which may take a minute or two depending on your Internet speed and how many Facebook friends you have.

That’s it! Your Facebook friends’ email addresses will be added to your Yahoo! Contacts. You will see which contacts and email addresses were imported and who you already had contact information for (don’t worry, we won’t create duplicates).

We hope this feature makes it even easier to stay connected to the people who matter the most to you. And this is just one of the first steps you’ll see us take to help people interact with Facebook users all across Yahoo!. Stay tuned here and elsewhere on Yahoo! for more ways to use Facebook and Yahoo! together.

I have some really exciting changes to share about the all-new Yahoo! Calendar that are based on the feedback you’ve been sharing with us. Your top request on our Yahoo! Calendar suggestion board was to make the Calendar open as a tab in the All-New version of Yahoo! Mail. Well, your wish is our command, and over the coming weeks we will begin to roll this change out to everyone.

You can see what it looks like below, but first I want to show some changes that are coming very soon. In fact, you may have already noticed the change in your calendar. The left hand column with the month, search and the calendar list is now an expandable tab just underneath the ‘Today’ button. Now, when you click the calendar icon, the tab expands to show the search and all of your calendars.

One of the main reasons behind this change is to free up some space so the calendar will fit nicely and neatly inside a tab in the All-New Yahoo! Mail. Now when you need to go to your calendar you’ll never need to leave your Inbox. Here’s what it will look like when it’s open in Yahoo! Mail:

Of course that’s not the only reason to use love the new Yahoo! Calendar. Here are some other reasons to love it:

• Calendar sharing
• Syncing your calendar with your iPhone or iPod touch over the air
• Multiple calendars (or layers) that you can hide or display
• A new search tool that lets you search your Calendar and Notepad
• A handy ‘right click’ menu to quickly add events and more

So when’s all this happening? The change with the expandable tab is rolling out now and you should be seeing it in the next few days. Adding the Calendar to a tab in the All-New mail will be coming soon after. You have to be using the All New Calender to get all these great features, so if you have not already switched to the new Yahoo! Calendar, you can do that here: http://switch.calendar.yahoo.com

Here’s a reminder for all the fellas out there (like me); Don’t forget that Valentine’s Day is coming up this Sunday (that’s the 14th of February). And of course a big Happy Chinese New Year!! Seriously though, I had totally forgot until just the other day.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to go running around looking for chocolates, flowers or trying to score that 8pm dinner reservation. With the Yahoo! Greetings app in the all new mail, you can send a Valentine’s card without even leaving your Inbox.

Let’s give it a try. Just click on Yahoo! Greetings in the applications pane of your Inbox. If it’s not listed there, just click the little plus sign next to ‘Applications’ and you can add it to your list.

Once the application opens, you can find the right card to send. Select ‘love & dating ecard’ and click ‘go’ to see a list of possible Valentine’s cards. Scroll through the list of cards and click on the one that suits you. Fill in your details, give it the personal touch with your own message and then click send. That’s it, you’re done. Now you can go back to watching Sports Center highlights.

Flowers are great but emails are too, so send your love without the thorns. Be advised, I am still getting chocolates and flowers (I like to cover all the bases).

It’s been over 12 years since Yahoo! Mail launched with just 3 Megabytes of storage. Fast forward to present day with unlimited storage, 25 Megabyte attachments, chat in mail, ‘drag and drop’ to name just a few enhancements we’ve added over the years. And to make sure you are getting the most out of Yahoo! Mail (and the rest of today’s modern Web-based applications) we suggest upgrading to a modern browser.

There are a host of modern browser options and they are all supported by Yahoo! Mail.

• Firefox 3.x +
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.x +
• Safari 3.0 +
• Google Chrome 4.0 +

Believe it or not, it’s been almost 10 years since Internet Explorer 6 was released, and 26% of Internet users are still using it. If you are still using an older browser, we will be encouraging you to upgrade to the latest version soon. We even have the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox that give you an optimized, one-click access to Yahoo! Mail.

Every now and again the need arises to send big files as attachments. Normally they never exceed 25 Megabytes, so you’re covered with Yahoo! Mail. But even in the case where you have one file, or even a bunch of files over 25 Megabytes, with the ‘Attach Large Files’ app by drop.io in the all-new Yahoo! Mail, you can attach files up to 100 Megabytes. So now there’s a way to share those home videos, large presentations and all your photos at once.

You can find the Attach Large Files app in the Applications section underneath your folders. (If you don’t see it listed, you can add it to your list by clicking the plus sign.) To get started just click on the ‘Attach Large Files’ app.

After you agree and then click to get started, you can right away begin using the app to attach and send up to 100 Megabyte attachments. It doesn’t have to be just one file, you can upload multiple attachments in a single go. Just keep selecting all the files that you want to attach and when you’re ready, click the ‘Upload and Compose Email’. The app will tell you how much more space you have available. It’s that simple.

Once the files have finished uploading, the Attach Large Files app will open up a new message with the files already attached. The files will be available for downloading for 30 days after you send them, and your upload history is saved so you can resend again if you like. And you don’t have to worry whether or not your recipient’s Inbox can handle these attachments because the attachment is stored over at our app partner drop.io.

It really couldn’t be easier. The only thing to note is for people that like to write emails in ‘Plain Text’. With ‘Attach Large Files’, you have to compose your emails in ‘Rich Text’, but the App will prompt you to change to ‘Rich Text’ if you are not already doing that.

I am a firm believer in the old adage ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’. That is why my colleagues and I write a lot of posts around online security, phishing prevention and spam. We want everyone to know how to recognize and avoid phishing emails, as well as share tips for staying safe online.

But I also recognize that even the best of us can get caught off-guard sometimes. Whether it happens by mistake or a particularly well done forgery, someday you may find yourself in the situation that you account has been phished. If you don’t realize it right away, you’ll know it when your friends start asking why you sent them an email to a strange online shop or whether or not you really are stuck in Chicago without your wallet and are in need of money.

If you do ever find yourself the victim of a phishing attack and think your Yahoo account has been compromised, here are some things you can do to help get your account back online and in your control:

Change your password immediately. If you find that your account is sending spam, and you are still able to access your account, login to your Yahoo! account and change your password. That will prevent the fraudster from entering your account again. (Tip: Also check that we have the correct alternate contact email address for you on file.)

Use our automated account recovery tool. Sometimes the hacker who stole your information changes your password so that you can no longer access your account. If that’s the case, our account recovery tool can help restore access to your account and change your password at the same time. (Tip: You will have to answer your secret questions to complete the tool. If you forgot, or haven’t set your secret questions/answers, you can do that here then click the link ‘Update password-reset info’.)

Contact our Customer Care Team. If you can’t remember or are unable to provide the information needed by the account recovery tool, you can always contact our customer care team. Have a look at our account verification help pages, and then click the ‘Contact Us’ link. They will help get access to your account.

Remember, prevention is the best medicine. So arm yourself with the knowledge to stay safe online, and make sure you are prepared in case you ever do find yourself the victim of phishing. To simplify the process and quickly regain control of your Yahoo! account, make sure you always have a current alternate contact email address, and know the questions and answers to your secret questions. You can update your Yahoo! account recovery information by logging into your Yahoo! Account.

Recently, we introduced a quick and easy way to consolidate all your different contacts lists into your Yahoo! Contacts. Whether you’ve imported the various address books that you’ve accumulated over the years or have a really big contact list, you may now find yourself with a few duplicate entries. If so, no problem, now it’s easier than ever to merge duplicate entries into one.

To get started, when you first open Yahoo! Contacts, just click the link to ‘Fix duplicate entries’. (There is also a link in the ‘Tools’ button at the top of your contacts window.)

The tool will scan your contacts list and present you with the duplicate entries that were found. To combine the duplicates into one, just click the button ‘Merge all EXACT’ and then ‘Yes’ to confirm.

OK, so it’s actually two clicks, but it really couldn’t be any easier to clean up your contacts list. If you would rather review each duplicate separately, just click the ‘Next’ button instead. A wizard will guide you through the process of merging each duplicate entry.

If you made a resolution to organize and clean up your address book for 2010 and were dreading doing it, now there is no excuse not to. What may have taken hours will now take just a couple of minutes.

It seems like only yesterday we launched the smarter and more social features in Yahoo! Mail. With the new welcome page – ‘What’s New’ – you can now easily find the important mail from those who matter most. In addition, you can now get updates from people you’re close to. And from the Inbox and folders, you can filter your mail to see just the mail from your contacts or connections.

I know that for some of you the new smarter and more social features haven’t been turned on yet. So I wanted to let you know that, shortly, these great new features will be added to everyone’s ‘What’s New’ page. So let me take this opportunity to guide you through the upcoming changes.

We are adding two new sections (they are highlighted in red) that will be above the Today section:

• Recent Unread Emails from Contacts (or Connections): This section shows you the most recent emails that you’ve received from the people in your contacts list. You can also change this to show the new emails from the people that you are connected to by clicking the down arrow. If you click on one of the emails listed you will open that email.
• Updates: This section shows you what your connections are doing on the places that they regularly visit. You can get updates from sites like Twitter, Blogger, Yelp, YouTube and many more. You can also share what you are doing by managing your updates. If you would rather see news at the top just click that down arrow to the right and the Updates section will move below the Today section.

From reading your feedback, I know that those who have these features really like them. However, if you would rather turn off these features, you can. Just click the ‘Options’ link at the top right of your Inbox and then ‘Mail Options’. Un-tick the checkbox labeled ‘Enable Connection-related features’ and then ‘Save Changes’. The next time you login to Mail you will only see the Today section.

The changes are rolling out over the next few months to both the Classic and All-New versions of Yahoo! Mail, so you may not get the new ‘What’s New’ page for a little while. If you don’t have it and would like to try it out, just create a profile, and you’ll get the new features.

Happy New Year!

What a year it’s been for Yahoo! Mail. I can tell you that all of us on the Global Yahoo! Mail team have been working hard throughout 2009 to deliver you a more social and more productive Yahoo! Mail that lets you get the important things done quickly and easily. In short, we’re working to give you the best email experience on the Web. I think you’ll agree with me, all that hard work has paid off. We’ve delivered some pretty great things to your Yahoo! Mailbox (pun intended).

As is usual at this time of year, it’s time to take a look back and see what we’ve been able to accomplish in these short 12 months. Here are the highlights (in no particular order):

• To kick off 2009 we gave you a smarter, more social Mailbox. With the new welcome page “What’s New” in Yahoo! Mail you can now easily find the important mail from those who matter most. In addition you can now get updates from your connections. And from the Inbox you can filter your mail to see just the mail from your contacts or connections.
• We launched Yahoo! Messenger in Classic Mail. It seems like it’s been a part of the Classic Mail forever, but the ability to instantly chat with your friends and family in the classic version of Yahoo! Mail has only been around since the beginning of the year.
• We’ve added fantastic new Apps in Yahoo! Mail to let you be more productive right from your Inbox. (Of course we have to thank our Apps partners who also worked very hard to deliver you these great tools.) Apps like Edit Photos from Picnik let you easily share and edit photos right from within your Inbox. The ‘Attach Large Files’ from ZumoDrive lets you share up to 100MB files. Apps like Pingg and Evite allow you easily manage your social calendar.
• One of our goals is to help you do more with your photos in your Yahoo! Mailbox. We want to make photos an integral part of your Mail experience. Our acquisition of Xoopit will go a long way to make that a reality.
• In order to send all those photos (and other attachment types) we recently launched the ability for you to add attachments up to 25MB to a single email. That’s about 12 photos if your camera takes about 2MB photos. And to help you attach those files, we launched an enhanced attachment feature for the all-new version of Yahoo! Mail. It allows you drag and drop your attachments right into your email. Plus you can scale and rotate your photo attachments.
• We’ve also been working hard behind the scenes to improve the speed of Yahoo! Mail. In the US we have achieved more than a 16% improvement in performance over the year. And, Yahoo! Mail is the fastest Webmail in the UK (based on our tests using 3rd party tools). So, not only have we given you more tools to increase your productivity, we’ve made it even faster to get things done.
• Our friends on the Address book team recently launched the updated Yahoo! Contacts. It goes a long way to unify the Contacts experience across the Yahoo! network and fits seamlessly into the all-new Yahoo! Mail. Plus the new clean-up duplicates tool is a great way to clean up your list of contacts.
• Our ongoing efforts to reduce spam and helping you keep safe in Mail have seen our lowest level of spam in recent history. We told you back at the beginning of the year about some of what the anti-spam team has been working on in the background, and we hope you’re all seeing the continued improvement. Plus we are always committed to keeping you safer online through safety tips on this blog.
• Thanks to our colleagues on the Front Page team you can now preview your Inbox right from the Mail tab on the newly redesigned Yahoo! Homepage.
• Finally, we know that many of you are mobile with your mail. So we have to give a shout out and congratulations to the Mobile Team who just went GA with an updated Mobile mail experience. Just point your mobile browser over to m.yahoo.com/mail to have a look. I definitely give it two thumbs up, way up!

Wow! That’s a lot, and those are just the highlights! Rest assured, we are prepared to work even harder next year. We are aiming to give you a better photo sharing experience, more amazing third party Apps and an enhanced Yahoo! Calendar to name just a few.

So, from all of us on the Yahoo! Mail team, I want to wish you and everyone on your Yahoo! Contacts list a very happy holiday season and all the best for the New Year.

In the spirit of the holidays, Yahoo! is encouraging our community to create a ripple of good around the world by doing random acts of kindness. You in?

Surprise someone by paying for their morning coffee. Or drop off a warm coat at the homeless shelter. Then update your Yahoo! status to inspire your friends and family to do something good for someone else.

Through the end of the year, you will see a heart in your Yahoo! Mail status update box. Click on the heart to tell your friends and family what you are doing. Then click on the exclamation point to shuffle through ideas for random acts of kindness. And feel free to come up with your own random acts of kindness – we’re sure you have quite a few up your sleeve!

Once you’ve updated your status, check out what others are doing to spread kindness around the world at http://kindness.yahoo.com.

Hi everyone! My name is Ajay and I am a project manager for Yahoo! Mail and Contacts. Today, I’d like to show you how to add a splash of color to your Yahoo! Mailbox. These same themes are available in Yahoo! Mail and Contacts so you’ll be completely color coordinated! Here’s how to change the colors in your Yahoo! Mailbox:

If you use the All New Yahoo! Mail:

1. From the Yahoo! Mailbox click on the Options menu
2. Choose Color and then select the color theme of your choice
3. That’s it you’re done!

If you use Classic Mail:

1. Click on the Options menu
2. Choose Mail Options

3. Choose Colors

4. Choose the theme of your choice

5. Click save and go back to your Yahoo! Mailbox.
6. Enjoy!!

The color themes in Yahoo! Mail and Contacts are a great way for you to personalize your Mailbox. I personally like ‘Lime Green’ but the feedback you’ve been sending tells me that ‘Bubblegum’ (’Pink’ in the UK) is very popular too. Whichever theme you choose, I’m sure you’ll find one that’s right for you.

Smiley faces in emails? It’s definitely not on your list of favorites. A while back we took a poll and it ranked pretty high up on the list of email pet peeves. But when you’re chatting with your friends in Yahoo! Mail, then that’s another story.
Smilies and text speak are an integral part of chatting. If you’re tired of the usual and and , surprise your friends with some different emoticons. They’ll be ROTFL.

Here is a list of the hidden emoticons (the ones you won’t find in the list in Mail). If you need to brush up on the usual suspects, you can find the complete list of emoticons here.

I’m happy to report that the issue with the spell checking function in the All-new Yahoo! Mail has been fixed. Misspelled words are now correctly replaced. This fixes the issue for all languages including Spanish, German, Italian and French.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused. As always, please feel free to contact our customer care team if you are having issues with your email.

I get questions from users now and again, whether or not we sent an email asking for account information. The answer is always NO! (Sorry for shouting) We will never send you an email asking for your account information. This is something that I’ve written about before but it never hurts to post about it again.

Here is an example of a phishing email that I received recently:

We definitely did not send this email. This one, and others like it, all pretty much follow the same formula:

• They are sent from a strange email address (but sometimes masked to look genuine)
• They usually use a scare tactic
• They want you to reply with your account information
• They have bad grammatical errors and use crazy fonts and lots of logos.

The most important thing to know is we will never ask you for your password! Here are some other tips to protect you from phishing threats: Never click on links in emails that ask you to provide account information, go directly to the website and login from there, don’t believe every warning you read in an email. And finally, there is no Yahoo Lottery.

To coin a phrase from my all-time favorite daytime cartoon series G.I. Joe – “Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.”

I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving. I might have to loosen my belt one notch for a couple of days, or at least until next month when I make that New Year’s resolution to exercise. One thing I won’t have to worry about is what to do with all those holiday photos of friends, family and celebrations. Yahoo! Mail makes it easy to store, create and share all your photos right from your inbox.

Save more. With Yahoo! Mail you have unlimited storage. You never have to worry about having to delete photos because your mailbox is getting too full. Feel free to keep all those photos your friends and family send. Well, maybe you don’t need to keep that one of Uncle Joe napping on the La-Z-Boy.

Send more. Yahoo! Mail lets you send emails with up to 25 Megabyte attachments. You can send more photos at once. You can send 12 pics with just one email assuming that each photo is about 2 Megabytes. Just make sure your recipients can receive emails that big. If not, you should encourage them to switch to Yahoo! Mail.

Do more. With our Apps, you’re not limited to just sending and receiving photos in Yahoo! Mail. Be creative with your photos right from your inbox. Without a doubt, the Edit Photos application is my favorite app in Yahoo! Mail. The App created by Picnik helps you clean up your snapshots with the ability to crop, resize, and reduce red-eye. Once you’re done touching-up your photo, add effects, frames and text. Then, once your masterpiece is complete, easily save and share your photo.

You can even share your Flickr photos right from your Yahoo! Mailbox. Load up the Flickr App and you can view the photostream and photo sets of you and your friends. Plus, share your photos and photo sets with the click of a button. Congrats to the Flickr team for being first on Time’s list of the 50 Best Websites of 2009. Don’t have a Flickr account yet? Sign up to Flickr using your existing Yahoo! ID.

Yahoo! Mail makes it easy to be more productive and more social. And now that the holiday season has arrived, I know you’re going to really appreciate all those great photo sharing features.

With more than 300 million Yahoo! Mail inboxes worldwide, we take our responsibility to keep you safe and your inbox free of spam, phishing and other online scams very seriously. Did you know that in 2008, Yahoo! blocked more than a billion spam messages each day?  And it doesn’t stop there. So far this year, we have reduced the amount of spam that comes to Yahoo! Mail inboxes by an additional 30 percent!

So how do we do it?  Our anti-spam efforts use a multi-faceted approach to protect your inbox including the use of enhanced technologies, industry collaboration, public policy efforts, and consumer awareness campaigns. Here’s a look at some of the latest advancements from the front lines of fighting spam:

Analytical analysis – Because spammers adjust their messages in subtle ways to evade detection, we’re using Hadoop, a supercomputer consisting of thousands of individual PCs, to look at hundreds of different elements in each message.  For example, Hadoop doesn’t just look for the word “viagra” or “v1agra” or “v.i.a.g.r.a.” to show up in the subject line, it also looks for extremely subtle signals like how many words are in the message, what time of day the message was sent, how different this message is from the last one we saw from that same sender, and so on.

The hunt is on – We welcome opportunities within both private and public sectors to eliminate spam and educate its users about phishing. For example, in 2008 we saw an increase in messages telling our users that they had “won” the Yahoo! Lottery.  Sadly, no such lottery has ever existed!  Yahoo! has formed a public-private coalition with Microsoft, the African Development Bank, and Western Union to allow victims of lottery scams to upload police reports that are used to track down these criminals and develop better ways of protecting people online, and filed a lawsuit directly targeting these criminal con-men.

Self defense – The old adage is true: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  Through ongoing consumer education and awareness, we are able to provide you with tips and strategies to identify spam, phishing and other online scams.  Speaking of, the holiday season and “Cyber Monday”—one of the busiest e-commerce days of the year—are right around the corner.  According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, Internet fraud surges around this time because more of us are shopping online. Be careful of those deals that sound too good to be true, because they almost always are.  For more advice, be sure to check out our top tips for staying safe online and spotting online scams.  Also, check out the sidebar below for specific tips for Cyber Monday.  With a sharp eye and a little education, you can better protect your wallet and your identity this holiday season!

With Yahoo! Mail touching over 50 percent of U.S. email users, your protection online and the prevention of spam are issues that are always top of mind.  Whether it be phishing scams, lottery scams, fund transfer scams or other crimes, rest assured that we are behind the scene working diligently to protect you and your inbox. 

Happy holidays from me and my team as we protect you from spam, one message at a time.

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Tips for a Safe and Productive Cyber Monday!
As I mentioned earlier, Cyber Monday is almost here.  So be sure to use the following tips when you’re receiving emails from vendors on deals and bargains or shopping online at Yahoo! Shopping or any other online shopping store for that perfect gift this holiday season:

Stay updated: Make sure your anti-virus software, internet browser, and operating system are all up-to-date, to protect your computer against viruses and fraudulent websites.

Know whom you’re buying from: Make sure you understand something about the company you are making a purchase from, and be familiar with their practices and policies. While there are many perfectly-reputable online merchants, there are also scammers out there, so be wary of deals that seem too good to be true. Check out their return policies, shipping procedures, and packaging timeframe. Be comfortable with the website and confident that you are going to be protected in the event an issue arises.

Keep your password to yourself: Most websites will require a log-in to make a purchase. Create a secure and unique password, with a combination of letters (uppercase and lowercase), numbers and symbols. If you need to, it’s much better to pick strong passwords and write them down in a secure location than to reuse the same, simple password on multiple sites.

Look for the padlock: When you’re entering sensitive data – such as passwords or credit card numbers – you should always look for the locked padlock symbol at the bottom of the screen or in the web address toolbar.  If the lock isn’t there, it means the site is not securing your information and the site should definitely not be trusted (unfortunately, just because the lock is there doesn’t mean the site is legit, but if it’s not there you know something’s up)

Use your better judgment: You know better! If that Cyber Monday deal sounds too good to be true, chances are that it is. The same can be said about e-mail. While our spam filters work hard to weed out the bad from the good, never click on links in unsolicited or untrusted messages; doing so exposes you to the fraud and also encourages spammers to send more spam.