The Yahoo! Mail Widget Engine
What is the Widget Engine?
The Widget Engine lets you engage your users with video content that plays directly within the body of the email. Your recipients will be more likely to view your video content if it's right there in your email message. We've done all the heavy lifting. All you need to do is modify your email HTML.
- The Widget Engine is:
- just HTML.
- rendered by Yahoo! Mail as video inline with your email body.
- configurable to play video with any flash video player and content hosted wherever you like.
- rendered by unenlightened email clients as a static image hyperlinked to an external site. We realize that Yahoo! Mail isn't the only email client in the world, so we make sure your emails play well everywhere.
- configurable to revert to the unenlightened behavior after an expiration date.
- only available to whitelisted senders.
Wanna Play?
- To get started:
- Email ymail-dev-questions AT yahoo-inc DOT com and let us that you'd like to test drive the Yahoo! Mail Widget Engine. Please include which Yahoo! Mail usernames you'll be using to do the test drive.
- We will email an invitation to your test users. When you get the invitation, accept it.
- After logging into Yahoo! Mail, notice the Applications List in the lower
left corner of the page. Click
the
in the
upper right-hand corner of the Applications List. This will bring up the
Gallery. Find the (private) version of the Widget Engine app and install
it. - You are now ready to test drive inline video.
Test Drive
The widget engine is just a <span> tag with a special yEmbed
class, followed by a series of hidden <input> tags that encode the
attributes Yahoo! Mail will transform into an <embed> tag, followed by a
hyperlinked <img> tag to be used by unenlightened clients.
To see an example of this working, send yourself an email with the subject line "witness the inline video magic" and the following HTML body:
<html> <head></head> <body>Look, there's a party in my inbox!<br><br> <span id="yEmbed1" class="yEmbed"> <input name="expires" type="hidden" value="March 10, 2020 PST"> <input name="height" type="hidden" value="351"> <input name="width" type="hidden" value="624"> <input name="allowScriptAccess" type="hidden" value="false"> <input name="flashvars" type="hidden" value="vid='22541769'&autoPlay=1"> <input name="src" type="hidden" value="http://d.yimg.com/nl/ymailbeta/ymailbeta/player.swf"> </span> <a href="http://features.mail.yahoo.com/"> <img src="http://developer.yahoo.com/mailapplications/assets/inboxlove.png"> </a> </body> </html>
allowScriptAccess be set to sameDomain
or never and wmode be set to opaque
or transparent.
If we approve your using the widget engine in production emails, we will whitelist your emails based on your DKIM sender and recipients won't have to install any special app to enable the enhancement. However, when using the test drive app, we will only enhance emails in your accounts that have the magic subject line as in the above example.
Going Live in Production
As part of our invite process, our product manager will discuss our terms of service for using this widget engine, mostly to put guarantees in place that you won't use this feature to spam our users. Once we have those guarantees and you have email that works in the test drive, you can start sending in the new format and with whatever subject line you like.
When you start sending in the new format, users will initially continue to see your emails without any enhancements. We will do some internal testing and then enable all users to see your emails enhanced by whitelisting your DKIM-verified sender.
FAQ
Why can't I just send email with an EMBED tag?
Most email clients, including Yahoo! Mail, will filter out EMBED tags for security reasons.
Why didn't you just make a whitelist of senders who are allowed to use EMBED tags?
That would have involved changes deeper in our stack. We may eventually make those changes, but meanwhile we leveraged the Yahoo! Mail Development Platform to quickly implement this feature.