Today, Yahoo is opening up two new e-mail domains i.e. ‘ymail.com’ and ‘rocketmail.com’. Now users can sign up their e-mail ids ending up with ymail.com or rocketmail.com. The reason for starting new domains is that most of the required names with ‘yahoo’ domain have already been registered.
According to Yahoo Mail vice president, John Kremer:
We have surveyed many of our users as they come out of the registration process and … many of them indicate that they do not have the Yahoo ID or Yahoo e-mail that they really want.
He also said that Yahoo is familiar with the two domains. Ymail has been there on mobiles and the history of RocketMail goes back to 1997 when Four11 Corporation (which owned web based email service RocketMail) was acquired by Yahoo.
On RocketMail, he said:
It’s a great brand.
Those who have no memory of our service in the late 1990′s 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.
On the new domains, he said:
We want users to get the exact e-mail account they want so they stay with us for life
E-mail ids on both new domains will work exactly the same way as Yahoo e-mail addresses do, he added. Yahoo also plans to start an auction on eBay from today that will sell rights to some new e-mail ids for charity.
Yahoo could have launched any domain other than ‘ymail’. Are they trying to copy Gmail? After the Yahoo-Google deal, maybe they’re trying to uniform things. A lot of people would be writing ymail as Gmail because of its wide usage and popularity. The new domains might force you to think about Yahoo’s popularity. Is it that popular that most of their desired usernames have been taken? Well it used to be the most popular e-mail service once but that spot has been filled by Gmail. Lets see if these domains can do any good to Yahoo.
