What Happened to Yahoo Mail? The Rise of Yahoo Mail
The entry into the email services field of free personal email service providers revolutionized how people, organizations and companies communicated with each other, as is discussed in detail over at runrex.com. Before then, people actually used to pay for email services, which seems absurd now, but was a reality to so many back in the day. One of the pioneers when it came to this email revolution was Yahoo Mail which was launched in 1997 by its parent company Yahoo. The story of how Yahoo became one of the biggest companies in the world has been well documented over at the excellent guttulus.com. Once Yahoo was up and running, it was always a matter of time before they began offering email services. After its launch in 1997, Yahoo Mail became extremely popular that by the end of 2011, just over 14 years down the road, it had over 280 million users, which made it the third largest web-based email service in the world. This article will look to go back in time and retrace the steps on what happened to it as we map the rise of Yahoo Mail.
The history of Yahoo Mail can be traced back to when Yahoo acquired Four11 for $96 million owing much to Fou11’s webmail service, RocketMail as revealed in discussions on the same over at runrex.com. Given that RocketMail was already built, Yahoo saw it prudent to acquire Four11 mainly for it rather than develop their own service internally as they needed to have a service in place immediately to compete with their rival Microsoft’s Hotmail which was growing so quickly and therefore Yahoo felt that they needed to act quickly. It was a shrewd move, although initially many RocketMail users found the transition to Yahoo Mail difficult, especially when Yahoo eliminated free software client access and introduced in March of 2002 a mail forwarding service that to sign up for, users had to pay $29.99 every year. 2002 was also a momentous year for Yahoo as it underwent a number of changes in design and with that all of its services, including Yahoo Mail, were redesigned as well as is discussed in detail over at guttulus.com. Among the changes that Yahoo Mail underwent during this time includes changes in design such as introduction of use-customizable color schemes, different category tabs among others, which was part of the launch of Yahoo Mail Plus.
2004 was a momentous year for Yahoo Mail as not only did it see the entrance of a competitor in the shape of Gmail, as is discussed over at guttulus.com, who took the email services world by storm by offering 1 GB of storage, it also saw Yahoo acquire Oddpost, which was a webmail service that simulated a desktop email client and had features such as an RSS feed, a preview pane, increased speed by using email caching to reduce response times among others, with many of these features being integrated into the updated Yahoo Mail service. In response to Gmail’s 1GB storage space offer, Yahoo Mail announced that it was introducing new storage specifications with 100 MBs being available to basic Yahoo Mail accounts and 2 GBs being available to premium Yahoo Mail users. To sweeten the pot more, Yahoo Mail eventually increased the space to 1 GB for basic accounts and then in March of 2007, Yahoo Mail began to offer free unlimited storage, which remained on offer until October of 2013, as is revealed in discussions on the same over at the highly regarded runrex.com. Other major milestones in the rise of Yahoo include a revamp of its interface in 2011 which also saw the introduction of improved Facebook and Twitter integration, the ability to watch YouTube videos straight from email among others.
As its parent company, Yahoo, encountered a number of issues, so did Yahoo Mail, which eventually saw it being overtaken by Gmail as the most popular email service provider. However, with Yahoo being acquired by Verizon, a topic that is covered in detail over at runrex.com, we have seen a bit of a renaissance as far as Yahoo Mail is concerned. This is because we have seen a revamp of the Yahoo Mail app, with the latest update making the app more organized and therefore making it easy to access mail. To do this, it has features that collect similar emails into one place, making it easier to locate them. You now don’t even have to search for items to find them as the new ‘views’ feature enables you to find items more easily. For instance, there is a view that collects all your photos making it easy to find any photos you may have received. The layout has also gotten a major revamp and it is now cleaner and more customizable. It is also easier to check all your email subscriptions and you can unsubscribe from any of them by simply pressing a button. And as per the gurus over at guttulus.com, you can even use the new Yahoo Mail app to access non-Yahoo email accounts such as Gmail and Outlook.
As ever, if you need more information as far as Yahoo Mail is and other related topics are concerned, then look no further that the excellent runrex.com and guttulus.com.