After Gmail, very few people actually use any other email service as their primary email service.  There are various reasons for that switch.  One of the reason is huge space and the certainty that the emails won’t be deleted if someone don’t access the account for a certain period of time.

I can tell you with my experience that the later was the only reason I switched to Gmail.  I lost too many important emails (personal and official) because of account inactivity for over 90 days.

Anyway, that’s not the point today.  Looks like Yahoo! mail is coming back to life by providing easy to use services (called applications) within the web email client.

If you happen to use this new interface, you will see that now within Yahoo! mail you can use various other applications like Picnik for photo editing, Photobucket for easy photo sharing, Xoopit for easy photo management, Zumodrive and drop.io for sending files upto 100MB to the recipient and so on.doodle.png on Aviary

This is definitely a step ahead of competitors like Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail and AOL who doesn’t support these kind of applications within email.  Though they are moving towards this slowly.

For example AOL provides you easy access to Blockbuster, Flickr etc.  Live Hotmail provides you easy access to its own Live Maps, Skydrive and other services so that you can include Maps, Files etc within the email message.

However, providing such a big list of awesome applications makes Yahoo! once again a contender of this email space on the web.  There is no clear winner because of personal preferences – some like clean interface of Gmail, some like contact and calendar features in Windows Live Hotmail and some love their old Yahoo email.

As of now the following applications are available:

  • drop.io – Upto 100MB attachments
  • OIB (Other In Box) – Automatic Organizer
  • Picnik – Photo editing
  • Flickr & Photobucket – Image sharing and search
  • Pingg invitations and Yahoo Greetings
  • PayPal – for easy money transfer using PayPal.

One thing which I didn’t like is the inclusion of multiple similar services.  For example drop.io and Zumodrive; eVite and Pingg invitations etc.  Why couldn’t Yahoo! select one service for one purpose.

If you have a Yahoo account which you haven’t logged in for a long time, then I would recommend you to login in once again and give it a try.

And let us know in comments which email service you love and why?  Below is a small poll for you to vote for your favorite service.


Suggested Posts…