The Yahoo! elves have been hard at work in their toy shop for the Holiday season to bring you a nice little integration of Maps, Local, Mail and Search.

Users of Yahoo! Mail (classic version only at this time) can now do more with the content in their email. When mousing over any address or location (including international cities) a quick click on the purple underlined terms will bring up an instant map or satellite image, business information, driving directions and a slew of other options relating to that location. The new Shortcuts lets you do all this without ever having to leave your message or open a new browser window.

It’s a very handy new trick for those that don’t like to do a lot of cutting and pasting.

This not only works for addresses, but there is also additional information available for a variety of other items in the messages (phone numbers, key phrases, email addresses…etc). You can also disable this… but why would you want to?

Happy Holidays

The Yahoo! elves and Jeremy Kreitler