Faced with mounting competition from rival e-mail providers like Google and America Online, Yahoo! is upgrading its free e-mail service. This week, it began limited testing of several new e-mail
features, including the ability to search through e-mail attachments, and new photo and attachment views that show thumbnails or mini-images of all the pictures and documents stored in a user's
account.
The search feature, which will be available to all users in several months, now includes "snippets" or brief excerpts displaying highlighted search content. It also provides
"intelligent matching" on searches of prefixes of words, meant to speed up searches for long names and big words. Searches can be refined by category--senders, folders, attachments, message status,
and date--as well.
Sabrina Ellis, Yahoo! director of product development, said the company revised the service because consumers are spending more time online and storing more of their personal
information in their e-mail accounts. "E-mail is becoming much more important in people's lives in terms of frequency and dimension," Ellis said.
And the easier it is for users to search and
manage their content caches, she explained, the more time and energy they are likely to spend with Yahoo! Mail. "If users are confident about easily storing and then retrieving their personal
information and photos, they're going to rely on their accounts more," Ellis added.
For now, at least, Yahoo! Mail is the industry leader, largely because of its early decision to make the
service available for free. Yahoo! Mail was used more than any other service in July, with 167 million users, according to comScore Media Metrix, while Gmail--which was only available to users who had
been invited to open accounts--had just 5.4 million users. AOL reported some 21.7 million subscribers in March.
At the end of May, Yahoo! launched an e-mail service add-on intended to
help users fluidly send and share their digital photos. The beta, called PhotoMail, scans photos on a user's hard drive, and allows them to drag and drop select pictures into an e-mail message without
adding onerous attachments. The service--which can search through a user's Yahoo! storage locker as well as Yahoo!'s database of some 1.5 billion pictures--allows users to include up to 300 photos
within an e-mail in thumbnail version. People can also add captions and borders to pictures with the software. Because Yahoo! Photos has unlimited storage, users can save as many pictures as they
like.
Yahoo! plans to roll out several new e-mail improvements in the coming months, Ellis confirmed.