SK’s Technology & Social Blog

Yahoo has offered free email accounts under the yahoo domain since 1997, shortly after its purchase of Four11 Corp. The problem with being around so long from a user’s point of view is that all the short, easy to recall email addresses are gone.

To address this point Yahoo announced today that starting around 12:00 pm they will begin registering new email address under the domains “ymail” and “rocketmail”. The purchase of Four11 Corp back in the late 1990’s included the Rocketmail domain.

At the time, Yahoo chose to allow existing Rocketmail customers to maintain their email address, but has never allowed new email addresses to be registered using the domain. Yahoo is hoping that allowing new email domains will help lure new users to its service.

Yahoo mail has been losing new customers to Google’s Gmail service. According to the AP, Gmail added 30 million users added 30 million users in the last year and has about 101 million users total. Yahoo mail currently has about 266 million users and Microsoft has about 264 million users. Both Yahoo and Microsoft’s mail offerings are growing at a slower rate than Gmail.

John Kremer, vice president in charge of Yahoo email told the AP, “We realized we needed to expand the universe of Yahoo mail.”

The new email domains will offer the same features as accounts using the Yahoo email domain. Users wanting to get a new email account can sign up at mail.yahoo.com.