SUNNYVALE, USA: Continuing the momentum of the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS),Yahoo! Inc. today introduced enhancements to Yahoo! Mail, providing consumers with a "smarter inbox" experience that will begin rolling out to users on a limited basis over the coming months.

This next generation of Yahoo! Mail is part of the company's ongoing effort to deliver more personally relevant starting points on the Web by integrating social functionality and opening products up to content and services from outside of the Yahoo! network.

The goal of the next generation of Yahoo! Mail is to address the changing communications needs of consumers by streamlining access to the most relevant and useful information, and helping users to become more productive, all from within their inbox.

The smarter inbox experience features a new Yahoo! Mail Welcome Page which surfaces messages, information and activity updates from people users care about most, as well as an updated inbox and folder view that filters messages from those personal connections. The smarter Yahoo! Mail inbox also gives users immediate access to relevant third-party applications that can leverage the user's email content, calendar and contacts with the user's permission.

"Yahoo! Mail users have told us that they want to be more productive when they get to their inbox and they want help breaking through the clutter and getting to the communications that matter most to them," said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo! Mail. "We've created a smarter inbox experience to address the problem of inbox overload. We're also embedding really useful applications directly into the inbox, which should help people be even more efficient when they get to Yahoo! Mail."

Developers to benefit from the Smarter Inbox

As part of the Yahoo! Open Strategy to open up to third party publishers, developers, and advertisers in the form of global platform services, the Yahoo! Mail smarter inbox experience adds to the transformation of the Yahoo! Network and serves as an unprecedented distribution opportunity for developers to share their innovative applications with Yahoo! users worldwide.

Yahoo! is working with developers from across the Web to integrate their products and services into Yahoo! in 2009 and beyond, and Yahoo! Mail adds a major new footprint for developers that will only continue to grow.

Yahoo! Updates gives developers a viral distribution channel for their applications across the Yahoo! network, including the new universal profile, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Toolbar and now Yahoo! Mail. Third-party Web sites and services can incorporate their users' activity streams onto Yahoo!, extending their reach and connections with consumers across Yahoo!'s social graph.