Yahoo Mail Opens Up Two New Domains

Yahoo has added two new domains to its popular email service, allowing customers the opportunity to get the email address they always wanted. The new domains, ymail.com and rocketmail.com, will also function as Yahoo ID's across the company's other Internet services, including Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Groups, and Flickr.

In a statement released last week, Yahoo said they were opening up the new email designations, the first time they have done so since they started Yahoo Mail in 1997, because the company recognized that people were no longer able to secure more memorable and easily identifiable addresses and forced to use accounts like "CutiePie4Ever80 or mattclark1977." (Source: shareholder.com)

"We recognize that people want an email address that reflects who they are," John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo! Mail said in a statement. "We are thrilled to be able to offer new Yahoo! email domain choices to Internet users, along with the same great Web mail experience that hundreds of millions of people have already come to expect."

According to ComScore, Yahoo Mail is the most popular email destination online with around 266 million users throughout the world. Microsoft comes in a distant second at 264 million users. However, while both Yahoo and Hotmail experienced tremendous growth during the 90s, the 21st century has belonged to Google thus far. (Source: newsweek.com)

Google's Gmail has just over 100 million users, but has been growing at a far greater rate with attractive benefits. These include a large storage capacity and a wide host of other Internet services such as document creation, blogging, customizable homepages, an online RSS aggregator,and photo storage. Yahoo offers a few of these benefits as well, some of which are far more popular (Flickr for example) than Google's, but Yahoo has found it difficult to draw people away from the search giant's growing business.

In addition, Yahoo recently acquired the Rocketmail domain from Four11 Corporation for $80 million, and is betting that customers will flock to the two new email designations to give a much needed boost to Yahoo's stagnating business which has been under threat recently.

Next month, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang hopes to fend off the activist shareholder Carl Icahn, who has mounted a proxy campaign to overthrow Yahoo's board of directors and install those who would be more amenable to selling the Internet portal to competitor Microsoft. As tensions continue over the company's future, executives at Yahoo have been abandoning ship at a rapid pace. (Source: nytimes.com)

The recent move-countermove between Yang and Icahn is only the latest chapter in the Microsoft-Yahoo saga that began earlier this year.