The SEVEN Beta setup is an interesting one.

As a company, Seven (enough capitalising already!) sell their excellent push e-mail products only via mobile operator channels, however their Beta program is an excellent way for users on unsupported carriers (that's likely you and I) to enjoy their software.

Available in a variety of editions on a variety of platforms, Seven's software allows you to receive push mail on your device from a variety of services - Exchange, Yahoo, GMail, AOL Mail, HoTMaiL and standard POP and IMAP services are all supported. A Beta release it might be (with the usual associated disclaimers), but the application is a supremely useful piece of software that i've been using for many years to push synchronise GMail with my Windows Mobile devices.

I happened to visit the Seven Beta site earlier today to download the latest Windows Mobile client and I was intrigued to notice that an Android download option had appeared. Obviously I had to download the application and take a look!

As expected, it's a Seven client for the Android OS that includes all of the goodness that i'm used to - push mail across a host of platforms, 'quiet times' when push can be automatically disabled, multiple accounts, server contact search, customisable notifications and more! Although the currently version of the software is missing a few features i'd like to see (primarily HTML mail), for Android users it can often be a trying task getting mail set up and working as desired if you are using something other than GMail, and Seven is making that story easier. I've been pushing an additional e-mail account and a HoTMaiL account all day without any issues!

If you'd like to try out Seven on Android (or indeed any of their other support platforms, which include WinMo Standard / Professional, Symbian S60, Palm OS and even J2ME!) then head on over to the Seven Community Forum to sign up for an account.

It's been a number of months (if not longer) since Yahoo showed any love to its Upcoming events service. Since acquiring the service in October 2005, the service has seen just one re-design - and few additional features since. However, in a largely-uncovered announcement earlier in the week, Upcoming now offers a new Jumpstart feature that scans your Pandora, last.fm and iTunes libraries and then follows your favourite artists on the service - alerting you to forthcoming gigs listed on Upcoming.

Whilst other services, including last.fm, allow you to easily view your favourite artists, it's an interesting addition to the Upcoming service - and hopefully means that Yahoo are now looking at ways to build on a largely unloved product.

Yahoo! Go was an early mobile content service that started in 2006. It seems quaint by today's standards, though, which explains why Yahoo!'s shutting it down. With a mobile site that's available on pretty much any phone, plus a few different iPhone apps, Yahoo! simply has no reason to keep working on Go.

Go hasn't been updated in the past year, so current users probably saw this coming (or already have newer phones).

The official date on the headstone for Yahoo! Go is January 12, 2010. In the meantime, the team working on Go has been reassigned to improving Yahoo!'s mobile site. Other Yahoo! mobile properties include iPhone apps for Flickr and Yahoo! Finance.

[via TechCrunch]

It seems like just yesterday that Yahoo! Messenger 10 entered beta, showing off new video chat and social networking features. Now it's all grown up, out of beta, and replacing Y! Messenger 9 as the default version on Yahoo's download page. Folks upgrading to version 10 get the benefit of several nice new features, including video calling and integration of streams from social sites.

Yahoo! has made some big improvements to its webcam feature, adding better video quality, synched audio and a full-screen mode. You can also move your video call windows around and place them side-by-side. It also supports video effects. To make video calls, both sides need to be on Yahoo! Messenger 10.

The other big addition is a social streaming view called Y! Updates, which lets you see your contacts' updates from several social sites, including Twitter, Last.fm, and Yahoo!'s own Buzz. Of course, it also shows your friends' Messenger status messages. However, CNET suggests you do a custom install of Yahoo! Messenger 10 rather than the default installation, so you have more control over toolbars and other additional junk that comes with Messenger.

We've known for months that early-90's homepage service GeoCities was shutting down today, taking a big chunk of Internet history and a lot of hideous animated GIFs with it. That doesn't stop the web geeks at Download Squad from getting a little sentimental, though.

To paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi: we felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

So, let's take a moment to remember GeoCities. The easy website-creation service opened in 1995, and many Internet users set up their first homepages within its quirky "neighborhoods". Back before everyone had a .com, GeoCities sported long, convoluted URLs with directories like SiliconValley/Pines or SunsetStrip/Towers. In 1999, GeoCities was purchased by Yahoo!, and has been a Yahoo! property ever since.

Although GeoCities sites are all disappearing from Yahoo!'s servers today, you can still take a trip down memory lane. Archive.org has started a Special Collection to catalog the sites. The effort was supported by Archive Team and includes a collection of those ever-present "Under Construction" GIFs from the heydey of GeoCities.

Popular geek-centric webcomic XKCD paid its own tribute to GeoCities today, reskinning the site to look like a stereotypical homepage, circa 1996.

Over 30,000 email addresses have been compromised, with their login info posted online, in the past few days. The BBC has apparently seen the list, and it includes Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo and Gmail users. None of those companies are to blame, though, because the owners of the email addresses got caught in a phishing scam. In case you're not already in the habit of making sure you're not giving your login info to fake websites that are made to look real ones, this is a good reminder to start.

Gmail is dealing with its share of the stolen accounts by forcing password resets, and a spokesperson at Google said there was no breach in Gmail security. This comes right on the heels of a possibly-related Hotmail-only phishing attack that hit 10,000 accounts earlier this week. To be safe, make sure you use a different password for each service you sign up for (the BBC says 40% of Internet users have the same password for everything), and if you click on a link in your email, make sure you're on a legitimate website before you sign in.

[via Mashable]

Xoopit is a service that turns Gmail into a powerful media browser, letting you quickly view your attachments. Since Yahoo! acquired it, though, it's been available to Yahoo! Mail users, and now Yahoo! is looking to make it exclusive. Xoopit will become the My Photos feature of Yahoo! Mail, and it's being pulled out of Gmail completely. Even the Firefox add-on and Facebook app for Gmail are being discontinued.

How does Yahoo! explain removing Xoopit from its biggest group of users? "We will not be able to keep investing in our Xoopit for Gmail product, and don't want you to end up with a lousy experience." That's going to leave a lot of Xoopit Gmail users disgruntled. Here's how this move affects you if you're one of them: your Xoopit data disappears on November 13th, but your attachments remain untouch (albeit unindexed) in your account. I don't know about other Xoopit users, but losing the service certainly doesn't make me want to sign up for an email address with the company that took it away. Bad form, Yahoo!

Yahoo's FireEagle project has long been a great (albeit under-used) service to let you share your location with other websites. Services such as Dopplr, Brightkite and many others can all update & read your location and use the service to display location-based data.

On the iPhone, there's plenty of free applications that update FireEagle such as yofe, but what if you're working on a desktop or laptop computer? That's where Clarke comes in handy -- a small, open-source utility for OS X that runs in your menu bar, it'll figure out where you are based on the Wi-Fi networks around you.

In earlier versions of Clarke, the updates were based on Skyhook Wireless' database -- the same used by the original iPhone to triangulate your location -- however the utility was recently updated for Mac OS X Snow Leopard and now uses the OS' built-in Core Location system to figure out where you are when run on the newest big-cat.

A free download, developers can also grab the source code over at Github, and the application also lets you easily view nearby data from Flickr, Google Maps, OpenStreetMap and Yahoo Maps.

Yahoo! is embarking on a new marketing campaign to convince users that the company's web services are all about "You." The mission is to reposition Yahoo! as a consumer-focused company. A few days ago, we mentioned that Yahoo!, for example, was unloading enterprise email service Zimbra and classifieds company HotJobs, which aren't really aligned with the new mission statement.

That said, if you look at the company's first TV spot for the campaign, you'd be hard pressed to tell exactly what that mission was. For about 55 seconds, Yahoo! clearly wants you to hear the word "you" a lot. And that ad is certainly dynamic, features vibrant colors, and locations from five different countries.

But you have to wait until the last few seconds of the ad to even find out what the company is... and there's absolutely nothing in the ad to explain how you'll be able to "consumer, share, buzz, destroy, earn, flirt, or watch." Of course, a TV spot that showed Yahoo! Messenger, Mail, Buzz, Video, or other web-services would be a heck of a lot less interesting.

What do you think? Is the new ad effective? If you haven't visited Yahoo! in a while, does it make you want to give the company another try?

Users who clicked on booby-trapped banner ads served by Google's DoubleClick and a Yahoo-owned service called Right Media ended up having their machines infected by a trojan, according to a report from The Register. The sneaky ads showed up on the Drudge Report, Lyrics.com, slacker.com and horoscope.com. Google says that publishers who use DoubleClick have to approve the banner ads that show up on their sites, implying that these four sites are at fault for the attack on their users.

The trojan itself was installed via an infected PDF file that opened and closed when a user clicked an ad. It's called Win32/Alureon, and it opens backdoor access to infected machines. This is serious business, and it's hardly the first time we've seen "malvertising," but who's to blame when it happens? Should site owners who buy ads have to scan them first, or should the big ad networks be responsible?

It seems like just two years ago that Yahoo! bought open source communication platform Zimbra for $350 million. Oh right, that's because it was. But today it looks like Yahoo! is looking to sell Zimbra, along with a number of other properties that don't fit the company's streamlined mission statement including HotJobs.

While Zimbra's advanced email tools certainly made their mark on the recently updated Yahoo! Mail web client, but Zimbra's real strength lies in the fact that you can deploy the software on your own server and create a corporate network for email, chat, and calendar sharing. And that's not necessarily a business Yahoo! wants to be in right now. Instead the company is focusing on its consumer oriented products.

Commencing noon EST today, online collaboration provider drop.io becomes Yahoo Mail's default 'Attach Large Files' provider. If you're wondering where you've heard drop.io mentioned before, drop.the company was recently featured on Time's list of the 50 best web apps of 2009.

Built on top of drop.io's open API, the change is a significant boost for the drop.io service, which up until now has provided users with free storage in the form of unlimited blocks of 100MB, as well as offering a premium service for enhanced features.

It's not clear at this time whether Yahoo! Mail attachments will also be limited to 100MB nor the extent of the integration between Yahoo! Mail and drop.io, but rest assured I'll update this post as more details surface.

Postbox - the e-mail application for Windows and Mac OS that we first mentioned back in February has exited it's long Beta period and reached a 1.0 release.

Postbox pitches itself as being 'smarter than your average e-mail client'. Built on a Mozilla core, the application works behind the scenes to catalog everything in your mail. Text, contacts, addresses, links, pictures, attachments - all of them are indexed, providing a very powerful search experience and a useful e-mail view that abstracts potentially interesting content from the body of the e-mail itself.

If, like me, you use GMail, you will have become accustomed to the conversation based message view and this is a perspective that Postbox retains, making migration from the web interface to the Postbox application a painless process. Postbox is compatible with a wide range of e-mail services (Gmail via IMAP and POP3, MobileMe, AOL Mail, Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail Plus as well as any generic IMAP or POP3 account) and includes excellent integration with the most popular services. One such example is the integration between Postbox's powerful 'To Do' flagging function and GMail's own 'Star' system.

The feature list is really too extensive to list here, but includes RSS support, Newsgroups support, Facebook / Friendfeed / Twitter integration, emoticons, draft auto-saving, password protection, spam filtering, return receipts, add-ons and much more.

Postbox retails for $39.95 with discounts available for 'Family Pack' purchases. A 'Lifetime Upgrade' option is also available.

By far the best way to experience Postbox's powerful search facility and unique content abstraction is by trying it - and thankfully a free trial is available from the Postbox site.

The only question is... is there still a place for desktop e-mail clients in today's online e-mail environment?

Yahoo is getting ready to roll out the latest version of its Yahoo Messenger chat app, and a beta version of Yahoo Messenger 10 is already available for Windows users. This time around, the focus is on new features for webcams. Now you can start a high-quality video call (with audio) from within an IM window, which is a step up from the low-quality video calls with no audio that Yahoo had before.

These improvements are only for 1:1 calls to other buddies who have Yahoo Messenger 10, though. If you're using Yahoo Messenger to broadcast video to multiple people, you're still stuck with no sound and lower video quality. Video calling also gets some of the features you might be used to from apps like Skype: putting calls on hold, entering full screen mode, and repositioning your video windows.

Yahoo's also jumping on the "activity stream" bandwagon: you can put your buddy list in update mode, and see what your friends are doing on other social sites, like Twitter and Last.fm. You can start a chat from the updates view, and the update you're talking about will show up inline in your IM window, so your friends know what you're responding to. Yahoo Messenger 10 also finally has the ability to sort your buddy list by availability, so the contacts who are actually online and available will show up at the top.

[via Life Rocks 2.0]

If you're willing to give Yahoo Calendar 2.0 Beta a try, you can now sync your Yahoo Calendar with the Calendar app on your iPhone. It doesn't require a separate app download or anything like that, just a quick and painless setup procedure. This is actual over-the-air syncing, with no need for plugging in and syncing with iCal on your desktop, and it helps Yahoo catch up to Google Calendar as a viable alternative for iPhone users.

Just go to "Mail, Contacts, Calendars" in your iPhone's settings, Go to "add account," "other," and then pick "CalDav account." Enter "yahoo" as the server, and put in your Yahoo username and password. Save and quit, and the next time you open your iPhone Calendar app, you should be prompted to pick which Yahoo calendar layer you want to use. Be aware that doing this upgrades you to Yahoo Calendar 2.0 Beta, and you can't downgrade again afterward.

(via Lifehacker)