Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo! Mail

File:YahooMailLogo.gif
A typical Yahoo! Mail inbox. A free Yahoo! Mail inbox.
Type of site	E-mail, webmail
Owner	Yahoo!
Created by	Yahoo!
URL	http://www.yahoomail.com/, http://mail.yahoo.com/

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

Yahoo! Mail Beta, a significantly different and advanced version, is currently under heavy development and is set to replace the current version of Yahoo! Mail when it is complete. It is currently in public beta. Development of what has now become Yahoo! Mail Beta started in July 2004, although it is possible other prototypes were in development before then. It is currently compatible with Internet Explorer 7 and Camino as well as Firefox (as part of Yahoo!'s plan to eventually upgrade all of their sites to be compatible with Firefox). Although usable under Opera, there are slight visual problems regarding the layout.

History

The history of Yahoo! Mail began with JoJo 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 on October 8, 1997, very close to the time that Yahoo! Mail was launched. 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. Soon after, on March 21, 2002, Yahoo! cut free software client access and introduced the $29.99 per year Mail Forwarding Service. 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. 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. 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."

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 invitation-only accounts 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. 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.

Features

Starting in May 2007, Yahoo! started to roll out to its users, both Beta and non-Beta testers, an unlimited amount of email storage.Yahoo! Mail is the email provider that offers the most email storage.

Yahoo! Mail has the following features:

• Free version: Unlimited Mail Storage. 10 MB attachments, plus protection against spam and viruses. (See: DomainKeys) Advertising is displayed on the screen while working with the e-mail account. In some countries, users with free accounts can also read mail from a POP3 server (but not in the US). 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. The Chinese version of Yahoo! Mail offers 3.5 GB quota and 20 MB attachments. [1]

• 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.

• Yahoo mail underlines addresses and phone numbers in email and allows the user to add them to the address book.

Users can get around the Web browser access restriction by using software that simulates a POP server to which the e-mail application connects. FreePOPs is an example of a free software application that allows email clients access to webmail (including Yahoo! Mail) services through POP3.

In September 2006 it was announced Yahoo! Mail will be open source.

Spam policy

Like most free Webmail providers, Yahoo! Mail is often used by spammers to provide a "remove me" email address. More often than not, these addresses are used for the express purpose of verifying the recipient's address--thus opening the door for more spam. This has led many ISPs and individual users to block messages from Yahoo! Mail accounts.

However, Yahoo! does not tolerate this practice, and terminates accounts connected with spam-related activities without warning.[2][3]

Filters

In 2002, in order to prevent abuse, Yahoo! Mail had filters that changed certain words (that could trigger unwanted Javascript events) 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 unintended effects of this can be seen by using search engines to find such nonsensical terms as "prreviewent"(prevalent), "reviewuation"(evaluation) and "medireview"(medieval).

When asked 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 Friday, June 8, 2007, 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 suspicious 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 ("_").

Mail certification

In February 2006, Yahoo! also announced their decision (along with AOL) to give some organizations the option to "certify" mail, by paying up to one cent for each outgoing message, allowing the mail in question to bypass Yahoo's and AOL's inbound spam filters.[4]

Yahoo! Mail user name bans

On February 20, 2006, it was revealed that Yahoo! Mail was banning the word "allah" in e-mail user names, both separate and as part of a user name such as linda.callahan. [5] Shortly after the news of the "allah" ban became widespread in media, it was lifted in February 23, 2006. Along with this action, Yahoo! also spoke up on this issue:

"We continuously evaluate abuse patterns in registration usernames to help prevent spam, fraud and other inappropriate behavior. A small number of people registered for IDs using specific terms with the sole purpose of promoting hate, and then used those IDs to post content that was harmful or threatening to others, thus violating Yahoo!'s Terms of Service.

'Allah' was one word being used for these purposes, with instances tied to defamatory language. We took steps to help protect our users by prohibiting use of the term in Yahoo! usernames. We recently re-evaluated the term 'Allah' and users can now register for IDs with this word because it is no longer a significant target for abuse. We regularly evaluate this type of activity and will continue to make adjustments to our registration process to help foster a positive customer experience."

Yahoo! Mail Beta

File:Ymailbetalogo.gif

In September 2005 Yahoo! began beta testing a significantly enhanced version of their e-mail service, based on Ajax scripting acquired from Oddpost, along with new philosophical approaches to email, including the Oddpost design philosophy (which Google made heavy use of in Gmail):

This data-centric approach may sound painfully obvious, but consider that at 1024×768 (the most common resolution on the web), only about 30% of Yahoo! Mail’s inbox screen is devoted to your mail. The remaining 70% is not, as you might expect, all devoted to advertising. In fact, ads only account for about 10% of the screen real estate, and the remaining 60% is consumed by navigation, dead space and administrative debris.

— Ethan Diamond, Oddpost co-founder

As Mail Beta is based on Oddpost, it features the same underlying code base, including the implementation of this design concept to minimize the amount of data sent during an email session by creating a JavaScript UI engine on the client side and sending "Datapacks" instead of reloading the whole interface on every click like a traditional webmail service [6] (e.g. traditional Yahoo! Mail). This makes the service much faster than its counterparts.

However, unlike Oddpost, Yahoo! Mail Beta runs on a variety of OS' and browsers, and runs perfectly under Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox. It does not work with the MacOS X default browser, Safari, though.

The look and feel of the new version is designed to mimic a desktop e-mail client, and it offers unlimited storage space, tabbed emails, RSS feeds, drag-and-drop capabilities, advanced keyboard shortcuts, advanced search, integration with Yahoo! Calendar and Messenger, Domain Keys, address auto-complete and more.

Yahoo Mail Beta also has a mascot called Liam, who is basically a little boy, who is shown in the "Help" panel as well as in the loading screen.

The Mail Beta team also plans on integrating Yahoo! Messenger with Mail Beta [7] [8].

Wide-scale beta release of the new version was introduced in late 2006 [9], and as of September 2006, active users who sign up get the new Yahoo! Mail Beta immediately.

It is unclear when Mail Beta will leave Beta stage, as there are certain features (e.g. Yahoo! Calendar, Notepad etc.) that are still missing from the application, as well as features that are wholly original to Mail Beta (e.g. Yahoo! Messenger integration). Mail Beta also lacks anything other than the most rudimentary search function, leaving it a long way behind many other webmail clients.

Public and critical reaction to the new product has been positive [10], although a number of users have encountered speed issues, which can render the client very difficult to use - especially on older hardware. Each update to the Beta has included significant speed improvements, and the Mail Beta team is still focused on improving speed issues.

In March 2007, Yahoo! integrated the Yahoo! Messenger instant-messaging service into the Yahoo! Mail Beta interface.

Screenshots

• The newest version of Yahoo! Mail Beta.
  The newest version of Yahoo! Mail Beta.
• Yahoo! Mail Beta Inbox under Firefox
  Yahoo! Mail Beta Inbox under Firefox
• Mail Beta and Messenger integration.
  Mail Beta and Messenger integration.
• Mail Beta and Calendar
  Mail Beta and Calendar
• Mail Beta RSS features
  Mail Beta RSS features
• Yahoo! Mail login screen as seen in the Internet Explorer browser.
  Yahoo! Mail login screen as seen in the Internet Explorer browser.

See also

• Comparison of webmail providers
• Webmail

External links

• Yahoo! Mail
• The Yahoo! Mail Users Group - Ask your questions, Share your knowledge, learn and discuss the latest news about Yahoo! Mail
• Yahoo! Mail Beta Team Blog
• Yahoo! Mail FAQ
• Sign up for Yahoo! Mail Beta