Yahoo! Mail is a Web-based e-mail (Webmail) service from Yahoo! It is one of the biggest e-mail providers on the Internet, serving millions of users (others include Gmail and Hotmail).

History

Yahoo! Mail was born in 1997 when Yahoo! bought Four11 Corporation and renamed its existing Rocketmail service.

Yahoo! purchased Oddpost on July 9th, 2004, to add its Yahoo! Mail service the ability to mimic a desktop mail application which is faster than HTML based model.

Features

Yahoo Mail has the following features:

• Free version: 250 MB quota, Yahoo! has announced that it would increase the amount of storage for free accounts to 1 GB in May 2005.

[1]), 10 MB attachments, plus basic protection against spam and viruses. (See: DomainKeys) Before an upgrade, these accounts had a quota between 4 and 6 MB in size. Advertising is displayed on the screen while working with the email account. Users can also read mail from a POP3 server through Yahoo! Mail. However, if they want to send mail from a distant SMTP server, they will have to upgrade to a Plus account.

• Plus version: 2 GB (or 2000 MB) quota. The Plus service offers POP3 access - meaning that the email account can be accessed through email clients (Outlook, Eudora, etc) that work with the POP3 protocol. When working with the account over a web browser, no ads are displayed. This type of account has additional spam and virus protection.

• Additionally, a user can pay a nominal fee to have a custom e-mail address and domain name.

Controversy

In 2002, it came to light that Yahoo! Mail had filters that changed certain words and word fragments into other words. "Mocha" was changed to "espresso", "expression" became "statement", and perhaps most damaging, "eval" (short for "evaluation") became "review". The widespread effects of this can be seen by using the Google search engine to find such nonsensical terms as "prreviewent", "reviewuation" and "medireview".

When questioned about these changes, Yahoo! explained that the changed words were common terms used in Web scripting , and were blacklisted to prevent hackers from sending damaging commands via the program's HTML function.

See also

• Hotmail
• Gmail

External links

• Yahoo! Mail

• Yahoo! Mail FAQ

• YPOPs: An application that provides POP3 access to Yahoo! Mail