Get Y! Mail IDs Now!

photo credit: Duet G.Being the largest email address provider in the world has its own problems, like it is for Yahoo!. With more than 250 million users (and growing) compared to a puny few tens of millions with Gmail, this huge number of users also means that many people don’t get the email ID of their dreams. To remedy this, Yahoo! is now giving out @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com addresses! The announcement was made a while ago on the Yodel Anecdotal Blog. Get them at new.mail.yahoo.com/addresses. Rocketmail, of course, one of the first email service providers which later got bought out by Yahoo!, so THAT’s a really vintage email ID you could show off. Ymail.com is short and snappy too.

The only problem I see now is what if someone has a yahoo.com ID, and someone else signs up for a ymail.com ID of the same name. Till now, the country where your mail ID was hosted was immaterial, but with the new system might come a bit of confusion initially. Say, while adding people on Yahoo! Instant Messenger. Like, are we supposed to add the extension too now, while adding messenger IDs? Of course, it must be set to accept yahoo.com as default…

Also, if you currently sign-up for a ymail.com ID, and then try to use the ‘extra email address’ feature to add a supplementary sign-in ID right now, it only checks for yahoo.com IDs, not ymail.com. That, would probably be sorted out in the next few days.

On the whole, this is a terrific news! No more multitudes of underscores and weird numbers and birthdates needed to land the email ID of your choice – opens up the playing field for newcomers to the Internet. Yahoo! 🙂