Why Mail?

Yahoo is offering free e-mail accounts in an effort to attract users unhappy with their current addresses under the domains of "ymail" and "rocketmail" today around noon at http://mail.yahoo.com/ .

This is the first time that Yahoo is offering e-mail accounts under umbrellas other than its own company name since it became a correspondence conduit in 1997. Yahoo began offering free e-mail shortly after its acquisition of Four11 Corp., which included the rocketmail domain. Rocketmail users at the time of the acquisition were allowed to keep their existing accounts, but Yahoo hadn't accepted any new addresses under that name until now. The diversification into new e-mail designations is being driven by the difficulty that people are having as they try to find an appealing e-mail handle under the Yahoo domain.

Yahoo is hoping the additional options created with the ymail and rocketmail will help boost its e-mail growth. With 266 million worldwide users in April, Yahoo is the e-mail market leader. Microsoft (which unsuccessfully tried to buy Yahoo for $47.5 billion) is a close second at 264 million users. But e-mail accounts at both Yahoo and Microsoft have been growing at a slower pace than Google's Gmail, which added more than 30 million users in the past year. About 101 million people used Gmail as of April.

E-mail under the ymail and rocketmail designations will offer all the same features as the Yahoo domain, including an unlimited amount of storage capacity like Gmail, a signifigant upgrade from the 3 megabytes of free storage originally per account.

ymail not to be comfused with Ymir, father of Norse frost giants