Yandex Opens New Webmail @ya.ru

The major task of the new interface is to make email faster and simpler. On all webmail pages, the panel with key actions is always near at hand, so no need to scroll the page even if the message or list is long. There is a message drag-and-drop option, keyboard shortcuts, and draft autosave. The new Yandex email is based on AJAX technologies, and for many actions refreshing the current page is not needed.

“More and more users turn to the browser as a universal program to solve their tasks,” says Pavel Zavyalov, head of Yandex webmail service. “We wanted to make the new webmail to be as browser-friendly as possible. We fought with every extra mouse move and every scroll bar, and it looks like we won.”

The unlimited mailbox size at Yandex.Mail provides storage for large volumes of mail. This naturally requires new information structuring capacities, and email at Yandex can now be used as a personal archive. To organize messages, users can set up traditional folders and also use tags to label selected messages. Moreover, a message can have any number of tags. The “smart” address book groups several email addresses of a single contact person and allows to view complete message history at the page of each addressee. In addition, the new mail service can find and organize messages into discussions – time-ordered mailing of a group of people on a specific subject.

The search box, an indispensable feature of all Yandex services, now has a new functionality, ‘search as you type’: on query typing, the list of messages in the current folder gets shorter, leaving only messages containing the entered text in the subject, first line of message body, or sender name. For example, it is possible to select messages from a single addressee without refreshing the page, and then perform any action – tag, move, or delete them. Working with long message lists is also made easier – it takes a single click to find all unread messages, messages “sent only to me”, or messages containing attachments in the current folder.

“We could say that @ya.ru is the most personal mail,” says Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh. “‘Ya’ is the Russian for ‘I’, and I am very unlikely to forget or confuse myself, aren’t I? In addition, a short address is easy to remember, type, and dictate over the phone.”

The new Yandex mail is located at mail.ya.ru. To use it, you need a Yandex login. The existing users do not have to register again, they already have an extra address @ya.ru. Yandex webmail service is now used by close to 6 million people per month. The mail is kept clean with Spamooborona (an anti-spam technology developed by Yandex), Dr.Web virus protection system, and there is an option to turn off ads.

Contacts:

Elena Kolmanovskaya, Chief Editor

Dina Litvinova, Head of Yandex PR

Phone: +7 495 739-70-00

Fax: +7 495 739-70-70

E-mail: [email protected]