Here are a few of our favorites:

• Personalize your in-box: Yahoo! Mail has many colorful themes to choose from and two of them are even animated! People with newer Macbooks who use the Google Chrome browser can have an alien zipping around their screen. To check it out go to Yahoo! Mail, “Options”, “Themes” and select the thumbnail with the alien in the UFO. Move your laptop around to see the alien fly faster. There’s another theme that moves too. We’ll give you a hint – it’s blue. Hey, we don’t want to give everything away so easy!

• Keep your in-box tidy: Automatic Organizer sorts your emails according to pre-set preferences so your inbox doesn’t spiral out of control. Regret signing up for some of those newsletters? Use the Unsubscribe feature to safely get off mailing lists. And to manage your emails, set up folders so it’s easy to find the important ones. If you right click on an email and select “filter emails like this”, you can set up an automatic filter to make email filing a snap.

• Photo Slide Shows: Yahoo! Mail detects photos in your incoming emails, so you can view slideshows right from your Inbox. An incoming email that contains photos, or a link to a photo service like Flickr, displays thumbnail images at the bottom of the message.

• Take it with you: Yahoo! Mail is mobile. Apple iOS5 users can easily add their Yahoo! Mail account to their iPhones & iPads. Android users can download our popular Yahoo! Mail Android app from Google Play.

• Organize your purchases: Drowning in email receipts? Online shoppers, rejoice – we’ve got you covered. Sign up for the All My Purchases app within Yahoo! Mail to get all of your receipts and purchase information centralized in one spot.

• Hidden Cat: For all cat-lovers out there, be sure to Alt-Click on the Yahoo! Mail logo within Mail to meet our resident team mascot. “Fluffy” can only be seen for people using Firefox or Internet Explorer.
• Become a productivity master: Shift + ? pulls up all of the keyboard shortcuts within Yahoo! Mail. Learn new shortcuts like N = new message, T = start a new text and P = print message.

And to those of you without a Yahoo! Mail account, open a new account to see what you’ve been missing!

If you live in the Bay Area or have visited San Francisco during the holiday season, odds are that you have seen some of the cute dogs and cats in the windows of Macy’s in Union Square, all part of the SPCA’s holiday adoption drive. With hundreds of dogs and cats in need of a home living at the shelter at any given moment and a goal to find homes for more than 4000 animals each year, the SF SPCA has a herculean task that is undertaken by hundreds of staff and volunteers at their SF HQ, which includes Maddie’s Pet Adoption Center and the Leanne B. Roberts Animal Care Center.  You can meet some of our new friends here:

When we came by to drop off our gifts, we were greeted warmly by SF SPCA President Jan McHugh-Smith and amazing employees like Susannah Dunlap.  Jan and Susannah gave us an all-access tour of their amazing new facility that offers potential pet owners the chance to see the dogs and cats in condo-like settings.  All of the cats even have their own TV sets!

We were also able to see their state-of-the-art veterinary care facility, where animals from all over the Bay Area come to get checked out and get ready for adoption.  The shelter is a no-kill facility and is often a literal safe-haven for pets from other shelters that do not have space, including the apparent overabundance of chihuahuas.

While the SF SPCA website is a great place to see all of the animals available for adoption, you can always come down to see the pets in person.  And for those of you who are socially-networked, you can also follow them on Twitter and Facebook.  For a preview of some of the pets you can adopt, we’d like to introduce you to our new friend Curtis the Cat:

And as a bonus, our new friends at the SF SPCA have given us the opportunity to let our followers on Facebook and Twitter name a kitten that will be up for adoption soon–so follow us and help give Mr. Pickles a new name!

Please visit Yahoo’s You In? site to share your stories of kindness!

Happy Holidays!

Pamela Woon, Lucas Mast and Mariel Myers

Yahoo! Corporate Communications