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Yahoo Mail

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Yahoo! Mail
A typical Yahoo! Mail inbox.Yahoo! Mail beta.
Top: A typical Yahoo! Mail inbox. Bottom: Yahoo! Mail beta.
Type of site
E-mail, webmail
OwnerYahoo!
URLhttp://mail.yahoo.com/

Yahoo! Mail is a Web-based e-mail (webmail) service from Yahoo! It is one of the largest e-mail providers on the Internet, serving millions of users. Yahoo! Mail's major competitors include Gmail, AIM Mail, and Hotmail.

History

The history of Yahoo! Mail began with J. J. Healy, Yahoo!'s resident investment banker since November 1996, who has dealt with every Yahoo! acquisition since it was created. "No one knows your business like your employees," he said. According to him, the main question was always to consider whether to "build, buy or rent." The answer really depended on the growth of competitors and the current position of the company. The main reason to buy things was to gain speed to market.

The growth in the number of Internet users eventually boosted the e-mail technology, but also created a very competitive environment where the winner was the first company to launch a successful e-mail service and attract potential users. E-mail became one of the most important features of a Web company as it would mean regular visits from e-mail users to the website.

When Hotmail and Mirabilis (the creator of the instant messenger ICQ) were looking to be bought, Yahoo! was the first company to which both made offers. Yahoo!, however, passed on both companies as they were too expensive for Yahoo! at that time. In the end, Microsoft ended up buying Hotmail for $400 million and AOL bought Mirabilis for $288 million.

Later there was also to be another battle to acquire the online communications company Four11. Yahoo! made a deal with the company for co-branded white pages. Gloria Gavin, who worked at Four11 as director of international business development said, "We always had a bias about being acquired by Yahoo! They were more entrepreneurial than Microsoft. We had a great cultural fit – it made a lot of sense." The real point in acquiring Four11 was that in March 1997, the company had launched Rocketmail, a webmail system that could be offered to users. In the end, Yahoo! concluded a deal with Four11 for $96 million. Yahoo! announced the acquisition [1] on October 8, 1997, very close to the time that Yahoo! Mail was launched [2]. Yahoo! Mail resulted from an acquisition rather than internal platform development because, as Healy said, "Hotmail was growing at thousands and thousands users per week. We did an analysis. For us to build, it would have taken four to six months, and by then, so many users would have taken an e-mail account. The speed of the market was critical."

The transition to Yahoo! Mail was not easy for many Rocketmail users at first. Yahoo! released various help pages to try and help these users.[3] Soon after, on March 21, 2002, Yahoo! cut free software client access and introduced the $29.99 per year Mail Forwarding Service.[4] Mary Osako, a Yahoo! Spokeswoman, told CNET, "For-pay services on Yahoo!, originally launched in February 1999, have experienced great acceptance from our base of active registered users, and we expect this adoption to continue to grow."

During the summer of 2002, the Yahoo! network was gradually redesigned. On July 2, Yahoo.com was redesigned and it was announced that other services like Yahoo! Mail would enter the same process.[5] Along with this new design, new features were to be implemented, including new navigation tools, such as drop-down menus in DHTML and different category tabs, and a new user-customizable color scheme.

In November of the same year, Yahoo! launched another paid service: Yahoo! Mail Plus.[6] Yahoo! Mail Plus offered a number of new features, including:

  • 2 gigabytes of e-mail storage
  • 20-megabyte message size limit
  • Ability to send up to 10 attachments per e-mail
  • POP Access and Forwarding
  • Archiving of e-mail messages to a hard drive for offline access
  • Ability to send messages from Yahoo! Mail using other e-mail domains
  • 200 blocked addresses and 50 filters to help screen unsolicited e-mails
  • No promotional taglines in messages
  • No account expiration
  • A choice of stationaries

"The launch of Yahoo! Mail Plus is part of Yahoo!'s strategic initiative to offer premium services that deliver innovative, reliable and relevant services to consumers," said Geoff Ralston, senior vice president, Yahoo! Network Services, and creator of the original Yahoo! Mail technology in 1997. "In just five years, Yahoo! Mail has grown from one million to tens of millions of users, illustrating how consumers have made e-mail an essential part of their daily lives. Through Yahoo! Mail Plus, Yahoo! continues to demonstrate leadership and innovation by offering consumers the industry's most complete and powerful e-mail solution."[6]

On April 1, 2004, Google announced a free webmail with 1 gigabyte of storage. Though Gmail, Google's e-mail service, certainly offers a large amount of storage capacity, its original lack of features kept the other webmail services at the forefront. Most of the major webmail providers like Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and AOL followed Google's lead and increased their mailbox storage considerably. Yahoo! was the first provider to announce 100 MB of storage for basic accounts and 2 GB of storage for premium users.[7] Hotmail followed suit, offering 250 MB, only 150 MB more than Yahoo! Mail, but still 750 MB beneath Google's initial whopping 1 GB. When signing up for a Hotmail account, users were initially only given 25 MB for the first 30 days, after which the account quota would rise to 250 MB. Determined not to lose customers, Yahoo! Mail then countered Hotmail and Google by increasing the storage quota of its free email accounts to 1 GB.

On July 9 2004, Yahoo! acquired Oddpost, a strong webmail offering that simulated a desktop email client like Microsoft Outlook. Oddpost had new innovative features such as drag-and-drop support, right-click menus, RSS feeds, and a preview pane, but it also had incredible speed, using e-mail caching to shorten response time, and many of these features were incorporated into an updated Yahoo! Mail service.[8]

Features

Yahoo! Mail has the following features:

  • Free version: 1 GB quota. 10 MB attachments, plus protection against spam and viruses. (See: DomainKeys) Advertising is displayed on the screen while working with the e-mail account. Users can also read mail from a POP3 server through Yahoo! Mail. However, if they want to send mail from a distant SMTP server, they must upgrade to a Plus account. Accounts not logged into for four months get deactivated (The account can be retrieved but all personal data is lost). Every free Yahoo! account will be deleted after an inactivity of 4 months. Early in 2006, Yahoo! Mail introduced aliases to its repertoire of features. Users could now add a (single) alias username containing a dot character for a pre-existing account.
  • Plus version: 2 GB quota. The Plus service offers POP3 access—meaning that the e-mail account can be accessed through e-mail clients (Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook, Eudora, etc.) that work with the POP3 protocol. When working with the account over a Web browser, no advertisements from other companies are displayed - though there are commercial links to other services from within Yahoo!. This type of account has additional spam and virus protection. Yahoo! is charging $19.99 per year per user for Yahoo! Mail Plus. Users of Yahoo! affiliated Internet service providers, such as SBC, BT, and Rogers have all the features of the Plus version included as part of their accounts.
  • Business: 2GB, 10 E-mail quota. Yahoo! Business E-mail is a combination of all their e-mail services with 10 distinct accounts each with the same features of the plus version and personalized domain name and e-mail address. Accounts can be managed by an administrator. There is $25 set-up fee and $9.99 monthly fee to use this service.
  • Additionally, a user can pay $35 per year to have up to five custom e-mail addresses and a domain name.

Future

File:Ymb inbox.png
Yahoo! Mail Beta Inbox

In September 2005 Yahoo! began beta testing a significantly enhanced version of their e-mail service, based on Ajax scripting. The look and feel of the new version is designed to mimic a desktop e-mail client, and features one gigabyte of storage space, tabbed emails, RSS feeds, drag-and-drop capabilities, and more.

Access to the beta is available with an invitation following sign up on the "a-list". Wide-scale public release of the new version is expected in 2006 and is already available for some localized versions of Yahoo! Mail, including Yahoo! Mail France and Yahoo! Mail UK/IE. It is possible to sign up with a localized version of Yahoo! Mail Beta and the switch the account to Yahoo! US. You would get to Yahoo! Mail Beta interface but the correct Yahoo! content. The caveat would be you would have to keep the localized Yahoo! Mail email domain (i.e. @yahoo.co.uk). Another way to get a Yahoo! Mail Beta account in the US would be to sign as a Yahoo! US user and under Mail Options > Account Information change the "Preferred Content" to Yahoo! UK. After the settings are changed, you would have to agree to an EULA (End-User License Agreement) that invites you to the Yahoo! Mail Beta. After this was done, you could change back your "Preferred Content" to Yahoo! US and end up with the Yahoo! Mail Beta while still keeping an "@yahoo.com" address.

As of September 2006, active users who sign up get the new Yahoo! Mail Beta immediately.

Filters

In 2002, it came to light that Yahoo! Mail had filters that changed certain words and word fragments into other words. "Mocha" was changed to "espresso", "expression" became "statement", and perhaps most damaging, "eval" (short for "evaluation") became "review". The widespread effects of this can be seen by using the Google search engine to find such nonsensical terms as "prreviewent", "reviewuation" and "medireview".

When questioned about these changes, Yahoo! explained that the changed words were common terms used in Web scripting, and were blacklisted to prevent hackers from sending damaging commands via the program's HTML function.

As of Tuesday, February 7, 2006, the Yahoo! Mail filters no longer substitute certain words for others. Although the change may have occurred prior to this date, Yahoo! Mail now prepends an "_" (underscore) to certain words and word fragments.

Sending a test email from a non-Yahoo! Mail account to a Yahoo! Mail account with the words "Mocha", "eval", "Javascript," and "expression" in a sentence resulted in the Yahoo! Mail filters prepending an "_" (underscore) to those words, resulting in "_Mocha", "_eval", "_Javascript" and "_expression". This prepending obviously removes the threat of the words acting as commands via the program's HTML function by rendering them as non-commands or unrecognizable commands.

As of June 9, 2006, only the terms "expression" and "javascript" were prepended with an underscore ("_").

See also

References

  1. ^ "Yahoo! Completes Four11 Acquisition" (Press release). Yahoo!. 1997-10-23. {{cite press release}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  2. ^ "Yahoo! Expands Community Services with Free E-mail" (Press release). Yahoo!. 1997-10-08. {{cite press release}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  3. ^ Griffin, Gretchen. "Rocketmail Slowly Gets Grounded". Flak Magazine.
  4. ^ Hu, Jim (March 21, 2002). "Yahoo! tacks fees onto e-mail, storage". CNET News. Retrieved 2006-06-01. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  5. ^ "Yahoo! unveils home page face-lift". ZDNet. July 2 2002. Retrieved 2006-05-31. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  6. ^ a b "Yahoo! Introduces Yahoo! Mail Plus To Help Consumers Manage Their Growing E-Mail Needs" (Press release). Yahoo!. 2002-11-14. {{cite press release}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  7. ^ "Yahoo! Announces "New and Improved" Yahoo! Mail, Introduces Major Increase in Storage Space, Makes 50 Million Additional E-Mail Addresses Available" (Press release). Yahoo!. 2004-06-15. {{cite press release}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  8. ^ "Yaho! Begins Public Testing of New Yahoo! Mail" (Press release). Yahoo!. 2005-09-14. {{cite press release}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
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