The Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) Mail service has hit 100 million users. The company also hit 500,000 Facebook fans. Yahoo! recently made some layout changes for its Mail service. Yahoo! currently receives 5,000 feedback messages per day that the company uses to create changes in the user interface. For example, the company took a message about making the toolbar appear at the bottom of long messages seriously. Yahoo! also added a switch view feature that allows users to jump between infinite scrolling and paginated view. CNET]

David Kernell, the “Sarah Palin e-mail hacker” has been sentenced to a year in jail at the Ashland Federal Correctional Institution in Kentucky according to the Federal Bureau of Prison (BOP) records. Kernell was able to hack into Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! e-mail account by guessing her security questions. After breaking into her e-mail account, Kernell got some attention by posting some of Palin’s personal e-mails and photos on the online forum 4chan.

Flickr has introduced a new feature called People You May Know. The suggestions are based on your contacts and people that they know. You can add contacts from the Find Your Friends page or from the new module on the Flickr homepage. You can designate people as a friend, family member, or contact. If you want other suggestions, you can dismiss the suggested people. You can aso have Flickr find your contacts from Facebook, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, and Hotmail. [Flickr Blog]

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) has redesigned Yahoo! Mail to make it faster and safer. The new Yahoo! Mail Beta is at least twice as fast as before. Facebook and Twitter integration has been added to Yahoo! Mail too. You can tweet, retweet, or send a text message out to friends while putting together an e-mail. If a friend sends you photos or videos from Flickr, Picasa or YouTube, then it will show up in a slideshow on the side. This way you never have to leave the page to see the external content. I think that is a cool feature that Gmail is also long overdue to have. Check out the video demo below of the new Yahoo! Mail:

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) has launched a Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger app for the Android Market.  Yahoo! also launched HTML5 mobile websites for the iPhone and a Yahoo! Search Widget for Android.  The new Android app features include push notifications for new e-mails, Yahoo! Address Book integration, e-mail search, photo uploads as attachments from the camera, emoticons and rich text formatting.  There is also easy toggling between Mail and Messenger.  Full press release below.

David Kernell was convicted by a federal jury in Knoxville, TN in connection with accessing the Yahoo! e-mail account of former U.S. vice president candidate Sarah Palin. He penetrated the e-mail account by selecting the forgot password feature and answering the security questions that Palin selected. He was able to answer the security questions by finding general information about Palin across the Internet.

Remember David Kernell?  He was the one that hacked into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account and posted her personal photos on 4chan.  And then Gawker retrieved those images and posted it on their website.  Kernell was able to hack Palin’s e-mail by getting through Yahoo! Mail’s security questions.  Today it was announced that three more federal charges were made against Kernell, the University of Tennessee student.

The three new chages are fraud, unlawful electronic transmission of material outside Tennessee, and an attempt to conceal records to impede an FBI investigation.

David pleaded not guilty to all charges.  The magistrate agreed to push back Kernell’s trial from May to October.  David is the son of a Democratic Tennessee legislator.

[via AP]

Digg cut about 10% of their workforce last week and announced that they wanted to expand upon their sales team in order to lean towards profitability.  This is why Digg has hired Tom Shin as their new head of sales.  Shin comes from Yahoo! where he was one of the top salesman in the Northwest region.  Shin’s job will be to manage the relationship with Microsoft and find leads for direct advertising.

While Shin was at Yahoo! he helped Yahoo! Mail grow from $20 million in revenue to $300 during the 7 years that he was Director of Product Marketing for the division.

I believe that with Shin on board, Digg will be able to achieve profitability based on Shin’s track record.  Given Digg has 35 million users and many are tech-savvy, this gives Shin a lot to work with in terms of pitching advertising campaigns to Fortune 500 companies.  Now hopefully we’ll stop seeing ads like these: