Yahoo Mail's Flickr plug-in

Yahoo includes six applications now for Yahoo Mail: Flixster Movies to share movie ratings, Xoopit to look at photos, WordPress for writing blogs, Family Journal for building a family tree and sharing information with relatives, Yahoo Greetings to send cards, and Flickr.

This view shows the Flickr application, which lets people add photos directly from e-mail to Yahoo's photo-sharing site.

For now, those six are the only applications available. John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail, said the company hopes to open up mail applications to all comers within a year. Writing Mail applications, though, is a process that's subject to stringent standards for privacy because the applications get access to very personal information.