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Yahoo Mail, the top provider of Web-based e-mail, is letting users sign up with the ymail.com and rocketmail.com domains in an attempt to attract new users and keep existing ones loyal.

The move is geared to help people find a better e-mail address, said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail. "We want users to get the exact e-mail account they want so they stay with us for life," he said.

Because "yourname@yahoo.com" is likely taken by now, a lot of people must resort to unpleasant and hard-to-remember addresses such as "yourname1988@yahoo.com." Yahoo wants to give people a new chance with a name they like.

Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

The rocketmail name dates back to Yahoo's $92 million acquisition in 1997 of Four11, a company that offered the free RocketMail service.

"It's a great brand," Kremer said. "Those who have no memory of our service in the late 1990s indicated they like it, and those who indicated they want to be retro like it for the fact that it's associated with Yahoo.com since the beginning."

Maybe it's retro for Yahoo, too, which is under fire from shareholders after a bruising takeover attempt by Microsoft. Probably plenty of employees enjoy thinking nostalgically about the company's dot-com glory days. But the company is trying to move forward, too, with Mail one major part of the company's Yahoo Open Strategy (YOS) strategy.

Open mail
Through YOS, Yahoo is trying to make its online services a foundation for third-party applications. For mail, that means letting other applications appear on the Mail "canvas," Kremer said.

In this area, Kremer said, Yahoo was inspired by technology the Yahoo got through its acquisition of online e-mail specialist Zimbra in 2007.

"Zimbra was a pioneer in opening up Web services within the Zimbra application. They have open applications within their space that are used all over the place," he said.

There are now "no walls" between Yahoo Mail and Zimbra engineers, he added, though the business units are separate. "They share a lot of what they do. You'll see in very short order products on our site built on their technology, and vice versa," Kremer said.

The Internet company revamped its Yahoo Mail interface beginning three years ago, calling the update the "all-new Yahoo Mail" for well over a year now. The new interface is based on technology from Yahoo's 2004 acquisition of Oddpost.com.

The "all-new" badge will be removed "pretty soon," Kremer added.

Rolling Thunder
Yahoo plans a "rolling thunder of announcements" around Yahoo Mail in the next six to eight months, he added. Some significant changes will include as a "smarter inbox," work to make Yahoo Mail fit better in today's world of social networking, and the opening of the mail platform, he added.

It's a good thing, because there are plenty of competitors--not just traditional Web mail outfits such as Microsoft Hotmail, AOL, and up-and-coming Google Gmail, but also social sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Yahoo considers the full spectrum of competition, though.

"What we believe here at Yahoo is all communication is eventually coming together," Kremer said. "You don't need to bounce out to a separate social communications site or a different social event site when most of those tools are really just communications. If it's built on the same address book and calendar information, you can see them coming together in a single, more productive, smarter inbox."

Update 5:35 p.m. PDT: I added more details and a comment that Gmail should finally exit its beta-testing phase "soon."

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Google will invite users to try new features the company is considering adding to its Gmail service, the company said Thursday.

At 6 p.m. PDT Thursday, users will be able to select from 13 new features in a "labs" tab in the Gmail settings page, said Keith Coleman, a Gmail product manager, in a meeting with reporters here.

The 'labs' tab in Gmail settings now has experimental options for users.

(Credit: Google)

"The idea is you can do whatever you want, get it out to tens of millions of people, and get feedback," Coleman said. And popular features will be incorporated into Gmail proper.

Among the new features that are possible:

• A quick-link tool that lets people bookmark specific Gmail messages.

• Superstars, which lets people select custom stars to label mail.

• The "e-mail addict" tool that lets people lock themselves out of their e-mail account for 15 minutes.

• A fixed-width font option to view a message within a font whose characters are the same width--handy for some formatting challenges.

• Mouse gestures that let users take actions based on mouse movements.

• Custom keyboard shortcuts.

• Signature tweaks that let people automatically add a signature file above quoted text in an e-mail reply.

• "Muzzle," which conserves buddy-list screen real estate by hiding status messages.

For now at least, only Google engineers can add features. "Any engineer can code a labs feature," Coleman said. "Once the code is written and mostly working, it'll get into the next product build that goes to users" through the labs feature.

Eventually, though, the company is interested in opening the system up to outsiders if it can find a way to integrate outside code.

"We'd like to get to a point where more people can build on this. That would require something with a different level of interface," Coleman said. "We're interested in making it possible of users and us to iterate on the product faster, so it's something we're interested in."

The openness of Gmail contrasts with the arguably greater openness of Yahoo's Zimbra, which is an open-source project. However, just because a project can be modified doesn't mean those modifications will appear in the version of Zimbra that Yahoo or another company offers as a service.

Google is trying to be open-minded with the feature additions for now.

"There are some things in here we think are probably bad ideas," Coleman said, pointing specifically to a snake game that's one of the 13 features that's amusing but probably not a great idea for mainstream deployment. "It's something we would never do."

The code behind the new features has been vetted at a basic level, but not otherwise heavily tested or screened.

If Gmail is so great, how come it's been in beta testing for four years now?

"We have really high standards," Coleman said. "There are a few things we want to do before we take it out of beta, but we expect to do it soon."

(Credit: YouMail)

YouMail, a free visual voice mail solution to organize cell phone messages like e-mail for online playback and response, announced on Thursday that customers can start viewing those same voice mail messages from their mobile phones.

By pointing the mobile browser to YouMail's home page, fans of the service can access their account with the usual login and pin to view contact's images, play back messages in any order, and forward or reply to voice messages in a form factor tailored from YouMail's servers to many high-end smartphones.

YouMail certainly isn't the first visual voice mail service to succeed in delivering transcribed messages to smartphones, which it does through a separate e-mail or SMS feature. Unlike some competitors for mobile voice message management, however, like PhoneTag (previously SimulScribe) and CallWave, YouMail's new service will retain the audio and organizational features of its rich online product.

The service will be ready for a wide variety of smartphones, YouMail said in a statement, including models from Research In Motion, Nokia, HTC, Morotola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and Palm. YouMail claims that YouMail's smartphone formula "even" works on iPhones, which already run on the full mobile Web with manufacturer Apple's Safari browser.

JetBlue passengers, rejoice. Now there is yet another way to pass the time during flights. JetBlue's free in-flight Wi-Fi will no longer require Yahoo or BlackBerry accounts to check e-mail and chat with friends.

Starting Wednesday, JetBlue's plane equipped with in-flight Wi-Fi will let users with Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, and Windows Live Mail addresses check their e-mail while onboard. It also will offer Microsoft Exchange so travelers can communicate with their office on the ground. No Web surfing is available, but thanks to a deal with Amazon, passengers on the so-called BetaBlue plane can log on to the mobile version of Amazon.com's site and shop.

The BetaBlue plane, which often flies transcontinental routes, has been equipped with Wi-Fi since December. Several other airlines, including Southwest, American Airlines and Virgin, have plans to connect to the Web in the near future.

Yahoo has filed suit against unnamed "lottery spammers" who tried to fool people into thinking that they won a prize from Yahoo so they'd share passwords, credit card numbers, or other sensitive information.

The Internet company on Tuesday said it filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, citing the Federal Trademark Act, the Can-Spam Act, and related state laws.

"The unauthorized use of Yahoo's trademarks is misleading, fraudulent, and has actually confused, misled, and deceived the public," Joe Siino, Yahoo's senior vice president for global intellectual property and business strategy, said in a statement.

According to Barracuda Networks, 90 percent to 95 percent of e-mail sent in 2007 was spam. Phishing, one activity associated with spam, involves sending e-mail masquerading as authentic messages designed to fool users into parting with personal information.

If you were thinking of using your work e-mail for job hunting or online dating, think twice.

A new survey finds that 41 percent of large companies (those with 20,000 or more employees) are paying staffers to read or otherwise analyze the contents of employees' outbound e-mail.

In the study, which was commissioned by e-mail security provider Proofpoint and conducted by Forrester Research, 44 percent of the companies surveyed said they investigated an e-mail leak of confidential data in the past year and 26 percent said they fired an employee for violating e-mail policies, according to security portal Help Net Security.

The companies also said they are worried about employees leaking company information on their blogs, message boards, and media-sharing sites like YouTube.

Eleven percent of the U.S. companies surveyed took disciplinary action against employees for improper use of blogs or message boards in the past year, and slightly more than that disciplined workers for social-network violations and for improper use of media-sharing sites.

And 14 percent of publicly traded companies investigated the leakage of material financial information, such as unannounced financial results, on blogs and message boards.

The digital divide is apparently alive and well.

About 20 percent of all U.S. heads-of-household have never sent an e-mail, and about 20 million households, or 18 percent, are without Internet access, according to a study released earlier this week.

(Credit: Parks Associates)

Similar percentages of respondents also indicated that they had never looked up a Web site or information on the Internet, the survey found.

Age and education were significant factors cited in the study, which was conducted by researcher Parks Associates. Half of those who have never used e-mail are older than 65 and 56 percent had no formal education beyond a high school level, the telephone survey found.

"Nearly one out of three household heads has never used a computer to create a document," John Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates, said in a statement. "These data underscore the significant digital divide between the connected majority and the homes in the unconnected minority that rarely, if ever, use a computer."

Just 7 percent of the 20 million households without Internet access indicated during the survey that they plan to subscribe to an Internet service within the next 12 months. However, the study noted a steady decline in the number of disconnected households when comparing findings with previous years; the 2006 survey found that 31 million households, or 29 percent, of all U.S. households were without Internet access.

"Internet connections have slowly increased in U.S. households, but getting the disconnected minority online will continue to be difficult," Barrett said in the statement. "Age and economics are important factors, but the heart of the challenge is deeper. Many people just don't see a reason to use computers and do not associate technology with the needs and demands of their daily lives."

Those annoying ads the Yahoo Mail has been appending to the bottom of e-mail messages soon will be a thing of the past.

Some at Yahoo apparently didn't like the taglines, either: this is the example the company used to illustrate how the ads can pile up.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Yahoo stopped adding the ads a few days ago, the company said on its Yahoo Mail blog on Friday.

Sounds good to me. Because the ads would be appended after each message, a back-and-forth exchange could lead to an accumulation of the pesky text lines like gradual accretions of soap scum.

I also never cared for Yahoo's text intruding into the content of my letter, which is much more presumptuous than a one-time display ad showing up in a separate frame in a Web page. I wasn't afraid people would think I was actually endorsing whatever product the tagline touted, but I didn't care for the idea of this dreck being archived alongside all those letters I sent my friends and family.

If you want to see how much of a clutter the ads have caused, here's one example: Google has tallied 18,700 instances of the "Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile" tagline in mailing list postings stored within Google Groups.

Yahoo, under pressure to increase its revenue, probably would like to sell every ad it can. But I suspect the tagline ads weren't that big a deal. The only ones I ever remember seeing had a more indirect potential benefit by promoting Yahoo services.

DailyLit, which offers entire books over e-mail and RSS in daily serialized chunks every day, is now offering information from Wikipedia on various topics.

(Credit: DailyLit)

The free service would be perfect for people who are short on time and don't mind digesting literature and information in 5 minutes at a time on their handheld.

The Wikipedia-based topics DailyLit is creating "tours" of major world religions (22 installments--compared with the 260 installments for Moby Dick), "Wine 101," presidents of the United States, "Best Picture" Oscar winners, famous poets, famous women in history, Greek mythology, famous inventors, and wonders of the world.

Each installment has a brief intro to a subcategory, such as Buddhism in the religions tour, and a link to the relevant Wikipedia page. Wikipedia's content is available for such repurposing under the Creative Commons license.