Yahoo Mail is letting users sign up with the ymail.com and rocketmail.com domains in an attempt to attract new users and keep existing users loyal.
The move is geared to help people find a better email address, said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail. "We want users to get the exact email account they want so they stay with us for life," he said.
The rocketmail name dates back to Yahoo's US$92 million acquisition in 1997 of Four11, a company that offered the free RocketMail service.
"Those who have no memory of our service in the late 1990s indicated they like it," Kremer said.
However Yahoo remains under fire from shareholders after the recent takeover attempt by Microsoft. The company planning to move forward with the Yahoo Open Strategy (YOS), of which mail is major component.
Through YOS, Yahoo is trying to make its online services a foundation for third-party applications. For mail, that means letting other applications appear on the mail "canvas," Kremer said.
In this area, Kremer said, Yahoo was inspired by technology the company got through its acquisition of online email specialist Zimbra in 2007.
"Zimbra was a pioneer in opening up web services within the Zimbra application. They have open applications within their space that are used all over the place," he said.
There are now "no walls" between Yahoo Mail and Zimbra engineers, he added, though the business units are separate. "They share a lot of what they do. You'll see in very short order products on our site built on their technology, and vice versa," Kremer said.
The company revamped its Yahoo Mail interface beginning three years ago, calling the update the "all-new Yahoo Mail" for over a year now. The new interface is based on technology from Yahoo's 2004 acquisition of Oddpost.com. The "all-new" badge will be removed "pretty soon," Kremer said.
Yahoo plans a "rolling thunder of announcements" around Yahoo Mail in the next six to eight months, Kremer said. Some significant changes will include as a "smarter inbox," which Yahoo hopes will make its mail service fit better in today's world of social networking, and the opening of the mail platform, he said.
Yahoo's facing a growing number of competitors — not just traditional Web mail outfits such as Microsoft Hotmail, AOL, and the up-and-coming Google Gmail, but also social sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
"What we believe here at Yahoo is all communication is eventually coming together," Kremer said.
"Those who have no memory of our service in the late 1990s indicated they like it," Kremer said.