Jun 19, 2008 : Yahoo Offers Two New Email Domains

📅 June 19, 2008 - Search engine provider Yahoo (yahoo.com) announced on Thursday it is offering two new domains for its email service in an effort to give users more choice over their addresses.


The company is now offering rocketmail.com and ymail.com email addresses, alongside its traditional yahoo.com domain name.

Yahoo decided to offer the new addresses following the results of its extensive research it conducted, which revealed that most people want an easy to remember address that includes part of their name.

Launched in 1997, Yahoo Mail is the most-used email service in the world, with over 260 million users around the world. However, the yahoo.com email system is running out of easy names for individuals to register.

The origins of the domain addresses stem from the Yahoo-owned Rocketmail service, which the company acquired in October 1997, while the ymail.com address sounds suspiciously similar to its competitor, gmail.com.

Yahoo says it plans to auction off many desirable email addresses related to charitable groups starting Thursday.

The company has made considerable efforts to hold onto its market share, with Google's Gmail and Microsoft's Hotmail quickly catching up to Yahoo's. Since founder Jerry Yang took over the reigns of CEO one year ago, Yahoo has been trying to turn the company around.

In March, the company announced it would offer "unlimited" storage capacity in celebration of Yahoo Mail's 10th birthday. Then, just last week, Yahoo signed a deal with Google that enables it to run ads supplied by Google alongside Yahoo's search results, which could potentially increase the company's annual revenue by $800 million.

Yang also spent the last few months fighting off a bid from Microsoft to buy Yahoo for $33 a share while receiving pressure from one of its own large shareholders, Carl Icahn.