The company said it made its email search tool more powerful so you could more easily see older emails from people while on the service’s mobile app. The iPhone version of the app will be compatible with 3D Touch, a new software feature Apple designed for the new iPhone that lets people navigate through apps differently.
Advertisement
Bonforte estimated the cost of enhancing Yahoo’s mail features and doing away with passwords amounted to “tens of millions of dollars”, but declined to cite specific numbers.
The simpler log-in without passwords is called Account Key and will be available for other Yahoo apps the end of this year. But he also said that it would accomplish its goal even if all it did was help current users get more out of email.
The updated app also will make it possible to connect Yahoo email with competing services from Outlook.com, Hotmail and AOL.
This new feature builds on a product the company release earlier this year called on-demand passwords, a two-factor authentication like experience where Yahoo emails a new password to your phone.
Signing into a Yahoo account without a password looks like this: When you enter your e-mail in a browser, the password field disappears. Instead, they will input an email address and, recognizing who the email address belongs to, the Yahoo Account Key will send a push notification to the account owner’s smartphone seeking authorization. By sending push notifications that allow you to login without typing out a password.
“For the first time ever, we are allowing Yahoo Mail users to link their third-party mailboxes into Yahoo Mail and be able to utilize the full power of the platform”, Delgado said. Now only 3 to 4 percent of users take advantage of Yahoo’s on demand password services.
The updated Yahoo Mail is available on iOS and Android. “Sounds like what this might do is give people a reason to use the Yahoo e-mail app or a few other phone-based client, which I think would give them more opportunity to add advertising and grow revenue”.
Aesthetically, the new Yahoo Mail apps aren’t a radical departure from the previous versions. The app’s Xobni heritage is visible in the way it aggregates details about your email correspondents, with items such as a list of other people who they email frequently, their recent tweets, and a history of their messages to you.
Yahoo Mail now has a slicker photo picker and inserts images directly into emails rather than as attachments.
“Email is the most prevalent way people communicate online”.
Smart Views, which already existed in Yahoo Mail’s desktop incarnation, automatically group messages of particular types, such as social updates and travel-related mail.
The changes are an attempt to improve a crucial part of Yahoo’s business, Bonforte said. “As a product manager, it’s not that I love every gauntlet, but they’re logical gauntlets”.
Advertisement
Seven months after replacing traditional passwords with single-use SMS codes, Yahoo is taking the next step toward blowing up the password altogether. However he said it’s possible Yahoo would if the product is successful.
