Sunnyvale, California — Is your e-mail inbox swarmed with newsletters, bill notifications, and junk mails? Yahoo has rolled out a small but useful feature to its Web mail service that allows users to filter the contents of their inbox to display only the mails from “contacts or connections” to help you get to your most important emails first. The new feature suggests that if someone is not on your contacts whitelist, you do not see their message.
Besides sorting by connections, users will soon be able to sort by contacts. Here is what the inbox looks like before the sort. (Credit: Yahoo )
The new filtering features appear in a View From bar right above your inbox. Yahoo Mail’s built-in filters and its connections sorting, this is one of the simpler ways to cut out any inbox clutter from people you do not know. The slightly broader filter, called Connections, denotes people you have conversed with frequently but never manually added as a contact.
In the View From tab in the Yahoo Mail inbox, there is now a Contacts option. Click that, and the inbox will display only messages from trusted recipients. Those with an overcrowded address book can create filters as well.
And here is what it looks like after the sort. (Credit: Yahoo)
This feature will roll out in the next few weeks to both Classic and the new Yahoo! Mail users who have the Smarter Inbox features enabled. To get these new features, first create a Profile at profiles.yahoo.com and then log back into Yahoo! Mail.
Yahoo Mail’s senior product manager Rick Pal says this feature will only be available for Yahoo Mail users in the U.S. and Australia, and would not be rolling out to all accounts until a “few weeks” from now.