yahoo mail turns 18 this month, and to mark the occasion, yahoo is going all out with three major announcements: a new mobile app for android and ios, support for multiple third-party email accounts, and so on. Again, most importantly, the introduction of a completely password-free login experience called yahoo account key.
Before we get into the app, let’s start with the two big announcements. In March, Yahoo Mail introduced something called Passwords on Demand which basically sent a one-time password directly to your phone so you could log into your email account. now, they’ve done something better: yahoo mail wants you to forget passwords altogether with a feature called yahoo account key. You’ll need a smartphone and the yahoo mail app for this, because basically what you’re doing is linking your email address to your phone number and the app. enable yahoo account key in settings, and voila, you will never need to enter your password again.
This is how it works. When you go to sign in to your yahoo mail account, you will enter your email address. and then when you click on the password field, the field will disappear. instead, you will receive a push notification on your phone asking you to accept or decline the login request. press accept, and you’re in; It’s as simple as that. “The account key is a metaphor for how a user will verify their identity,” says Dylan Casey, vice president of product management at Yahoo, adding that eventually this authentication method can be expanded to include biometrics such as fingerprints and facial recognition. .
of course, there are some disadvantages. For one, you’ll need a smartphone to use it, since you need that app for verification. and if you lose your phone for whatever reason, you’ll have to authenticate via a secondary email address, which isn’t ideal. Fortunately, the yahoo account key is completely optional and you don’t have to use it. but for everyday use with the vast majority of yahoo mail users, the account key could be the perfect solution to increase security.
“email inadvertently inherits the weaknesses of other password systems on the internet,” explains jeff bonforte, senior vice president of communications products at yahoo. “Our users too often use the same password or the same service that maybe they’re not thinking too much about.” he adds that while two-factor authentication is the current security standard, less than 10 percent of yahoo mail users currently use it. it’s often too complicated for most people, he says. “you can always get a huge level of password security, but you can’t get a huge level of password security that is simple and intuitive.”
The second big news is that yahoo mail will now officially support third-party email accounts. So if you want, now you can add outlook, hotmail and aol email accounts to your yahoo mail app. you can send and receive email from those accounts and search through them just like you do with your yahoo mail. not only do you get the top 200 messages in the account, but you can access the entire mailbox and its entire archive; photos, documents and everything. “everything is done and synchronized on the server side,” explains bonforte. “it is complete and non-destructive.”
“This way, we can deliver a consistent experience across mailboxes,” says Shiv Shankar, senior product manager at Yahoo. there are a number of other advantages as well. You can set up all your third-party accounts in Yahoo Mail on desktop, for example, and it will sync across all your devices automatically so you don’t have to add them back on your phone. search and contacts will be unified across accounts, and anything you can do with yahoo mail can also be applied to your third-party mail accounts (learn more about yahoo mail’s new smart search capabilities below) ).
the big question here is: will you be able to add gmail to yahoo mail? The answer: “We’re working on it,” Bonforte says. The same answer also applies to corporate outlook and microsoft exchange accounts.
Now let’s move on to the app, which has been completely reimagined to be not only faster and easier to use, but also prettier. The first thing you’ll notice when you open your inbox, for example, is that people are front and center. “We are the only email provider that allows you to connect your Yahoo account to social accounts like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter,” says Fernando Delgado, senior director of product management for Yahoo Mail. That means, whenever possible, yahoo mail will fetch the photos or avatars of each of your contacts based on the social account linked to their email address.
but what if the sender doesn’t have an account with any of those services? Then, instead of generic grayed-out avatars, you’ll see the sender’s initials cut out of a photo pulled from a flickr image library. “We wanted something rich and beautiful even for the boring stuff,” Bonforte says. “we want the inbox to always look beautiful.”
Another neat trick is that whenever you receive an email from a company like Bank of America or CVS, you’ll often see their logo next to the email. Interestingly, that logo is also a security feature. “When we display a logo, it’s like displaying the sender’s signature,” says Bonforte. That’s because Yahoo Mail only displays the company logo if the email has been officially signed and verified; you can 100% guarantee that the company has shipped it. this, says bonforte, is the result of a dmarc email security feature that yahoo mail implemented a while ago that ensures messages are only delivered when the service is absolutely certain the sender is who they say they are. /p>
There are other UI improvements too: a right swipe lets you mark a message as read or unread, a left swipe deletes it, a long press lets you select multiple messages, and there’s also a handy undo button at the bottom if you make a mistake. As for threads, Yahoo Mail respects the different ways they are traditionally handled in the default iOS and Android mail apps; vertically and hey, if you prefer to see the yahoo news, you can also easily access it in the upper right corner.
even better than it sounds, though, is yahoo mail’s new intelligence. take the new contact card, for example. When you tap on a person’s photo, you’ll immediately see their contact details, even if he or she isn’t in your local address book. That’s because everyone is automatically removed from your connected Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter profiles, and even from your email signatures if they contain alternate email addresses or phone numbers. the contacts card also usefully displays the history of email exchanges between the two of you and a list of what you think are related contacts (perhaps mutual friends or co-workers). the latter, slim says, is especially useful if you’re trying to remember who the person is and how you met them.
more powerful than that is yahoo mail’s new intelligent contextual search engine. type the first few letters of someone’s name and it will instantly suggest the most likely contact. For example, let’s say you entered your co-worker’s name in the recipient field and then proceeded to type a couple more letters. It will automatically suggest the name of other co-workers you’ve normally emailed together, a feature that’s been in Gmail for a while. however, what’s impressive about the yahoo mail version is that it’s even more contextual than that. Let’s say you entered your co-worker’s personal email address because you want to host a non-work related movie night. the next couple of cards will list people with personal email addresses instead of their work address. “If the user has to type more than a couple of characters, we haven’t done our job,” Bonforte says. “It’s these little things that when users get used to it, they feel blind without it.”
ah, but that’s not all. Let’s say you’re looking for messages from a particular friend. While traditional mail clients usually only fetch what’s locally on the device or the top 100 messages on the server, yahoo mail will search your entire inbox, even going back months or years. and yes, it will also search all those multiple third party accounts. that’s because the lookup works on the server side, not the client side. they’re not just messages either; you will be able to see all the images and files that your friend has sent you, and all the images and files that you have sent to them.
“We think we have the most advanced search in a mobile email client,” Delgado says. “We really understand the structure of the messages, files, and photos that are in your inbox.”
There are some other cool features for composing new messages. you can easily include multiple photos from your camera roll in a single message and have them play online by default, or you can attach them as traditional attachments by hitting the plus sign at the bottom. For android app, you can also browse your phone’s system folders or your sd card to find the file or image you want to attach. But what’s particularly powerful here is that because Yahoo Mail indexes every message you’ve ever received or sent, you can also easily find and attach any photo you’ve received without having to download and attach it—all attachments are ready. on the server side, even if it’s an 80mb file.
If you often use your email to send yourself reminders, you can simply press and hold the compose button and your own email address will automatically appear in the To field and the cursor will be the subject line. write the note, press send and you will receive those reminders. “About 20 percent of our users email themselves frequently,” says Bonforte. “it also knows all of your email addresses…sending an email to yourself from either account will be considered email to yourself.”
and if you have the new iphone 6s or 6s plus, you can 3d tap the app icon to “peek” at the app and compose a new message, send yourself a note, do a search or go directly to the app. inbox. for those with ios9, you will be able to search for anyone in yahoo mail directly from spotlight. tap any of the featured results and it will switch to the app and email in question.
Of course, yahoo mail has to climb a steep hill to defeat the behemoth that is gmail, but with innovations like account key, willingness to support multiple third-party accounts, and its huge smart search abilities on the side From the server, the new yahoo mail is certainly worth checking out. The new app should be available on Android and iOS today, while you can also add an account key to your account starting today.