Yahoo has started offering free e-mail accounts under two new domains: ymail and rocketmail. I remember when I first browsed internet in 2003, I made one email Id on yahoo, it was abhishek842003ATyahoo.com. This email address was too long and therefore I never liked it. After the launch of gmail by Google, I created my gmail address and till now I am using it. Now Yahoo has other domains like ymail.com and rocketmail.com so I have created two email addresses on Yahoo, one is abhishekkumarATrocketmail.com and other is abhishek_kumarATymail.com. However according to web 2.0 standards, I will prefer to use the second email address.

RocketMail was one of the first major free webmail services on internet. It was a product of Four11. During its early days, it was close competitor of Hotmail for the number one position amongst free webmail services. Yahoo!acquired RocketMail and Four11 in 1997. Very few people know that Yahoo Mail still uses the old RocketMail webmail system. So with this move, Yahoo has breathed new life into the RocketMail brand by allowing new users to sign up for accounts under the rocketmail.com domain

Don’t you think Ymail is nothing but poor copy of gmail ? At present, Yahoo mail has about 266 million users whereas Gmail has about 100 million users. But Gmail is growing much faster than YahooMail. So it is a big concern for Yahoo Inc. This email war started when Google introduced the concept of 1 GB space for gmail addresses. That was the reason for huge success of Gmail. Gmail is much better than Yahoo mail in identifying and killing spams. Also you can integrate all the free Google services to your Gmail account. I don’t think this launch will affect the growth rate of Gmail. Yahoo should come with some completely new and innovative idea, if they really want to pause the growth of Gmail.