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Monday, October 20, 2003
Yahoo Quietly Unveils New Mail Tools
With no fanfare, Yahoo on Monday released an upgraded Yahoo Mail interface and advanced spam protection tools. Now, when marking a message as "spam," Yahoo automatically reports the message as spam, deletes it, and trains its new spam filters to learn what you consider to be spam. This seems to be a step up from the previous version, which didn't ever seem to catch those messages from karen@yahoo.com about the "New Online Seminar" that I still receive a few times a week, despite reporting Karen's butt to Yahoo ad nauseum.
It's unclear whether the "SpamGuard Plus" spam filters will also work on external POP3 mail checked through Yahoo Mail Plus, but I sure hope so. I had to shut down my main Traffick.com e-mail address due to an avalanche of spam, as did Andrew, and it would be nice to see this extra touch.
Also new is a more streamlined message status box labeled "Mark" with a down arrow indicating further options, which is where Yahoo now hides the options to mark messages as read, unread, flag for follow up and to clear message flags. I'm not sure if this existed before today, but you also have viewing options, where you can view all unread messages, flagged messages or all messages.
Finally, when viewing messages, Yahoo also pulled the "hide the options" trick for replying and forwarding, probably as a way to conserve screen real estate. I'm not sure that was a very big problem, but they must have had some good reason to do so.
In any case, as a heavy user of Yahoo Mail, I love every little improvement they make, however small!
Posted by
Cory Kleinschmidt
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