By Josh Jacobson, Product Manager, Yahoo Contacts
The most common way people search their inbox is by entering a person’s name or email address. Today we are updating Yahoo Mail with dramatic improvements to the quality and usability of these “people” searches.
Let’s start with the search box. Right from the first couple of characters you type, you will see Yahoo Mail instantly suggest people and recent searches. Your most important contacts appear at the top. For contacts with multiple email addresses, Yahoo Mail will automatically include every email address in the search query so you don’t have to know which email account they used for a given email.
We’ve also improved how Yahoo Mail displays search results. On the results page, you will notice a new, more useful layout that highlights the most important information.
At the center of your results are all the emails you have received from the person, beginning with the most recent, and you can easily toggle between sent and received emails.
Looking for an attachment instead of a specific email? You can search for all the documents someone has sent you with the “Documents” view, or you can see the three most recent attachments to the right of the results. Click “See All” for a longer list of attachments, including message subject lines, sent dates, and links to download attachments.
The “Photos” view displays a beautiful, Flickr-inspired page of all the photos from that person. Click on an image to quickly expand it. You can also quickly find recent photos to the right below documents and links.
Lastly, if you want to see the contact details for someone, just click “More Details” under the person’s name in the top right corner of the search results.
If you access Yahoo Mail on the web in the U.S., you’ll see this new feature today. And as with the new features we introduced in February, the Xobni platform is helping to power this functionality. To get the most out of this experience — such as images of people from Facebook and Yahoo Profiles — be sure to link your Yahoo account to Facebook.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can improve Yahoo Mail, so let us know what you think about the latest updates!