Yahoo has been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately, such as unwanted texts to Sprint customers, the shutdown of their Yahoo Screen service and budget cuts calling for tons of jobs to go down the drain. Amidst all of this, it’s safe to say that it’s crucial that they continue to engage existing users. To that end, they are still keeping their mobile apps up to date. They announced via their Tumblr blog today that their Yahoo Mail app for Android has been updated. The update brings a few new features, but the two main headline features are actionable notifications and custom swipe actions.
The custom swipe actions allow a user to decide what will happen when they swipe a particular message left or right. Things like archiving emails, deleting them, starring them, moving them to other inboxes and marking them read or unread are all available to set up as custom swipes. By default, swiping right marks a message read or unread, while swiping left deletes a message. You can access the custom swipe actions setting by going to “Settings” within the app, then “Swipe actions”. The other new feature, being notification actions, is tied into the custom swipe actions. When you set up custom swipe actions, these two actions become available on a peeking notification for any message that comes in. Unfortunately, there is no way to set up more than two custom actions. Taking either of the custom actions will not open up the app, allowing you to continue with whatever you may be doing when the message comes in.
Other new features include the addition of “Star” and “Mark as spam” to the multi-select toolbar. To reach these new options, simply tap the “…” symbol when you have multiple messages selected. In order to select multiple messages, long click on any message and then simply tick the checkboxes next to any messages you want to perform a group action of some sort with. Users not wanting to leave feedback in the Play Store or who have already done so can also send feedback to Yahoo from the app’s settings menu. The updated app is already live in the Play Store and should be available for all users.
