Yahoo Mail Now Highlights the Emails Just from Your Friends

Email overload is an increasingly frequent problem. When dealing with hundreds of emails every day, at some point people just give up and start deleting them or marking them as read in bulk. You won't miss much of the emails that you skip this way, but more than a couple may prove important or from someone close. A lot of people realize this problem, but few are doing anything about it, even the biggest players. One company that is making the right moves is Yahoo albeit rather small ones. Yahoo is announcing that Yahoo Mail is about to get a couple of neat features, which have been in testing, that will make it more social, but also easier to retrieve the email that is the most important to you.

"With the new welcome page – ‘What’s New’ – you can now easily find the important mail from those who matter most. In addition, you can now get updates from people you’re close to," Yahoo announced. "And from the Inbox and folders, you can filter your mail to see just the mail from your contacts or connections... [S]hortly, these great new features will be added to everyone’s ‘What’s New’ page."

The first big new feature enables users to get a quick overview of the emails they received from their friends and family in their Contacts lists. This allows them to weed out the ones that are just clogging their inbox and makes it more likely that they won't miss an important email. The feature can be further customized to show the emails from the people they are connected with. This feature is available as a section on the "What's New" page but also as a filter option in the inbox.

The second new feature adds the same social tools which have been popping up all over Yahoo proprieties lately, from the home page to Yahoo Messenger. In the Updates section of the "What's New" page, users will be able to keep track of their friends' activities on a number of social networks, blogs or various sites and services like Yelp and YouTube all in one place. The features aren't live yet for everyone, but Yahoo says they are coming very soon.